How this creator gained 121M views on YouTube in 12 months.

(thread) 👇

Any success on YouTube can be broken down into 7 words:

Beat the attention market by being remarkable.

You become remarkable when you find an edge (a competitive advantage).

Not only did he find an edge, but he built it (like we've seen with @GrahamStephan)

https://twitter.com/wono_strategy/status/1584908811978289152

Let's first break down the edge:

- Japan is one of the most famous countries/cultures in the world
- 90% of the population will never set foot in Japan in their lives
- The travel niche is well-established on YouTube

The demand is proven; there is an attention market.

But this is not enough to beat the market yet.

Instead of sharing the destination, he's sharing the journey.

He's not the first one doing it, but again, demand is proven.

Sharpening his edge even more with:

- Unconventional means of transport for most countries (capsule bus, capsule hotels, compartment trains)

- Most people can't afford to travel so much (no time, no money, or both)

The edge sharpens with fewer and fewer possible competitors.

The content now:

- Structuring the trip: what cost to expect, what happens before, throughout & after (instead of just the trip)

Adding his identity through:

- Storytelling the journey, which gives the viewer a reason to watch from A to Z instead of jumping here and here.

- a touch of humor (he's pretty fun ngl lol)

- Allocating a particular time for food, apparently many appreciate these parts.

There are always retention spikes around it, it seems like he found an excellent retention hack)

The smart thing he did was to give a luxe lexical field to cheap means of transport (bus/train).

Wealthy people usually use the fastest and most comfortable way to travel (first-class flights/private jets).

Adding a "luxurious" dimension to a bus makes the videos remarkable as it's an oxymoron.

$200, $100, $80.. when the price is usually around $10-$20 opens a solid curiosity gap, mainly because at this price you'd instead take a train or a flight.

He does the same with the exact opposite extreme (very cheap).

The average person takes the average-priced transport, not the extremes.

Another way to be remarkable.

Last but not least, the private dimension is very uncommon in western countries as Asian cultures lean more toward the introverted side.

And guess what? His videos are in English (not Japanese).

The right content for the right audience.

The mix of everything above gives this content a solid edge to be remarkable and beat the attention market.

To summarize how he beat the attention market:

- Picking content that naturally reduces competition drastically
- Pick the right audience (English, not Japanese)
- Story tells his content
- Added his identity
- Added humor
- Smart choice of topics

He made his content feel like reading a book with live images.

That's it for this case!

Hopefully this will help you find an edge or give you more ideas to sharpen it!

Unfollow if you found this unhelpful or the other way around @wono_strategy 😊

How this creator gained 121M views on YouTube in 12 months

How @GrahamStephan made 3 million views on YouTube with:

- a shitty thumbnail
- an (almost) unedited video
- him speaking in front of a camera for 25 minutes straight.

Those of you who read my threads will see me coming with this one:

Every single success on YouTube can be explained in 4 words:

Beat the attention market.

The attention market is easy to understand but hard to disrupt:

- your content is remarkable, it will go viral
- your content is not remarkable, it won't

As. Simple. As. That.

And this video is no exception.

However, to beat the attention market, you must have an edge (a competitive advantage).

You can't make your content stand out without one.

So how did Graham build his edge?

The world's total population is 7.7 billion.

63 million are millionaires, representing 0.8% of the world's population.

Before 30, 8% of this 0.8% become millionaires.

That's 0.07% compared to the world's population.

That's undoubtedly remarkable, but that's still 5 400 000 people.

That's only the foundation of his edge.

Many people have shared their own "how I became a millionaire" story with far less success than Graham.

How did he reach 3M views with such a video then?

First of all, he makes the "in real estate" precision, it's important because that's his core target, and it adds up to the credibility.

For the rest, the answer lies in the first 2 minutes of his video, let's analyze it together:

He starts by introducing his video with a sentence that will act as both:

- a hook (opening a curiosity gap)

- value proposition emphasized, implying, "Yup, it's not clickbait, you'll get what you came for"

He then cut to the chase by setting up the context right away:

- Quick summary to get the big picture

- Mentioning big numbers not to lose attention

- Hook the viewer again "it actually takes quite a lot more than just making X amount of money..." (implying there are secrets)

Now the best part:

- He makes it about THE VIEWER instead of flexing how smart of a person he is & how much money he made.

It is crucial in the attention market:

What's in it for your viewers?

Graham serves the answer to this question on a silver plate for his audience:

And he doesn't stop here.

A good marketer (especially in copywriting) answers his client's objections before they are even formulated.

That's what he does here:

🔸 First objection:

"Why would I watch a video about someone flexing his wealth and social status?"

Answer:

- Positioning against the competition by explaining why they bring no benefit to the viewer

- Offering a benefit the competition is not offering by providing a structure ("from start to finish"), so the viewers can extract some value for themselves.

🔸 Second objection:

"He grew up in a wealthy family for sure."

Answer:

He brilliantly pre-shot these objections to keep his viewers' attention, leaving them eager to know more.

I don't know if he calculated it or not, but in the end, it doesn't matter.

He did the right thing, and this is what you should learn from it:

- Find a remarkable topic/concept/idea
- Make remarkable content out of it

Even if the thumbnail is pretty bad (sorry Graham if you come by 😂), the topic and content are greatly remarkable.

If everything but the thumbnail is perfect, it will work in the lon grun, remember this:

https://twitter.com/wono_strategy/status/1569298001943748608

Now that his personal brand is strong, if I was him I'd replace the thumbnail with this instead:

📄 To summarize what he did:

- Use a remarkable edge

- Build it by:
- Open a curiosity gap
- Setup the context
- Make it about the viewers
- Position the content in a unique way
- Answer objections

(Instead of jumping right away into the story as others did)

How Graham Stephan made 3M views with a shitty thumbnail

90% of YouTube analytics (especially CTR & AVD) are poison to understanding virality.

Most YT gurus love these metrics since you can always tell a coherent story without contradiction.

A book written in 2001 (4 years before YT's birth) provides a clear explanation of why.
👇

Fooled by Randomness, a book by Nassim Taleb is by far the greatest book ever written to help you differentiate information & noise.

Taleb explains how we create reasons and patterns for wild success even though it is essentially random.

Mild success can be explained by skills and hard work, but wild success is usually attributable to variance and luck.

Let's take CTR, for instance.

What you will usually hear is you need to increase your CTR to increase your views, If the CTR is low, change the thumbnail & title.

While this seems perfectly logical, it's absolutely wrong.

Here is an example with two videos of mine.

If I hid the views, most YouTube gurus would argue that the thumbnail of the second is better. And it would've been perfectly logical.

The problem is that reality is far more complex to fathom.

If I didn't reach 1M+ viral videos and reverse-engineer them, I wouldn't have the data to comprehend this phenomenon.

What I observed is quite the opposite, the more viral the video, the lower the CTR.

When the algorithm finds a "viral-worthy" video, it will try to push it to new audiences outside your initial circle.

Throughout this test process, the click-through rate will be significantly lower as people are less likely to click (and vice-versa).

Keep in mind there are many more pieces to the puzzle, I can't go into too much detail here, this is just a simplification.

Numerous other elements come into play that make metrics alone insufficient to fully understand the outcome.

Taleb calls it the "Hindsight Bias."

When we look back at past events, we see them as less random than they actually were.

The problem with YouTube gurus is that the majority of people are unable to present the contradiction since it requires 2 things:

• A long experience with several viral videos
• Study them without being fooled by randomness

This leaves very few people on the table.

Here is another example (I could go like this all day long).

These two videos are about the same duration.

• Video A has 44% retention in the first 30 seconds
• Video B, 63%.

Result: Video A outperforms B by 246k views.

In that case, video A started right away with a sponsored ad, which is why the starting retention was lower.

The algorithm is really good at tracking if people loved a video or not through hundreds of different factors.

This leads us to another takeaway from the book:

• Silent evidence prevents us from having an accurate understanding of past events.

As the creator of these videos, I knew the first video would perform better because I know my audience very well through non-analytics analysis.

If I was obsessed with analytics, trust me, I would've turned insane by now.

After 12 years, I've seen everything and its opposite.

As a creator, you want to improve these:

• Human behavior understanding
• Content crafting (storytelling, good editing...)
• Conveying emotions
• Providing unique value

Not these:

• CTR
• AVD
• Retention
• etc

As they are mostly noise, not signal.

The more data, the more noise.

Hold on tight to the fundamentals.

Why YouTube metrics are poison to understand virality

You guys voted for this thread, but a little disclaimer before we start.

Many creators are obsessed with the micro aspects of things (CTR, Watch Time, Retention, AVD etc..).

To me, these metrics mean nothing if the macro aspect hasn't been taken care of.

It's easy to say "it was obvious" after an event has occurred.

So this thread will try to give you more perspective on a macro scale and try to see where the MrBeast channel is heading IF no changes are made.

Let's see if the future will make me right or wrong.

Attention is a currency and a zero-sum game.

If you spend 1 mn watching Pewdiepie, you can't spend the same minute watching another creator. This means for every winner, there must be a loser.

It is extremely important to understand the attention market if you want to beat it.

To understand it, we will use the Gaussian Bell Curve.

If you're not familiar with this, fear not maths haters! I will make it easy to understand, I swear. 😁

Just like any market, this is how creators are distributed in this curve.

Most of them are in the middle trying to survive (64.2%), 13.6% are doing well, 2.1% are doing very well and 0.1% are owning.

@MrBeast is from the latter, but we will come back to this later.

Here, we will think in terms of "remarkability".

The more remarkable your content, the better chance it has to beat the attention market.

Every single video can be mapped somewhere here. The more "highly remarkable" videos you can pull in a row, the faster your growth will be.

This is why I always say that to beat the market, you must not think like the market.

You can't be remarkable if you're copying everyone else. You must find an edge, a way to be unique.

And this is what Jimmy did.

At first, Jimmy started like everyone else, somewhere here. Trying to survive for years.

His content was just like thousands of small channels, not remarkable.

Until he found an edge.

Something 99.9% won't do.

He finally became remarkable (note that remarkable is a neutral word here, remarkable is not necessarily tied to quality).

This is where things started to become interesting, after milking this concept for a while, he (probably) understood that while the first time it was remarkable, the more he does it, the less remarkable it becomes.

So he found a new way of becoming remarkable: Money. The rest is history.

This edge he's found (doubling down the money every time) is almost impossible for anyone to replicate.

The format however, that's another story.

As I have some trading background, here are some lessons I learned that can 100% be applied to the attention market:

It is very similar to financial markets:

- Just because an edge is profitable, it does not guarantee it will be profitable going forward

- If a profitable angle becomes known, then the price will eventually adjust until it becomes an unprofitable angle.

Replace "price" with "views" and you'll understand market dynamics on YouTube.

It is crucial to understand when you build your strategies, because remember: a plan is not a strategy. https://twitter.com/wono_strategy/status/1571758460336832513

MrBeast becoming the #1 on YouTube created two problems for his channel:

1️⃣ The MrBeastification (I highly suggest you watch this video from @Pinleyy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gauf6ZmIXxs)

2️⃣ He became his own competitor

These two points are a red flag 🚩 for a creator, this is where you must start to shift toward a new edge.

Why? Because people get used to everything, even millions of $.

And this is where he trapped himself.

The market will always want more, it's an endless demand for something bigger and more remarkable.

By becoming his own competitor, @MrBeast created a bubble of attention that reached its all-time high and started to burst (in my opinion) with his Squid Game video.

This is paradoxical, but his most viewed video trapped him.

As people become more and more resistant to money content (remarkably speaking), they will expect more from him.

He will be forced to match the cost of his videos to the demand for remarkable content. The problem is:

It cost him almost $4M and was probably closer to breaking even than profitable (even with the beneficial side effects).

It's going to be incredibly difficult to beat in terms of remarkability since he trend-jacked the worldwide squid game hype (which was way bigger than him).

The attention market is ruthless and money-wise he reached a ceiling.

This can't scale forever. So he has to find a way to make remarkable content with less money.

He did use here and here his former edge (doing extreme stuff) but doing that consistently would be dangerous as it's way easier for the average Joe to copy (and even beat) but also not really fun to make (for obvious reasons).

His main channel is dangerously leaning towards the 50M average views (a point that wasn't hit since 130 videos or so).

If he's not able to pull a banger within the next 10 videos you will start to see "MrBeast channel is dead" popping around.

That's the price to pay when you grow exponentially too fast.

You become a trend, which is double-edged.

You need to be really solid strategy-wise to convert all this growth into a solid base.

Note that I'm not taking into consideration the whole MrBeast ecosystem.

There are many other aspects that could make him less dependent on his main channel (hopefully for him) such as Beast Burgers, Feastables, his side channels etc..

No matter what happened next, MrBeast has achieved something incredible so far and will remain in the history of youtube.

I hope he will find a way to renew his content because there are a lot of possibilities in front of him to set it free from the money dictatorship.

The Trap MrBeast fell it

How this viral video ruined his channel.

👇

Attention is like hot water, without the right container to conserve the heat, it will escape.

This creator managed to do something 99.999% will never be able to achieve in their lives:

Hit 2.6M views with their very first video.

I suggest you watch it before reading the rest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4hST2p0NyA

In itself this video is close to perfection:

👉 Attention jacking from an established big attention niche (Dream's followers)

👉 Exposing a piece of information very few ppl from this niche know

👉 Excellent hook in the first secs of the video

👉 Solid story-telling structure

You start to know me now and I bet you can see me coming with this one:

If you have no content strategy you will either never succeed 🚫, or get crushed under your own success ☠️.

(hopefully, this example will finally end the obsession of many with thumbnails & titles 🤦‍♂️)

After such a performance, he kept capitalizing on the concept by

👉 Same format
👉 Same audience target
👉 Same topic
👉 Same video structure

The curiosity gap of this one was less powerful, but 134k views is still a great achievement at his size (4k subs).

At this point, he probably starts to realize he won't be able to milk the Dream's audience forever as he ran out of secrets to unveil.

So he tried something else:

This time:

👉 Same format
👉 Broader audience target
👉 Different topic
👉 Same video structure

Which was the RIGHT thing to do. From my perspective he's still in huge profits here, he had around 5k subs at that time and managed to keep 10k views (+100% of his audience).

It's not the ideal scenario for sure, but as a newbie with a small experience, it's miles away from failure.

But when you've hit a bullseye 🎯 of 2M+ views on your first try, this can be a hard pill to swallow (no pun intended). It hits the motivation to create content really hard.

It's like giving a lollipop to a little kid and taking it away from him right after.

At this point, I don't know if he lost hope or made a huge mistake, but since we're here to learn for our content it doesn't matter, we'll treat it as it is:

A huge mistake.

This is his next upload:

🚫 Different format
👉 Same audience target
👉 Different topic
🚫 Different video structure
🚫 7 hours video


And the next one:

🚫 Different format (again)
👉 Smaller audience target
👉 Different topic (again)
🚫 Different video structure (again)


Way too confusing for the algorithm. It went from:

👉 "wow people love his content, it should be more suggested as it has the power to keep them longer on YouTube!"

to

👉 "nvm it was a fluke"

Let's use my creator's attention cycle to understand what happened here visually:

Hitting virality with your very first video does more harm than good when you're not ready.

Without a proper content strategy, instead of riding the wave, you will be crushed against the shore.

The lessons to learn from this:

➡️ Make sure your core concept/topic is exploitable. Can you find 10-20 different ideas from it? If so, do it beforehand to not trap yourself.

➡️ Don't build several audiences on one channel with different content, make a second channel instead or focus on building one audience only.

➡️ Search creative topic/concept ideas, that's 70% of the work. This is the real gold when it comes to catching attention.

How this viral video ruined his channel

Why content creators should stay away from Tiktok and short content. (with a few exceptions)

Thread 👇

I will use A LOT my concept of "good & bad attention" here so if you don't know what it is, check this out first:
https://twitter.com/wono_strategy/status/1571758464904433664

Short contents are the purest form of bad attention.

It goes against the goal of a creator, being to farm as much good attention as possible so it can convert into a relationship.

This is how the creator will survive in the long run.

The ultimate goal of short content is to retain the attention of users for as long as possible, by any means necessary, including using content creators as a tool instead of a partner.

Please bear with me, let me explain.

As per Nassim Taleb (the author of Anti-fragile), the more you optimize something, the more fragile it gets.

"This is the classical problem of naive optimization. You optimize on one dimension, causing hidden side effects in other dimensions."

Here is an example:

A formula 1 car is optimized for speed on smooth concrete but very bad on most other types of terrains (snow, mud, sand, humps, etc...)

A classic car is average/mediocre everywhere and can beat a formula 1 car on most other kinds of terrain. It is far less fragile.

Tiktok (and short content in general) is extremely optimized to retain attention, causing side effects on good attention.

Creators are fooled by the number of views, thinking 1 view = 1 view everywhere but most don't know short views are close to being worthless.

An easy explanation:

Let's compare the worth of 1 view (in terms of attention quality).

This is the watch time on average per viewer for:

- Cinema: 90-100 minutes
- Youtube: 4 minutes 15 secs (excluding shorts)
- Tiktok: ~10 seconds

If a viewer spends 90 minutes on each he will watch on average:

- Cinema: 1 creator's (so to speak)
- YouTube (excluding shorts): 21 creators
- Tiktok: 540 creators

Do you start to see the problem?

As a creator, you want to build a strong relationship with your audience. Do you think you can build a healthy one on a platform where viewers watch 360 creators/h?

After 10 TikTok, they already forgot about you. And they can't even find you again if they wanted, too much noise.

This is why you have:

Cinema: 15 minutes of advertisement
YouTube: ~10 seconds of ads
Tiktok: a few seconds (and they didn't fully figure it out yet, my bet is it's hard to make it worth it for advertisers, but it's another topic).

Because the better the quality and the longer the content, the higher the "ad tolerance" will be for the viewer.

But it doesn't end here.

In both YouTube and cinema, the viewer CHOSES the content he's about to watch, which means the creator has a chance to convince the viewers to watch his content:

He can:

- Be creative with his content
- Make a thumbnail
- Write a title

This is a healthy supply/demand ecosystem.

On Tiktok (and alike) the viewer DOES NOT choose the content he will watch next.

And this is PRECISELY why it's super bad attention.

The viewer isn't here to learn or entertain himself in a "healthy way" (in discovery mode), he's here to kill boredom.

Public transport, elevator, waiting room, on his couch or bed like a dead body... you name it.

Standing in line at your local supermarket? Not enough time to watch some quality content on youtube, but a perfect time to distract yourself.

You can now fill every single small gap in your life because you can't deal with your thoughts.

This is the main purpose of short content, don't get fooled.

And if you don't trust me, here's a small sequence from an interview of @theChrisDo by @Ed_FilmBooth (great itw btw) https://youtu.be/6dakIcXUQ2c?t=633

Another issue is that it's still very early, meaning the demand for attention is waaaay higher than the supply as there's not enough content to satisfy the constant demand (17 years of content on YouTube, 2 on TikTok).

This is why it's so easy to get so many views right now.

Over time as more creators jump into the platform, it'll become harder and harder to get views.

Now I'm not a fool. I know there are winners and one can say it's an opportunity (which is true) but if you don't know what you're doing the wall you'll crash on will be hard to tank.

So here are my 4 situations where short content is worth it to me:

1️⃣ You're selling a product, in that case, if you're able to make money off of bad attention, that's a fair deal.

An example from @tweetsauce: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cFd2c5txIvo

2️⃣ You've found a way to convert consistently bad attention into good attention. For instance by leading short content viewers to your long-format content.

3️⃣ You have no audience. In that case, any attention is good attention, but don't forget to make the shift once you're getting momentum.

4️⃣ You're experimenting with short content to sharpen your ability to catch attention or you're just having fun and don't care.

If you're not in one of these situations, you might get some attention for a few weeks, but if you think macro (at least 1 year ahead), trust me these viewers will vanish as fast as they came.

It will ALWAYS be better to invest your time into content that generates good attention (long-form content, streaming etc..), than to waste your time producing content and farm perishable attention.

Why content creators should stay away from Tiktok (and short video formats)

No, consistency is not key on YouTube.

Today I'm going to reveal the secret of Emma Chamberlain. You'll understand how she's able to pull so many views with these titles/thumbnails.

I will share with you an extremely important tool of mine I've never heard anyone talking about. 

If you don't know who Emma Chamberlain is, she's a young american vlogger with almost 12M subs. 

Emma started her channel on the 15th of June 2017 and started posting. 

As you can see, her thumbnails/titles were exactly the same back then as they are today. Basically a random frame in the video. 

She is one of the few creators out there that can reach 5 000 000 views with a video called "cooking". 

And she did it over, and over... and over again. With the same results. 

"ahahah wono, are you stupid? You said consistency is not key but look at her first video description. She even started to upload almost daily at this period. This must be why she blew up! " 

Don't worry, we'll get there. Relax.

It will be a great opportunity here to learn that correlation is not causation.

For now, we'll get back to her recent content. Let's play a little game, shall we?

Is there anything unusual you notice here? 

If you pay close attention, she didn't upload for almost 5 months and... literally, nothing changed. 

In fact, that's something I also achieved with my content as well. On two different channels of mine. 

And not only did the content not lose traction, it also blew up. 

If you fill a water tank full of holes with water day after day, you can be as consistent as you want but at the end of the day, you have wasted your time. 

So first of all you need to understand the difference between a plan and a strategy. 

Because a plan is NOT a strategy. 

This is a plan:
       👉I will upload 2 videos /week

This is a strategy:
        👉 I will upload 2 videos /week of this format and evaluate the results after 10 videos.

First, find a working strategy, then start planning. Not the other way around.

Consistency only brings results once you start providing value to your audience.

I will share with you the tool I've never heard any analyst talk about. 

This is a concept of mine that I call: 

Good attention / Bad attention.

(You've heard it first 😂) 

Bad attention: Your content is like a strainer, people come but they don't come back. 

This is when your content is unoriginal and/or too distant from your identity. 

Good attention: Your content provides value, it is original, unique, and tied to your identity. 

People want more of it. They come back for more. You're building trust with your audience. 

To survive the long run, you MUST build a strategy that farms good attention and THEN be as consistent with it as possible.

However, consistency should NEVER be your priority. Your priority is to build GA content. 

For instance, if you reached a deadline to upload your video, but you feel like your content is not polished enough, delay your video and work on it to farm as much GA as possible. 

Good attention is what frees you from the thumbnail/title dictatorship because once your audience trusts you, they will watch your content no matter what. 

Of course, it's always better to have good title &amp; thumbnail, but the more viewers trust your content, the better for you. 

In the case of Emma, she indeed started planning (as she says in her own words).

BUT she had the perfect content to farm good attention right away. 

In every video, people got to know her personality a bit more, up to the point she reached today. 

It is crucial to understand this because a lot of creators are strategic enough (or lucky enough) to produce content that farms good attention from the get-go, but if it's not the case, you be as consistent as you want and upload as much as you want, nothing will change.

📝Note: 

There are some cases where bad attention can be exploited, but it's for advanced strategy. 

It's a very shaky place, you need to be sure you know what you're doing.

Hope this helped.

Follow 👉 @wono_strategy  for more if this provided you value.😉

Take care.

Consistency is not key on YouTube

Today we're going to talk about a very common but HUGE mistake many creators make on YouTube  (especially small creators).

A thread👇 

Yesterday, I was browsing YouTube and this video was recommended to me: 

The content was interesting, well produced, and straight to the point.

But as an analyst, something sparked my attention 🤔: the video has almost 370k views, but only 3k subscribers. 

Just by looking at these numbers, I knew this mistake was done. And indeed she did it. 

This is her content, can you spot the mistake? 

Okay, I'll give you a hint, focus on the views. 

If you still don't have any clue, this is the mistake: 

👉There are too many different core topics.

When you build an audience, and this is even more true if you're a small creator, you want it to be the most optimized possible around a core topic. 

You want this: 

Why? Because if the viewer can't figure out your content, the algorithm won't be able to make sense of your channel. 

If you converted the attention of a viewer, the algorithm will try to suggest him more of your content.

You probably won't watch it. 

These topics are way too different to convert viewers into your audience at scale. 

Viewers lose interest, and the algorithm stops recommending your content at a larger scale and comes back to your small niche.

You can clearly see it translates through the numbers of her content:

🟢Core Topic 
🟡Hybrid Topic
🔴Random Topic 

Maybe she doesn't want her content to be focused on Obsidian only, but it's the one that blew up. 🤷‍♂️

As you can see, when she talks about it, this is where she's able to catch attention, even if it's not as much. (You can't always hit a viral video, even with the same topic)

So according to my model, I'll explain to you what happened here 

She was in the survival phase and finally reached momentum. 

The algorithm started to recommend similar videos from her library.

It was already confusing enough as it had to work with mixed topics but still figured it out. 

Then she did this mistake again by uploading something completely different: 

She's now back to the survival phase. The algorithm can't make sense of her content. 

She didn't consolidate the momentum and has now to start all over again. 

If she would upload this video instead (same topic), it would probably gotten way more attention. 

But since the channel lost the algorithm's trust (for now), she has to hit momentum again. 

TL;DR:

👉Don't mix topics or make separate channels for each one. 

Unless you are already very well established and earned a lot of good attention (check my mrbeast thread), start by consolidating momentum on core topics first.

https://twitter.com/elwono_/status/1564519237577760768

A common but huge mistake many creators make on YouTube

Quality or Quantity?

Today a creator sent me this (see pic) and asked for my opinion on it.

After 11 years of creating content, I can assure you there is only one answer to this so I will correct this comment:

If you can't win on quality, you lose.

Let me explain why.👇 

When you build an audience, it doesn't matter if it's on YouTube or if you own a restaurant, your asset number one is trust.

Trust is earned drop by drop, and lost in buckets. 

The algorithm is ruthless, it follows the people. If you lose them it will punish you hard. 

Every single video you upload is an investment that will either work for you or against you.

Be a long-term player, anything that can make your videos better, do it, even if it's a small thing. 

Don't chase the shiny objects, if you do things right you will thrive.

Be that one creator from whom you get a dopamine shot when you notice he's released a new video.

 That's what you want to focus on. 

Quantity is never an option unless it's a qualitative quantity. Capturing attention is hard enough, and it's even more if you're a small creator. 

You better convert it in trust or you will engage in a sword fight against the wind for the rest of your career.

Quality or Quantity?

Watch time, Retention Time, Average Video Duration, CTR...

95% of the time, these metrics are just bullshit &amp; pure noise unless you understand something simple but very important. 

Don't trust me, let me prove it to you with one of my videos that crossed 1M+ views

Read 👇 

I have hit the million mark on my videos a lot of times in my career. Not for my clients, not for someone else, for me.

99% of creators never reach this milestone, and from the 1% left, very few try to understand how they did it. 

They just enjoy it.

Trust me I spent a loooot of time studying my content. (you have no idea how many hours I've put into it) 

And before we start you need to understand two very important principles that will help you understand my point.

1⃣ Fooled by randomness

A concept from the book of the same name by Nassim Taleb.

This is when you try to make sense of randomness by finding patterns in it while in reality there aren't. 

2⃣ The narrative biais

This is the tendency to interpret information as being part of a larger story or pattern, regardless of whether the facts actually support the full narrative.

Basically, it's when you know when it started and when it finished but not what's in between. 

In this case, you know when a video was uploaded &amp; what's the results in terms of views, but how it happened is so complex, with so many factors involved, that it can't be explained through numbers only.

This is very important to understand because people would rather accept a wrong explanation than admit that they don't understand. 

Don't get fooled, or it will drive you crazy.

This is why I almost NEVER use these metrics in my strategies. 

I'm a full-time YouTuber since 2015 and I rarely check my analytics because most of it is just pure noise. 

I've built for myself strategies analytics-free that work way better.

Now the theory is cool, but let's back it with some solid facts. 

Let's play a game:

One of these videos has 1.4M views,
the other has 500k (almost 3x less).

Guess which one.

(same channel, same audience, and roughly the same duration: 13mn vs 12mn &amp; only 4 months between em) 

Video 1 beats video 2 in EVERY. SINGLE. ASPECT. (even the retention time graph)

And yet (you guessed the plot twist) video 2 is the one with 1.4M views. 

The lesson here: 

No matter how many numbers you will put at work, it will always be easier to understand people rather than numbers. 

Focus on providing value to your audience, and you will succeed. Almost everything else is a waste of time.

Here is a starting point: 
https://twitter.com/wono_strategy/status/1569298001943748608

If this helped you, subscribe 👉 @wono_strategy, there's more to come. 🙂