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Have you ever seen a title on a YouTube video similar to the title on this Blog post? YouTube reminds me of the California gold rush of the mid-1800’s, and like the gold rush, most people don’t get rich, enough strike it rich to entice others to try, and the folks who really do well are the “shovel and supplies” merchants (channels focused on helping others trying to get rich on YouTube)!
I have been a content creator on YouTube for nearly 4 years focused mainly on helping folks who are just getting started with RV travel. The timing of my channel has worked out well given the trend to travel and social distance. My channel has grown slowly but steadily, likely due to my teaching background and enthusiasm for travel. I’ve been able to enjoy creating content to help people yet I have resisted some of the things to do that are needed to grow fast.
If I wanted to grow quickly on YouTube, I’d likely do some things differently. First, whether you are a YouTube content creator or viewer, understand rule number one: YouTube is an advertising business. They make money by serving very targeted ads to viewers, and they use content creators to do so. Content creators are the “show biz talent” and share in the ad revenue, yet the actual percentage of revenue sharing is a mystery to most creators. “Targeted” is the key word stated above. Since YouTube is a subsidiary of Google, they have access to almost all of your online data as a viewer. Ever wonder why your Gmail email account is totally free? You guessed it – it isn’t free at all, and the exchange you agree to by using Gmail or any Google service is your browsing and viewing information.
Why do Google and YouTube want this information? So that they can better target-market ads to viewers like you. Were you recently searching Google for information on what RV to buy? They know it, and guess what will start to show up in your suggested videos on YouTube?By the way, Facebook does the exact same thing. They are Google/YouTube’s main competitor for your valuable daily screen time and also make money by serving very targeted ads.
Besides understanding that YouTube is a targeted ad marketer, you should know that if YouTube could get by with it, they would run videos of only ad content 24/7 to viewers, in order to maximize their revenue. Of course, they can’t do this because no one would watch all ads all of the time. So, while they harvest your personal data to provide a micro-targeted ad tool to advertisers, they know that they have to be careful to not “over-ad” the viewer or no revenue or lesser revenue will result. Finding the sweet spot in this regard is what they invest heavily in analytically.
So, it is an analytic exercise for YouTube of finding out how much ad content they can get away with before they lose a viewer or the viewer’s attention. This sweet spot of serving the optimal amounted ad content can be different based on the viewer’s sensitivity to ads, the time of day, the content being presented, etc. Catastrophic failure for YouTube is if a viewer gets fed up with the video (including ads) and hops over to Facebook. A lesser failure is if a viewer jumps out of a video to watch another video on YouTube. Hey, at least we can serve another ad! So, of primary importance is that you begin to see what the objective of YouTube is and isn’t. There are some parameters, but basically YouTube wants more ad revenue and needs to serve more ads to get more revenue.
Google (Alphabet) is YouTube’s parent public company, and as such is under pressure from investors (owners) to increase profit every quarter, thus driving their stock price up for owners. They have done a decent job of it since inception. A $10,000 investment in Google stock, if purchased when the company went public (August 2004) would now be worth roughly $319,000 (as of Late February 2021).
If you have been watching any YouTube videos in 2020 and early 2021 you should have noticed two advertising changes. First, the dreaded mid-roll ads. In July of 2020, YouTube disclosed to all content creators that they would be adding mid-roll ads (ads in the middle of videos) unless the creator opted out on each video. Any video over 8-minutes would have mid-roll ads going forward. Watch your next video on YouTube over 8-minutes and see if your viewing isn’t interrupted, sometimes mid-sentence, by an ad. If not, you should click the like button of the video, because the content creator took time to remove the mid-roll ad when publishing the video in order to value your time by not making you watch another ad. Good for you, but not necessarily good for the Creator and certainly not good for YouTube.
YouTube in essence over time is getting all viewers conditioned to mid-roll ads going forward, and my take is that at some near future point, content creators like myself won’t be able to stop mid-roll ads from being on videos. There is just too much revenue at stake for YouTube to reverse policy on mid-roll ads and too much incentive to force them on all videos as people are conditioned to them.
The second major change in ads is the increase in the frequency of non-skippable ads at the beginning of videos. I think this is becoming more and more the norm, that non-skippable ads are being served before videos. It makes perfect sense from YouTube’s perspective. When you skip ads, likely no one makes money, and the advertiser doesn’t have their ad viewed. So, the advertiser likely won’t keep advertising, meaning less money for YouTube.
It wasn’t until I started advertising on social media that I got it – these platforms have invested Billions to perfect the art of micro-targeted marketing, so someone like me can send my ad to an extremely fine grain of people who would likely want to know more. This greatly reduces my cost to reach the next interested person with my content.
It is also important to understand that viewers also differ in terms of how sensitive they are to ad interruptions. I may hate all ads and actively skip them while others may not care and watch everything, including the pesky mid-roll ads. There is a huge amount of analytic talent and computing power in these large social media companies set against this issue. Billions of advertising dollars are at stake. Squeezing out just a marginal increase in ad serving time per viewer means a potentially large increase in revenue.
So, in light of these things, let’s ask and answer our main question: who does YouTube want to partner with in terms of content creators to make as much money as possible? Remember that for YouTube to make as much money as possible, they need to serve as many ads as possible to as many people as possible for as long as possible. So, who would be the “model creator” to help them accomplish this goal?
Given all we’ve discussed thus far, it isn’t difficult to deduce who YouTube would want as a model creator. First, the content creator needs to support YouTube values by creating interesting content that people want to watch repeatedly. Basically, if a content creator can’t do this, no one will watch their content and the entire business model fails. So, we need to find lots of people who produce quality entertaining or educational videos that other people will watch and want to watch again. Second, our model creator needs to be able to keep people watching for most of the length of the video. This way we can take more of people’s daily screen time and keep them from our competitor and potentially serve more ads. The creator has to be able to keep people’s attention throughout the video. Third, our model creator really needs to allow ads before, during and after the video, so we can serve up a bunch of ads. Ideally, they would be so interesting that people will want more content and won’t jump off the video when we serve a targeted ad their way, even in the middle of content. Fourth, our model creator needs to produce long videos and still not lose the audience. The longer the better for videos as we can serve more ads.
Now (speaking as YouTube) that we have the main ingredients for our model creator, we’ll tweak our search algorithm so that this type of creator is easy to identify and so we can promote their content. After all, once we have a successful creator, let’s add more people to their channel so we can reproduce the outcome at a larger scale and make more money.
You get the point hopefully by now – YouTube knows how to make money and they know who makes money for them. So, they obviously will benefit the channels who benefit them. Look at any channel that has grown significantly in the past few years and generally you will find this commonality: the channel produces interesting or entertaining content with longer than average video length. The channel has personal talent or attractiveness that keeps their viewers engaged, and usually allow all ad content.
To summarize, if you want to really grow on YouTube, work for YouTube and make them money – plain and simple. It is an advertising business for them and showbusiness for you. If you can’t draw and keep an audience, you’ll be panned by your boss (deprioritized in search results) and struggle. If you happen to be able to keep and grow an audience, they will promote your channel and videos since they see you are generating revenue for them – you’re top talent!
None of this is to say that you shouldn’t be on YouTube. Likely some of the greatest creators never try this medium. YouTube is absolutely the best tool to learn anything. If you can tell a great story visually or are an excellent teacher or funny or talented in some way that can draw and keep an audience, then you should by all means give it a shot. Be aware that your boss is an ad agency trying to sell ads and you are the talent they are leveraging to make money. They likely will never let you know your cut of the revenue but be assured that it will be just enough to keep you posting videos. You’ll have to decide along the way just how much you want to be the model creator and how hard you want to work to benefit your boss.