#339 – How We Created A Profitable YouTube Channel In Only 3 Months

Even if you hate Google, there is no denying that YouTube is probably the best social network to doing well on. Think about it, it has 2.7 billion monthly active users, and all generations use it. The discovery engine, unlike Google, is incredible, and small creators stand a chance to gain some free visibility there. They actually pay you for distributing your content unlike most other networks, and you build a deep relationship with your audience due to the long video format. And on top of that, they add the ability to add links in many places and send your audience to places where you can convert them to customers unlike many other networks as well. Why isn’t everyone doing YouTube? Well, if we go past the fact that many people are camera shy, it’s because being a YouTuber takes a lot of time and skills. And that is something that most of us don’t have at hand right now. We’re all busy with other things, and it’s hard to fit it in your schedule. That’s exactly where Mark and I were at the end of last year. We had this podcast, but to be frank, this podcast was never made for YouTube.

And even though we adapted it to the platform over time, the potential for wide reach is limited. We had some long-form videos that did find, but they were taking ages to produce, and we couldn’t keep up with the pace that we would need to follow if we wanted to be successful. On the other hand, we didn’t want to leave the opportunity that is YouTube Today passed by because we think that it’s easier to build on it now, that it will be five years from now, and we didn’t want to live with regrets. We spent a lot of time strategizing and thinking about how to get the most out of the platform while minimising the drawbacks. Now, I’m not going to go in the details right now of why we picked this angle because you’ll get that in the episode. But this led us to start the Authority Hacker News YouTube channel. And fast forward four months, and this new channel is already outperforming our six years old YouTube channel and getting more views per video than many competitors with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. And I can hear the naysayers in the back saying that we could only do this because of our brand.

And yeah, it probably helped at the beginning. It probably sped things up a bit. But almost every single week when we release a new video, there are more new watchers than there are returning viewers. And this tells us that the YouTube recommendation engine is working and is building a brand new audience for us that was not aware of who we were before. And what’s more is the channel is actually profitable, despite the fact that we pay salaries and we have a team doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And that is thanks to the great early engagement. We’ve managed to bring sponsors on board now, and we’re getting paid every time we release a video. And the best part is the whole project only takes Mark and I about two and a half hours each week. It’s not the hectic YouTuber life that people dread. It’s a cool, profitable, fun side project that helps us grow our audience on the side. So in this week’s episode, we are going to be pulling the curtain behind everything we’ve done for that channel and how we’ve completely outsourced the production process so that you can do the same in your industry.

We’re holding absolutely nothing back in this episode. But before we jump in, let me say a quick thank you to today’s episode sponsor, Search Intelligence. Get in touch with them if you need high-quality digital PR campaigns. We’ll tell you more about them later. For now, let’s get started. Everyone, welcome back to the Authority Hacker podcast. In today’s episode, we actually decided to take you behind the scenes of our new YouTube channel that you might have seen called Authority Hacker News. I want to break down how it works, the business model, what has worked, what hasn’t, and most importantly, how you can take what we’ve done and learned and how you can actually apply it to your business and the logic behind all of that. So obviously today I’m with Mark because we are launching this channel together under Otteria Hacker. And we explain why we’ve done it under Authority Hacker. Actually, when we started it, we did not plan on launching it under the Authority Hacker name.

We couldn’t find a good enough name because all of the SEO-sounding names that were anything to do with news were already taken. So we just went back to Authority Hacker news.

Yeah, it wasn’t intended initially, but actually, looking back, I’m actually happy we did it that way. And maybe we’ll talk about that. It’s not really in the notes, but we’ll talk about that. But let’s talk about what it is, basically. So, Authority Hacker news is So far, it’s just a YouTube channel, but actually, when we launched it initially, there was also a TikTok profile, an Instagram profile, and we actually did not do a Twitter one because Twitter is news already, so we didn’t feel like we needed another profile. But we actually started with both Shorts and YouTube initially. The angle is like, you find industry news that are relevant to our audience there. In my head, it was never just SEO. It was always everything we use together and that is relevant to our target audience. The idea was to give one convenient place to get this in quickly, efficiently, in video format so that people can get it, basically. I know you guys like numbers, so let’s just talk about the stats as well. We only have published 15 videos so far. It’s not a lot. We published one per week. It’s been a little bit over three months that we started the channel.

The channel is sitting at over 100,000 views already, which is pretty good for a brand new channel. We’re pretty happy with that. The views are climbing fast. I mean, now every video is over 10,000 views. Last week we had over 15,000. I think it’s going to not take too long to get to a million views or something. The subscribers is 4,364. Again, we started at zero, but again, now we found a good format and we’ll talk about that. Each video generates maybe 300, 350 subscribers.

To be fair, a YouTube subscriber isn’t what it used to be. It’s not a big driver of reach, such a big driver of reach anymore.

The proof is the channel only has 4,364 subs, but over 100,000 views already, which shows that it doesn’t matter. Eighty % plus of views on the channel are actually from non subscribers at this point. So people are automatically self-subscribed by YouTube when they’re just consuming the content. And it’s just as strong as a signal as actually subscribing these days, pretty much. If you’re watching content, it’s even probably a signal than just clicking the subscribe button because it can be tricked to do it. Around half of the viewers of each new video we publish are actually new viewers. So more and more people are discovering the channel. And because the view numbers are going up, it’s actually more and more new people discover the channel every single time we publish a video. So it’s like we’re pretty happy, especially considering that we also have a very high to high return rate from one video to another. So people discovering a video, they’re quite likely to watch the next one as well. So that’s That’s how we get that compounding effect of more and more people essentially watching this stuff. If we actually had looked at number of views maybe three weeks ago, we’d probably be at 50,000 or something.

You know what I mean? We’d probably be at half or something. A lot of the recent success has been achieved with the last three or four videos. Each video gets over 50 comments as well. We are not metised with that sense yet, but we project at $500 per month. We actually have a problem with the pin right now. We need to solve that. We We can actually add the channel, but if we look at all the analytics tool, it should be around 500 bucks a month from that. But we also have around five-figure sponsorship deals mixed with emails. We actually email the videos and there’s a promo in the email, and we actually have a a shout out in a video. That is actually the main revenue driver for the channel right now. Any other stats that you think I should mention?

No, that’s pretty much it. It’s pretty good for a three-month-old channel, I would say. I think one of the reasons we’re doing so well is obviously the sponsorship. I think that we’re in the B2B space, so the audience that we have here. It’s obviously quite an attractive market for advertisers and sponsors to want to get to rather than teenagers watching prank videos or something like that.

It was fairly easy to sell the sponsors, actually. We talk about that, but we have a queue for sponsors, actually. We don’t have enough content for the amount of sponsors that want to talk about that. We’ll talk a bit about that later in the podcast. You can either skip in the chapters if you’re watching on YouTube or just wait until we get there. But yeah, it’s quite interesting. But I want to just go back to the basics first on why did we do this channel? Why did we start a new channel? What was the plan exactly?

Really, it came out of a conversation, I think, like September, October, last year, when you were like, We’re missing out on YouTube. We had our podcast on YouTube, this podcast, but it’s not really made for YouTube. It’s sometimes an hour, hour and a half long episodes. People on YouTube, they don’t have that much attention span normally. So while we have a great core audience that watches this podcast and they’re very engaged, they follow us regularly, it’s not picking up huge amounts of new viewers. Typically, we would pick up viewers from… They would find us elsewhere through SEO or through some other channel, and then they’d learn about more, get to know us more on the podcast. So we wanted a way to find new audiences, find new people, get to new people through YouTube. And honestly, we We’re not other people having great success with it in our industry and in adjacent industries. There’s something about seeing people interacting with people on video format that you end up just trusting them more. I mean, if they have something good to say, obviously, and you resonate with that, versus a blog post. And when we think about it, some of the blog posts on Authority Hacker, the best travel affiliate programmes.

Even if you’re in the travel space, you go read blog post. It’s like, Yeah, cool. Okay, there’s some good ideas here. But anyone could have wrote that. They don’t get to know your eye. And unless they then go on to our email list or the podcast, we’re not convincing them to follow us, to follow our journey, and to buy into what we’re doing. Now, the alternative was on YouTube when people are just-I want to say that just on the blog post, it’s our problem with SEO right now is that this is the only content that ranks.

So it’s like, you cannot… Express a large amount of personality. You can a little bit, there’s a little bit of a goal, but you cannot really say what you want about the topic. You need to say what Google wants you to say about the topic. Otherwise, you don’t get traffic. While I still think SEO is still viable and we’re still using it, we’re still getting lots of emails and growing our email list from this, etc. We’re actually fine overall. I like this deeper connexion that we find on YouTube, actually.

Now, the flip side of that is we also looked at people who were doing lots of YouTube videos. The one thing is they all get burnt out quite quickly. You get to a certain level of growth, and then you work yourself into a job at the end of the day, and you maybe run out of things to say or It’s tiring. You’re on this treadmill with YouTube and you have to show up every single week, be enthusiastic, and make great content. It’s just it’s difficult to do that for long term. We’ll get into why We have the news angle a bit, but it had something to do with that. We wanted to be on YouTube, but we didn’t want to throw our entire lives and become YouTubers. We had this whole other business to run. We have the podcast, we have our courses, our products, still our SEO, and all the other elements that go into Authority Hacker. We didn’t want to just put all that to the side and make videos 24/7. We tried to find some way that we could achieve both of those goals, and this This was really it. There was a few other things as well, like growing the brand to an audience beyond just who we were previously targeting, like grow our email list further.

The thing with YouTube as well is you can now retarget people who watch your videos. If you have a lot of people following you there, not even subscribing, but just watching your content, then you can retarget them across Google’s ad network. We do a lot of… We’ve done a podcast about this before, but Facebook, and specifically, the retargeting element of it is very profitable. There’s a good money play there for us in being able to advertise to people to sell their products and stuff there as well.

I wanted another growth engine as well. I wanted people to discover us somewhere else than SEO. We’re still doing a good job at SEO, as I said. Lots of people coming in, but we want that stability. It’s like when Google stops being a good traffic driver, I want to be like, Well, we have these other things, etc. And YouTube, in my opinion, is the number one best platform to do that on.

I think a good way to look at it is when you or I go to consume content, to learn stuff, we go to YouTube, not to Google. And that’s been the case for a few years now. So there was a danger of us getting left behind if we aren’t getting on YouTube. So that was a big factor. And look, I’m not going to lie, there’s a money element to it as well. We saw financial opportunities, both in sponsorship in the short, medium term, but also longer term in promotion of our products and services to an audience. We’ve witnessed other people in the industry doing really well off of just YouTube. So there’s clearly a good financial reason for us to do that. And so that was an incentive to do it, too.

Yeah, I want to say as well, I would say almost back in the day at this point, the idea was like a lot of people would start a new site and grow a portfolio and do all of that, etc, and just run a bunch of unrelated tiny businesses that would stack up with each other. That would make sense when traffic was easy to come back, basically. But it’s really not the case anymore. Not just Google, even social networks and less traffic, etc. This initiative has replaced starting a new site for us. We grew a portfolio of diversified ways to reach the same audience on different platforms through different formats so that we can lead them back to the same place that we can run at a higher level because we’re not running multiple things, basically. I really think that it’s like a mental shift people need to have. I know this community has this shiny object. They want to start something new, et cetera. They want to have a fresh start. To be fair-This is a fresh start.

It’s not just the SEO community or it’s not just this community. It’s Any entrepreneur has shiny objects in their own. Entrepreneurs love starting stuff and getting stuff from zero to one. But eventually, you keep doing the same thing. It gets a bit boring. It gets a bit samey. I think, Oh, there’s all these other opportunities. I could go do this. I could go I’m going to do this. This was really a way for us to scratch that itch, but while still incorporating, while still helping the business, is that stacking effect?

Yeah, and I think that’s something that most people should consider because we’ve recommended in the past few weeks, people need to build a real business around their brand and sell something, either products or services or whatever. We do info products, we like info products, but you could be doing physical products, you could be doing anything. This allows you to essentially make a new traffic driver every time, tackle something fresh, and have this fresh start and be enjoying it. You could be starting a newsletter, you could be starting to do TikToks, or you could be starting Instagram reels like I talked about with Sam in the last podcast episode. We talked about React videos when we were at this podcast as well. But the idea as well is that since you’re tying it back to a business, let’s say we abandon the news channels, it’s three months from now, it will still have done something for the main business. Many people will have discovered us through that, and there will be some long-lasting effect from having done that that would not happen if we just did a one-off project that was detached for everything, and that traffic would go to waste.

So there’s a That’s something that, in my opinion, that’s the new approach of your shiny object syndrome is start a new thing. I think what we show here is we have two YouTube channels. We have this channel, we have the podcast channel, and we have that new news unknown. And I think that’s something that is only possible in the last few years because for a long time, subscribers were the main way you would get distribution of your content on this platform. So the more subscribers you would have, the more distribution you would have. It’s still like that, but not exactly. It’s basically the way it works. It’s like if your content gets high engagement, you will get distribution well beyond your subscribers. As I said in the stats part, we’re getting 80% of people who are not subscribed to watch that news content. It’s not you guys, probably. It’s probably other people that are browsing YouTube, etc. And because of that non-connection between the distribution and the subscribers, you get to make essentially multiple… You You can make as many channels as you want for one business as long as you’re doing well. And that’s why format-based YouTube channels are actually probably a better idea now than they ever were.

Because if we were posting the news videos on this channel, on a podcast, I mean, I would call this the podcast channel. It’s called Authority Hacker podcast. We definitely have discussions. It’s called Authority Hacker. Sorry, we’re discussing about calling it Authority Hacker podcast. But if we post it here, you guys are used to long content. If you’re watching this, you’re sitting down or you’re playing us in the background, you’re listening to this for like 45 minutes or whatever. The news videos are like 10 minutes or less, sometimes a little bit more, but it’s short. It’s not the same format and vice versa. The news watchers, they probably would hate this podcast for a lot of them because it’s just too long, too rambling. They don’t have time. They want us to get to the point quickly and just go on with their day. And as a result, it’s like the people who watch the podcast and not the news would not click, which means we get a low CTR when we publish a the news video and vice versa. The people who watch the news would not click the podcast and we get a low CTR if we publish the video, which means both content types would probably do worse if they were on the same channel than if we’ve separated them.

And we accept that while there is a common core to our audience that probably consumes both, there’s also an individual audience for each channel that does not have to consume the other part. And this allows us to have this good engagement metrics that gives us that free distribution. Not really on a podcast. I mean, we get it a little bit, but mostly on the news channel, which it would have been killed. Even this channel has 40,000 subscribers. It’s way better. But it would have been killed if we posted these videos there. I don’t think they would do better than the podcast, actually.

Absolutely. You know, It’s a case in point. The very first video we did when we had zero subscribers got over 7,000 videos. The third video got 9,200. 7,000 views. Views, sorry. Yeah. Which is huge. Four or five years ago, you never in a million years get that on your first video. You needed to just do a lot and get nothing until you hit that critical mass. But the algorithm has changed now. It’s much better at matching content, even from brand new channels, to the people that will watch it.

I actually watched a video from Think Media, I think, last night, where they actually… They’re like YouTube works like Google, right? It’s like they have this YouTube liaison and everything is just a copy paste of that. Except they’re actually nice and they’re actually useful, which is not really In the case, they’re the search team and they probably should learn from them. But the point is that they actually pushed an update recently to YouTube to actually push smaller channels more. So unlike Google, once again, they’re actually doing a good job, which means quite often now in your feed, you actually see videos with low view count from channels with low subscriber count, and they’ve actually done money and effort so that YouTube is a place where you can enter as a new content creator and find success so that they maintain their platform freshness. It’s not just Mr. A biz videos everywhere you’re looking, basically. And it’s cool. Probably is a hit to the bigger creators, but it’s also a big opportunity to start now on YouTube if you consider the mix of you don’t need a lot of subscribers and the YouTube algorithm is being tweaked to surface high-quality content.

You can’t make shit videos, high-quality content from small creators. For me, I’m excited and we can see it with this channel, actually. And that’s another reason why I think YouTube is literally one of the best channels. That’s pretty much the reason why we did this in the first place. Now, I guess the next question is why news? Why did we go with the news format? It’s not really what we’re known for as well. It’s interesting, I think.

It was really some analysis that we did of the industry and of other channels, and we looked specifically at which types of videos were people doing in our industry that got lots of views. And it was pretty clear that whenever there was some interesting news development, some Google update, something changing within the industry, and people did a video about that and what it means. Ai was a great example in the previous couple of years. It did really, really well. So this idea of covering things which were topical and relevant became… That was like our go-to approach there. So it was just a natural extension of that to go for news based on based on that.

I think another one as well is, as you said, creators, they create content and they get burnt out. And mostly it’s because your ability to accumulate experience is far slower than your ability to create the speed at which you need to create content for social, for YouTube, etc, to actually stay relevant. And so that means you end up repeating yourself. I’m not going to give any names, but just go and look at so many big names. And probably if you watch their recent videos, it’s probably some rehash of what you’ve heard before. To be fair as well, this also affected us in the podcast.

We’ve been in the podcast for over eight years now. And okay, there are developments and things change that we talk about. But once we’ve talked about how to create content, how to build your site, how to build links, how to build that three or four times. It’s like, right, what new? Well, we don’t have something new to talk about the same stuff again. But despite that, that’s what sometimes people want. It’s difficult as a creator to do that.

And we can’t a new YouTube channel every week or something to have something to talk about. But in this case, this is actually a fresh experience. But yeah, so the idea is the news, you don’t really create anything yourself. You’re just curating. You’re curating and analysing, which you can add value. I think we tried to add quite a bit of value and analysis in our news, and I think that’s one of the reasons they’re doing quite well, actually. I will talk a bit about the process a little bit later and how we add value. But we don’t need to create a massive case study or anything like that to create any interesting We just need to tie things together into a useful utility for people so they don’t have to be scrolling Twitter or LinkedIn all the time to actually get the news. I think a lot of people are liking that. Another thing is it’s quite highly outsourcible. We’ll talk a little bit about the team, the process in a bit. But actually this channel, we were talking about this before the podcast. For me, it takes about two and a half hours per week, and I think you’re around the same, right?

About two hours, yeah.

It’s highly outsourcible and it’s running a full YouTube channel at literally less than five hours total from founder’s time per week. It’s very nice. It’s almost like a perfect team for a case study for our work week. I mean, yeah. That was quite interesting to us because, as Mark said, we have lots of other things to do, sorry, to say as well, and just don’t have time to do something of the level that we I would want to do. I don’t want to make a shitty daily video or something without investing lots of time, basically.

I think there’s another thing around the team, right? There’s no one job that gets done here that can’t be done by someone else. We’ve seen that a couple of times with creators, especially on the presenter front. They’ll have someone else be the presenter of their channel, and then that presenter suddenly has all this an hour, and then they’ll leave and start their own channel, and it kills the channel. We wanted to… It’s like you and me have done the majority of the episodes presenting, but also Matt, our video editor, has presented a couple as well. I think in future, we’re going to have him do more and bring in potentially even more people in future. So the idea is that this channel becomes its own thing rather just Mark’s channel or Gael’s channel, specifically. And we wanted to be able to take ourselves out when we wanted to, and it still be successful.

Another thing with news is obviously high CTR, high virality. When you cover a big news, people click. That’s a big driver of growth, especially nowadays. I think we’ve proven it now at this point with this channel that it works the angle, which was a bit of a gamble because nobody does a news channel in this industry. We were the first ones, literally. But I think the guess was good. There are some cons to that model, to the news model, though. The first one, and I think the biggest one, is the fact that videos are not evergreen. The idea is on YouTube, you create content and you get passive views over time and it grows. We get a bit of that. When I look at the analytics, there’s a bit of that. There’s a floor for watch time. It’s not zero and there’s no video or something. But obviously, because the news fade, there is less interest to watch the news three months later. It’s very useful. And as a result, you probably get a much bigger spike when you release, but a much lower level of evergreen views after that. But we’ve looked at other news channel in other industries, and they’re still doing very, very well.

So one of our inspirations, for example, was Techlinked, which is a channel from LMG, the LINE news media group. It’s LINE news tech tips, etc. And they do news like that roundup, very similar to what we do. And it’s the second or third biggest channel of their big conglomerate of YouTube channels. So it’s like there’s still a high ceiling for that. So we said okay for that. And the second thing is the time pressure, right? Because news get old. And that’s why we’ll talk about production in a minute. But you need to be quite tight. Once the news breaks, you basically have like six days, five, six days to cover it. Otherwise, it’s basically irrelevant and people are not interested. And so we need to go quite fast. And it’s really a balance between quality and speed to produce these videos.

It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m sure it will happen that a story will come out, we’ll cover it. Then in the 48 hours or so it takes us to record and edit, it will have changed dramatically and we won’t want to post what we’ve done. So that is a potential issue. But I think the trade-off in terms of having lots of stuff to talk about just because news events are happening is worth it.

Yeah. So I mean, that’s pretty much it. It’s not perfect, but It’s definitely a model that can be replicated in lots of niches. And I think we’ll talk about this a bit later. Yeah, there’s a lot of examples, even outside of B2B stuff as well. Yeah, it’s not just like, oh, this works in on the marketing, but it would never work in my niche. You know what? I mean, it doesn’t work in every niche, right? If you’re doing woodworking, I don’t think there’s lots of good working news every day that you could cover that. But for many niches, it’s definitely doable and it can be very profitable with sponsors, I think. But before we jump into that, let’s talk about the actual process. So I know people now, they probably want to how we do this. And we’re just going to go step by step and talk about exactly how we do that. So it’s defined responsibilities. I’m taking care more of the editorial process at this point. I did present, but I’m actually worse than Mark at presenting. So We decided that I’m going to be focusing on the editorial because I think I’m a bit more on top of the news of the industry in general.

So we have what we call a collecting and annotating news step. Basically, we use a tool called something a little bit like pocket as well, where every time you come across something interesting online, I have a Chrome extension where I can click on. And once I click on that, it saves that into Readwise Reader, which is an app, etc. But most importantly, I can start annotating the page with the interesting bits and so on. So I start actually doing some of the work. I’m like, Okay, that piece is interesting, that piece is interesting. And it actually synchronises with Notion for us. So we have a Notion database with everything that’s synchronised and all the notes, the highlights and the notes I’ve added on on these highlights that is just stacking up all the time. Every time I come across something interesting, I just add up to that database. And then that’s all we do. And then we actually can subscribe to newsletters as well. On the readwise, we don’t do it as much as we should right now, but I want to do that. I want to start implementing other data sources than just us browsing the web.

And you can do that. Then essentially on Monday, we have a meeting with our script writer, Steve, and we go through all the capture stories and we decide which stories are the most interesting and which ones we’re actually going to run. We pick a front running story, which is going to be the main angle of the video. And the ratio is usually between one-third and one half of the video is the main story, and then the other stories are cued after more as a quick round of stories.

I think that’s an important thing to focus on here because I’ve seen people try to do news and the presentation The presentation of their episode or what they do is like your news for first of January 2024, whatever. Nobody cares. No one cares about news on that day. They care about specific stories. Think about when you’re walking past the newsstand and you’re not like, Oh, I’ve got to find my favourite newspaper and read that. It’s like people, their attention is grabbed by whatever story is on the front page. And it’s always been the case for hundreds of years, and YouTube is no different. So you need to present it, and this is inspiration here, came from Techlink, is you need to present it as one story and then deliver multiple stories, but behind that.

Yeah. So the idea is basically the title and the thumbnail will reflect the main story. And then we spent a good bit of time delivering on that because people clicked for that story. So we want to go deeper. And that’s how we sell the news, basically, rather than just selling your roundup, which is not very exciting. I think that’s how we did. That’s why you didn’t want to do at the beginning, and we’ll talk about that later. But we did a roundup podcast one day. It was horrible. It did so bad. It’s just because it was fully packaged. But when we package it like this, it works pretty well, actually. We decided from running story, we decided secondary story. But also what I try to do with the editorial is have an arch and an angle for the whole episode. I want to link the primary story to all the secondary stories and potentially link back the secondary stories. I’m like, Oh, this thing happened. Let’s say we talk about the Google Google leak, for example. That’s something we talked about recently. And we talk about AI overviews as the second stories, for example. And then what’s going to happen is when we talk about AI overview, I’m going to link it back to the leak.

So I’ll be like, it’s probably showing this because we saw this in the leak. We saw this factor, and that’s why this is actually showing in this overview, it’s not working properly, for example. So we link back everything together. So there’s like an overarching thread that you can follow and a story to across all stories, basically. That’s not always easy to do, but I think it’s what makes a better episode. So basically we do that. But at this point, it’s Monday night, right? So we give ourselves another 24 hours to slot in any news story that would come up. So for example, the Google leak, it came on just after we did that call, actually last week when we did that. And so we had to rewrite a lot of stuff and fix a lot of stuff after. But what’s good is because we ran three stories, I think, We had two done already at that point. So it was like we didn’t have as much work to do. We just had to rework one of them. So after the Airtority meeting, our script writer goes and essentially expands the notes in Notion, plus does extra research for sources, etc.

And then we actually trained an AI assistant to take these notes and make a first draught of the script. Now, I’m not saying you can make great YouTube videos as an AI assistant, but we’ve written a lot of these roundup our cells first. We gave that to an assistant so that it trained on our writing and our angles. And now it gives us a very approximate first draught for a story, but it needs lots of work after that. There’s really more human words than AI was in the final script. However, it’s still a bit of a time saver, so it’s definitely something to do. And I’m excited to see GPT-5 and so on to help us more, hopefully. And so the script writer essentially puts everything together sources mixed with AI stuff, mixed with his research, and he submits it, basically. He submits the first draught. Then I take that over. I read the whole script right away, I add extra analysis research and pointer opinions in there. It’s like sometimes he doesn’t necessarily have the experience of the industry and so on. So I’m able to link back to all the stories. I think at some point we talk about John Mueller and there was this story of his deleted tweets, for example, and how this ties together and so on.

So I add these things in. So so that it makes the stories deeper and has insights into that, which really makes it more than just a roundup of news, but rather an analysis.

I think that’s a really important point, actually, because there are other sources out Their search engine land journal, whatever. Yeah, they don’t do much on that. But how often do you go on there to read their detailed analysis and come away thinking, Oh, yeah, that’s really… They’ve got that right. They’re breaking the story. I think what sets this apart is that analysis part at the end.

Not only that, but that analysis part actually does work for us in terms of what we want for the channel. Remember we said we want to deepen the relationship, establish authority. It allows us to do that. So it’s like the news is almost an excuse for us to give our opinion, do some deeper, a little bit deeper in that relationship, get people to adopt our views as well. Definitely. There’s a little bit of that. I mean, we believe in what we do. So it’s like we hope it helps people, but there’s definitely a bit of that. But anyway, once that’s all done, I’ve tweaked it. It’s not that much, but it’s definitely adding lots of value. Then we run it through a checklist. So it’s like, we have a very basic checklist right now. We have the host introduce themselves. Do include a byline. Does the content make sense to strangers who don’t know us? Like no inside the joke reference, no how is it going, Mark? Nothing like that. And it’s written for people who don’t know us. So it’s really important to do that. We check the sources are included, and then we run it for readability on Grammarly and on Hemingway app so that we actually make sure it’s easy to read.

The early episodes were definitely very hard to read. I did read some of them. It was difficult. We’ve learned the hard way. In general, we’ve seen massive engagement increases when we’ve used shorter sentences and made things easier to read. I think we’re aiming for a grade 4, 5 or something. That’s pretty low. We were a grade 9 when we started. To give you an idea of the level of progress we’ve made, not really half.

Then we’ve played around with different ways of shooting and filming. I think you did the first three or four episodes. I’m not sure. Were you using a teleprompter for that one or was that just…

Yeah, but the thing is, because the sentences were so long, sometimes they would not even fit on the screen. I’d start a sentence and I wouldn’t know where I’m ending. And it’s like, I actually made it quite difficult.

You have this tendency, Gael, to write super long sentences or six commas in them and stuff, because I think that’s the way you speak.

I wasn’t writing the script at the time.

You hold many different thoughts in your mind. But even now, I can tell when you’ve written a line because there’ll be more than three commas in the sentence. But for that reason, when I get a script, the first thing I do is skim over to get a sense of what’s included and what’s-I just want to say, by the way, up until that point, you’ve done absolutely nothing.

You don’t even know what the story is running.

That’s not true.

You might see it on the-I sometimes submit stories, and then we have in the call, when we decide which stories we’re running with, I’m there as well.

I I think it’s important that whoever’s presenting has a say in what stories we’re covering.

But you could skip it if you wanted. You could just skip it at that point.

Yeah, I don’t think it would be as good, though. 

So I received the script, I skim over it, and then the most important thing I do is I read it aloud because I’m going to have to do that on camera in just a moment. And reading it aloud for the first time, it’s warming up, it’s practising, it gets your voice going. But any mistakes or weird pronunciation or things like that, you’re learning the script in doing that. And it’s well worth the hour or so it takes to do that. There’s usually a few changes, and sometimes there’s an idea that I don’t think is presented well, so I’ll go and rephrase that. Occasionally, I do a little bit of extra research. But by and large, we’re pretty good at giving feedback back in understanding, Okay, here’s what to do, here’s not what to do. The last two or three scripts I’ve gotten have been pretty close to perfect. I really haven’t needed too much to do. Sometimes I just change words that I wouldn’t say, that someone else might say instead. So just make it more natural for me to say.

And then try and fix some of the understandability so that I think when I’m communicating it, people who maybe aren’t experts in the topic would be able to understand what it is we’re talking about. And then this is probably the thing that made this so much faster is we started using teleprompters to do this. Now, if you watched any of our course videos from from last year or before, we didn’t use any teleprompters for any of it. So sometimes there’ll be like six minute monologue or something, and we’ll script it and read a line and say a line, read a line, say a line. Oh, I forgot what I was going to say. Read it. We’ve done a little bit of that in some of our videos. The screencast elements of our course videos are normally just a bit more adlib. But for this, because we had a script and because we had to read it, we had to use a teleprometer But it’s always been a huge faff in teleprompter apps are not designed particularly well. The teleprompter, setting it up and all the settings and just getting the camera set up correctly, it’s It’s always been terrible.

But this year, Elgato released the Elgato prompter, which is really quite revolutionary in that instead of having just a stand where you put your iPad or phone at the bottom and then it reflects it onto the mirror so you can read it, it has a screen there, and that screen is connected to your computer. It acts as just another desktop. Using the software, you can literally… Gael is taking a photo of it right now.

I’m making a video so we can overlay, actually.

You can literally just drag it from Notion or wherever it is and put it into the teleprimter app on that screen and read it. And it’s amazing. It really reduces the friction to do teleprimter videos. And it has all the pro features that you would need with any higher-level software. So we use that, we film it for, let’s say, 12-minute video. It will take me about half an hour to do that. I’m still not perfect at it. I’m still trying to tweak some of the speed settings and spacings and things like that. There’s a bit of going back, and sometimes I’ll say things in a few different ways to give the video to give the video editor options on which one to use. But it takes about half an hour to do a 12-minute video. And then it’s just a case of getting the footage, getting the audio, and uploading that. And then that’s me.

You never see it again, basically. After that, Matt’s going to see this who is editing the podcast as well. But there’s a quality check, so make sure the footage is actually correct, the sound is correct, you can hear it, etc. It happens more times than you think that there are quality issues in terms of technicalities and so on. Then he does the A roll cut. He basically takes the initial, you on the camera, and he just cuts it to the final timeline. He cuts all the stuff you messed up, all the repeats and so on. You just have the final timeline. Then after that, he adds some basic bureaux. That would be the screenshots you see and so on. Then he animates it with effects. Matt, if I said anything wrong, feel free to correct and jump in.

Add some footage in there. It’s fine. Then he basically closed it to a tool called Frame. Io. Frame. Io is basically Google Docs for video editing. It allows everyone in the team to watch the video he’s edited. Then at any point, you can pause, click somewhere on the frame, and you say, Oh, I would like to add an effect that does this. I think we should add this screenshot, etc. That allows us.

Really good commenting system. Very, very well built.

Not only that, but for Matt, who This is the video. These comments actually pop directly into Premiere Pro. He does not have to watch it on the browser on one side and edit. It’s directly where he works, the comments pop up. It’s very easy to work together. We use this tool. It’s very handy. I think anyone who’s doing YouTube semi-seriously and collaboratively is using this. It’s very much like Google Docs. He does the edits until we approve based on the comments. Then we need to work on packaging because honestly, packaging is 90% of YouTube. It’s like your thumbnail and your title. Now, we knew the angle from the moment we picked the main story. When we picked the main story in the editorial, we know that it’s going to be what the thumbnail is about and what the title is about. Now, again, we talked about speed as well. We did not want to have some fancy thumbnail designer that takes three days to get back to you to make the thumbnail, or you need to wait for them to be back home, whatever. We actually just based that on a simple Canva template that is always the same.

There’s always a photo. There’s three to five words, including one world that is highlighted. There is some logo or visual element that reflects the main story. So that would be a Google logo, an OpenAI logo, something like this. A contextual background behind the photo, usually. And it’s always branded around with the same colours, which are the new… It’s actually a new Otter Hacker visual chart. I hope the website will be up. It’s going to be up in a few weeks from now where all the branding is basically refreshed at this point, but that’s going to be the new way Otteria Hacker looks. So that’s basically always the same. It’s a simple Canva template. We always do that and it works just fine. You need to make sure the text on your thumbnail is obviously different from your title. A lot of people tend to put the same text and title. Very, very bad idea. They need to complement each other. And the goal is to really not give everything away, but intrigue people. For example, today, the last one we’ve actually published last week was Google Leek Explained was the title on this a thumbnail, and it was Google algorithm leak everything you need to know.

So it’s like we don’t put exactly the same thing, but the idea is they complement each other. So for example, Google AI Overviews, big changes ahead was the title two weeks ago. And then the text on the thumbnail was search, It just changed forever, for example. I think that’s a good example.

A good example with the Google leak story. So obviously, when that broke, there were people who had videos about that the day it came out, right? But it took us maybe three or four days to that scripted, filmed, edited, and published. So we weren’t really breaking the fact that there’s been a Google leak. But the selling point of that was that here’s some actually deeper analysis and explanation and what you need to know for it. That’s why the title Everything You Need to Know did quite well, and the thumbnail, Google Leak, and then the highlighted word was explained. It’s really the explanation of it because There’s a lot of complex stuff going around there. I don’t think that many people did a good job of really explaining what can you actually do with this information other than, Hey, this thing happened.

Yeah. You want to create a sense of intrigue when you do that. So explain this, What do they explain, what you need to know, etc. And so that gets the click because click through it is probably one of the main matrix you want to work on. If you see a bad click through it on a video, it’s very unlikely you will get many views. And so, yeah, that’s pretty much how we package this. But the templated thumbnails really makes things so much faster and easier than just having someone else do a thumbnail. I really like that, actually.

And one thing when you’re designing thumbnails as well is sometimes they look really good on Canva or whatever it is, but when you actually see them on YouTube, it’s like, it doesn’t really stand out quite in the way I hoped. There’s a free tool called thumbnailpreview. Com that you can use to upload your image, and then it just creates a fake YouTube homepage view with a bunch of other videos in there. So you can see, okay, does this capture people’s eye or attention in the way that I’d like? So that’s been really helpful.

Yeah. I also like the consistency in your thumbnail because people know it’s a video from us almost immediately because it’s always the same look. I think on the podcast, we change almost too much. There’s too many colours, different colours, different things, etc. We’re not doing this on this channel and we’re seeing higher CTR. I can’t say it’s exactly for the term now, but I think if you create good content people engage with, then it’s nice and easy for them to recognise through the template. And actually you improve your CTR, which is quite good actually. So once we’ve done the packaging, we actually, essentially, we need to publish it on the day. Usually, it’s on Friday for us. First step is obviously to post the video on the main YouTube channel, but we always make sure we email the video to our email list for several reasons. One of the main reasons is because if the early views you get to a YouTube video are long views, so people who watch a large amount of the video, then it will push its distribution quite significantly. We have a big email list, but the number of people watching actually the video more than 30 seconds from the email is not that many.

It’s less than a thousand, usually, for us that actually do that. But if these people watch most of the video, then that sends a signal to YouTube that there is high engagement on this video that then distributes it through their channels. And that can lead to way, way, way more views. Most of our views come from YouTube recommendations, not the email list, actually. But the email This is why it’s doing it.

And this is just another good example of why this value-stacking idea of doing different traffic sources and different marketing channels can snowball and help each other.

In my experience, that works for SEO as well. When I email a blog post, it tends to do better on search. So it’s very similar. So we really make sure that the promo email is cued. It’s usually sent within a minute of publishing the video so that the early views can be hopefully long views. And that helps the distribution. It’s the game. Send as much traffic as you can immediately. So it’s not like random people watching it, it’s your fans, basically. And so that’s how we do. Then we have dedicated posts on all channels, basically, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on our Facebook groups, on Twitter, all of that. And the thing is, it’s quite difficult. We actually started tracking links recently, and honestly, the clicks from these networks, it’s pretty low, honestly. Usually, again, all networks combined, we’ll be We’re looking at 150 clicks max, I think, or 150 views or something. It’s pretty low, but again, hopefully the people who click are highly engaged people who will watch. It’s not really about the number of views. It’s rather about the metrics you’re sending to YouTube about these views so that you can get that large distribution from YouTube.

The perks of having multiple channels as well is that we actually make YouTube community posts for these videos. So when we post a YouTube video on the news channel, we actually can a community post that links back to that video on the podcast channel. So the people who are subscribed to a podcast, but not the news, they actually get to know about this. They can click and watch. Again, it’s not perfect, but that actually drives quite a bit of views because it’s within YouTube. And YouTube is completely fine sending traffic to itself. It’s just they don’t want to send traffic to other people or to other websites. So that works pretty well, actually. And we actually also have a trailer that we post on the stories. So we post that on our Instagram and Facebook, basically a We should actually post it on TikTok as well. And then again, after that, it’s our private communities. So it’s going to be the AutoInside system, it’s going to be HPro, and HPro Platinum. We’ll make some custom posts for them as well. We are going to be trying to make some post that actually talk about the news, not the video.

So featuring the actual stories that we’ve been covering and some interesting insights in an effort to drive more traffic to the video over the week. So our goal is to have a post every two days or something, but we haven’t really done that yet. So I think we’re going to wait and we’re going to report on that when we’ve actually done it. But that’s pretty much the promotion process. And again, you might feel discouraged at how many views you actually drive by doing this. It’s really not that many. It’s not what’s going to make or break your channel, but that builds the metrics to actually tell YouTube, please distribute this video to more people that are relevant. And that works quite well. So that’s how we approach this and that works quite well for us. Let’s talk What about money.

Yeah.

I think people want to know about that. How do we monetize this? It’s like, okay, we’re paying people, right?

Yeah. So really, right now, the vast majority of the revenue comes from sponsorship. And anyone who’s been in YouTube any time knows that YouTube ads and the money you make off of that, it’s not really worth it unless you’re getting hundreds of millions of views on video. Even then, it’s not worth it. That’s the reason why MrBeast has his chocolate bars and Logan Paul has his Prime and stuff, just because there’s way more money in doing your own stuff there. But sponsorship for a lot of creators is a huge, huge, huge step up from what you can make in revenue. We’re making five figures a month off of sponsorship right now. Now, that’s, I would say, unusual for a channel that has 4,000 subscribers. Even getting 10,000 views, that’s pretty unusual. But The reason for that is because we’re in a B2B space, and the people that watch our content, they run businesses, they work in businesses, they buy products and services from marketing tools, marketing companies, marketing service providers. There’s a lot of value in terms of getting in front of that audience to these providers. One customer from buying some of these services can be worth the cost of the sponsorship alone.

If they’re getting in front of 10, 15,000 people a week, that’s pretty good. Look, I’m not going to lie, the fact that we had the Authority Hacker brand behind it to begin with, and we’ve been working in the industry for a while. We had a bit of an email list as well, that obviously helps. But I still think we could have gotten here in the first six months had we not had that. And that’s not really something you can say at the moment, at least, if you’re running an affiliate website or something. The time to buy figures is usually much higher than that unless you have a serious investment behind you.

Yeah, that’s the thing. I think it’s all these channels are evening out eventually. Seo was significantly better for a long time, and that’s why we focused a lot of energy on it. It made sense. Now it’s not so hard to actually grow on these things. And sponsorship is something that not a lot of people in our corner of the internet have been talking about because it’s a little bit more hands-on. You need to talk to people. It’s a bit more work, but it’s growing so much. And brands love sponsoring content, especially YouTube, because they usually don’t do it well.

Yeah. And look, a lot of the brands that are talking to us, and that’s one thing as well, they will find you. Most of the sponsorship deals that we’ve gotten for this and for the podcast, they have come to us rather than us having to reach out to them. I think we did a little campaign at the start when we first did sponsorship on the podcast, and it was a case of we reached out to five or six tools and services that we used and we paid for, and we were like, Hey, do you want to sponsor us? And all of them said yes. So there’s a huge pent-up demand for this. Brands I’m speaking to at the moment, they have more budget than they’re able to spend because there’s not enough channels and not enough creators that are offering inventory, basically.

That’s why I think there’s a huge opportunity. I Like I said, lots of people, they want to run a content business, they want to make content, and they want to get paid for making content. Adsense, probably not it. It’s a complementary revenue on YouTube, but it’s not it. But the sponsorship, I think you can. You can make a content business. You could pick a niche. We have some niches we want to talk about later, but you could make real estate news, you can make anything. You could make Polo news or something that has lots of money, for example. I think you do quite well. It’s Yeah, it’s potentially more viable than making an ads-based website at this point because of the sponsorship. Just you have to be a bit legit so that you can actually make content people want to watch because if they don’t watch it, you won’t get the sponsor.

But ultimately, the process of creating content, it’s not that far away from writing content. It’s just there’s a camera and you or someone else has to speak. You don’t even show your face. There’s plenty of examples of news or YouTube channels that just have other stuff going on on the screen, and they still are hugely successful. We’ll talk about those in just a second. But in terms of the other revenue for the channel, as you said, we’re about to turn on Ad Well, here’s the thing. You used to turn on AdSense to your channel. Now, Google will just show ads on your channel regardless of whether you opt in or not. So it’s really a case of, do you want them to give you the money or do you want them to keep it all?

So, yeah, Even how much we love Google these days, I think we’ll take some of the money.

For a channel our size, I think it’s projecting about 500 bucks a month or something. So it’s not nothing, but it’s not a huge, huge, huge deal. For us, though, The real long-term plan with this is to promote our own products and services. Having call to actions to a lead magnet, to maybe a course, to a product, to service, or we have this strategic partnership with marketing pros now. So you see the pinned comment is often a promo for them. So that is just another way in which we can derive value from this. I’m sure at some point in the future, you’ll start seeing lead magnet giveaways, these types of things in our content. We don’t want to detract away from the value too much and make this promo, promo, promo. But we’re in this to make money at the end of the day. It obviously makes sense to do that.

Yeah. A pin comment is a space that we decided to keep for ourselves, basically. We won’t be selling that or anything. It’s just like we will sell sponsorship, we’ll do all of that, but the pin comment is just going to be our CTA, potentially description links as well. If we mention something in the content of the video, we can put these little video links on top where people can click as well. That’s the three ways we want to put CTAs in the content. We’ll still be compatible with sponsorship. Nothing stops you from doing it all. But in It needs to be done tastefully. If it’s too heavy, your engagement’s cost will drop and then you will lose your reach basically. It’s as simple as that. And obviously, retargeting. It builds audiences for when we do product launches. So next time we do a product launch, if you’re watching the news video, there’s a good chance you will actually see our ads for the product. Retargeting is very easy to make money from. From our experience, we have a podcast where we talk about ads. Go and listen to that. Building quality audiences for us is a very big deal.

That’s how we generate a lot of our revenue. That’s pretty much the monetisation for this. If you combine all of it, it really makes sense financially. It’s quite easy to pay everyone and to get everything done in a qualitative way. Yeah, pretty excited. I’m pretty excited for YouTube as a content platform, really. I really see it as the new blog in the way it’s done.

It’s just a way where you can actually express yourself in a more of an open way rather than being constrained by what. You You can only say things in a certain way in order to rank with SEO. Whereas just making great content, I know it sounds cliché, but that is what works on YouTube because it’s very CTR-driven.

Yeah. Actually, And then we’re talking about that, let’s talk about the things we’ve learned as we went through. So we came in with some ideas of how we would do this. And we had okay success at the beginning. They deeped a bit, the success. And we did quite a bit of tweaks, and then now we’re higher than ever. And so we definitely have quite a bit of learnings that we made in a process. And that might not be obvious because they were not obvious to us when we started actually. So the first thing is to play around with the format. So when we started the channel, it was actually single news. So we’d cover a single story. I think one of the stories that didn’t do well, for example, was the story of like, Who Conners killing their own rankings with their redirect, for example. We just covered that story. There was nothing else. I think the problem is people’s attention span is not high enough. After three or four minutes on the same story, they get in bored and than leaving the video. Whereas when you jump onto another story, you renew interest, or they can skip to the next story instead of quitting the video.

That worked better in terms of doing roundups for us instead of a single story. It’s quite likely when you launch, you will not necessarily find a format that works for you. You should experiment with it, especially if you’re seeing stagnation or reduction in growth, then you should definitely do heavy changes. This was a pretty heavy change for us. The second one is packaging is the most important thing. So packaging means the title, the thumbnail, and then the first few minutes of retention, basically. That’s essentially like minute five plus of your video is a lot less important. Unless you’re already really good and you have already high retention, then essentially the point of importance goes deeper into the video. But early on, your goal is to get most people to click and watch long enough more than new industry average, basically. And then you’re going to grow. Simple as that. Because And that’s the most important takeaway is that engagement is the most important metric. Subscribers don’t matter. Nothing matters except of CTR, average watch time, and likes and comments, basically, and people engaging with your content. If you do that, you will get the subscribers.

That’s not a problem. That will sort everything out. Don’t focus on subs. That’s pretty much it. Engagement, engagement, engagement. And that’s why we talked about these tactics of emailing right after the video is. It’s really within minutes. So You get these highest quality views early on, and then you show high engagement to YouTube that then in turn gives you more exposure. And then when you get more exposure, you get more subscribers. Simple as that, and you’re going to grow. So most people When you’re on YouTube, focus on the wrong thing. Subscribers is more like a metric of you doing a good job at engagement. It’s just like a benchmark rather than a goal. It just shows how well you’re doing at this. That’s That’s one thing that people need to focus on. Let’s talk about where we’re going to take this next, what we can do next. We might not do everything.

So one thing that we’re really keen to do is have more than one format. So at the moment, we’ve got this three or four news stories in a video, and it’s very dependent on what’s happening in the news. But sometimes there’s lots of stuff happening, and sometimes there’s actually just not that much happening in the news. So we want to explore doing deeper dives into specific topics. So think of investigative journalism and really uncovering new news ourselves and going a little bit deeper explaining why things are happening and going behind the scenes of what a website or a business is doing online. So that’s like a… I think it’s quite interesting to explore topics in a deeper way in It’s not just interesting.

It fixes one of the main flaws of the channel, which is the fact that it spikes, but it doesn’t stay evergreen. Whereas if you do some deeper research, investigation, this has a much longer shelf life. As a result, we can use this to grow the channel and reach more people with the regular news videos. So that’s probably something we want to look at.

A good example of that, it’s not in video format, but Glen Allsop, he has a couple of really great pieces on the 13 companies that dominate Google search, and he updates that. He’s updated that piece a few times, but he did a tonne of work to do all the research and present that in a great way. I think we could cover different topics in that-We should talk to him, Same level of detail on this channel. I think it would do really well.

Yeah, we should talk to him. Maybe we could just present his stuff in video format and give him a shout out, actually. That’d be a win-win for everyone. But yeah, that’s one of the things. The second Another thing we could consider doing that we might do is a newsletter version of this. We collect more than the stories we cover to actually decide what we’re going to put, half the stories are thrown away, basically. They could be put in a newsletter. That would give us more sponsorship space. People could actually pay for sponsorships in the newsletter as well, which could justify that. Then having people’s emails is always a good idea given algorithm swings everywhere. Having a newsletter version of this is definitely I have in mind. And by extension, potentially have a news section on a torry hacker where we could potentially cover these stories early. Maybe there’s not the analysis in a news section. It’s just like, Oh, the story comes out, we cover it that day. There’s a short post about it and we just update it if there’s new things. I think in order to do that well, though, you need to be the one breaking the news.

At the moment, we’re not breaking… We haven’t broken any stories Other people have broken those stories and we’ve given it attention and given it some interesting analysis. So there’s a lot of value there. But I think in order to really go super viral, you need to be the source that everyone else is quoting.

To go big, you need to do that. But the thing is, autoriahacker. Com is actually already including Google News. We could make this a traffic source for us if we had a news-You You were talking like, there’s a good example.

A year ago, you bound that CNET. They had this author profile on the website and it was written by AI. And you tweeted about that and it went, it blew up. You’re on Euro news and on TV and stuff. And it got us a tonne of links, tonne of attention. If we could have stories like that regularly, then that would be amazing for the channel, for the business, for the Google News.

That would really improve the SEO. It would improve the whole site’s SEO, actually. That would drive the brand searches, that would create navigational queries, et cetera. That’s what Google is looking at.

The challenge with that is obviously you need people really all day, every day focused on that in order to find these stories. A good example of a business that does as well would be VPNmentor, and there’s a few other VPN sites.

Not sure they do it much anymore, but they used to.

They would hire a security researcher/ethical hacker to go and find vulnerabilities in company systems or where data had been leaked and all these types of things. Then they would release the story on VPNmentor. All the BBC and CNN, all the big publications would pick it up and they get tonnes of links. That was their link building strategy. And that’s the reason why those sites sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, at least one of them. So in order to, I’m not saying we can do exactly the same here, but in order to break news in the same way and find stuff that’s happening, we would need a team or more people who are dedicated to just doing that. I think there’s a level to get there. We’re not quite there yet, but it’s something I’d really, really like to do. I think it’d be super interesting.

It would have the whole business as well. Our SEO would be on steroids if we did that, I think. Yeah, it’s like you see how you start somewhere else and you end up back in SEO when you actually loop it back. And that’s what we were mentioning in the future of a 30 site. A podcast, actually, where it’s like eventually you can get these SEO benefits, but you take a big path around.

And this is not the time to be giving up on SEO. That’s not what we’re saying. Diversifying doesn’t mean just do different independent traffic sources. They all support each other. The sites and the companies that are doing well in search, they have presences on other platforms as well, and it all feeds into each Yeah, and that’s why you want to do that.

That drives your brand search and so on. Our brand search is a little bit up since we started the news channel, actually. Not a tonne, but a little bit. So hopefully that was driven by that. I can’t tell for sure. But now we’ve talked about ourselves, but I want to talk about what other niches you could do that in. So we mentioned a few before, but I just want to give people ideas here. So if they want to do something similar. I think you can steal the format and do it in several niches, actually. We wrote a few, but crypto is one, for example. There’s always token halving and outage and whatever quote from some big investor or some well who sold a lot of bitcoins or something. There’s lots of things to cover. And there’s a really strong community that loves this shit that you could build. And the affiliate offers and sponsorships pay a lot of money.

It doesn’t have to be crypto. More traditional personal finance as well. Think of how big Wall Street street bets has gotten the subreddit in the last couple of years. It’s in the news at the moment for Gamestop going up again. But there’s a huge, huge interest in these, not just meme stocks, but actual value investing and things like that as well. And there’s always news around that. Ai, obviously huge. We’ve seen channels like Matt Wolf, who we were actually on his old podcast. I He was on his old podcast a couple of years ago, but he’s absolutely exploded. Was it 700K subscribers in the first year or something? And he just covers AI news and does some analysis on it, explains what that means, and breaks it down for people. It’s great.

Probably makes a lot of money as well. There’s lots of products you can promote there. You could do it around real estate as well. Real estate tight with financial. It’s a little bit tight with financial news. It’s interest rates and consumer interest, maybe some areas that are hot, countries that are hot, etc. But in general, people would probably pay a lot of money for sponsoring in real estate as well. So high value niche, strong community.

Yeah. Another good example would be, you wouldn’t probably think of this, but The Law. There’s a great channel called Legal Eagle. And whenever there’s a story happens in the news, someone gets arrested or someone’s investigating, someone’s in court, then they do a video about it, but it’s a team of lawyers who are doing the presentation, and it’s explaining, Okay, so what does this mean? Are they likely to get sentenced under this stature? Or which laws have they broken? There’s some analysis in there on what it means. I’m not a lawyer. I have no interest in it, but it’s just a really interesting channel to learn, Oh, is this person, how long are they likely to go to jail for? And this type of stuff. I would check that one out. It’s quite interesting, and they do really well as well.

3.2 million subscribers. So yeah, they’re doing quite well.

Exactly. And it’s not just lawyers who are following that. That’s a really broad appeal, that channel. Yeah. The Just the actual news, like what’s going on in the world in politics, for example, is another area you could go into. Tldr News in the UK, great example of a channel. Our thumbnails are quite inspired by by what they’ve done there and the approach they’ve taken. It’s very interesting as well.

I would argue for sponsors, it’s a bit less good to be general. I would prefer to be niche and somewhere where people spend money. Just because you can be big.

It’s an interesting one. So legal, legal, they do sponsorship for meal delivery services and just very broad B2C stuff.

The mainstream now.

Yeah. Tldr News is interesting. They still do VPN and it is quite B2C. Yeah, but then you start to get into the fact it’s not just people watch teenagers watching prank videos. It’s educated people who are interested in intellectual stimulation. And so legal, legal, TLDR news, real-life lores, another example. It’s like geo-politics from a broader sense. And they have 40-minute videos, so it’s a little bit different, but it’s all It’s all very topical. And they’re able to promote or they’re able to command much higher sponsorship rates because the audience that they have is… They have a lot of money and they spend a lot of money online.

Yeah, it’s That’s the thing. It’s like you’re better going to smart rich people. You make more money, basically. There’s lots of examples of other channels, right? There’s tech links. Let’s not go through all of them. There’s quite a lot.

There’s a couple of examples I really want to talk about, though. Djs aviation. This is an Australian guy, and he basically releases information about airlines. So when a new airline has a new paint colour or a new type of seat or a new computer system, he releases a five-minute video of it. He has 354,000 subscribers just doing this. It’s the exact same format as we’re doing, news format, and it does super well. There’s a guy who runs a channel called AuspExTactic. He releases news about miniature war gaming, so like Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, that stuff. Whenever there’s a new balance set or a new model released, he has a video about that. And again, hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Joey Swal, millions of subscribers, in his entire channel, is whenever there’s some fitness influencer who releases some video criticising someone in the gym for doing something wrong, he basically critiques why they’re being an asshole and they’re not a nice person and that he releases information about that.

Okay, that’s not even news anymore. That’s React.

It’s React, but at the same time, it’s like, here’s what’s topical. It’s all over social media and people are talking about that one thing that happens, and he creates this gym-positivity following based around it.

Okay. But It shows it’s very different from SEO in terms of niche picking. It shows you can pick one format and build your entire channel around that one format as well. And there are people who are going to pay big bucks to be in front of your audience from sponsorship, not really from AdSense. Overall, it shows that you can apply this to many, many niches. It’s not just an online marketing thing. I would argue our niche is not the best for this, actually. I would argue it’s okay because we have our own stuff to sell, but if we didn’t, I would probably go somewhere else and potentially get much more reach. If we made the same channel in AI, I think we could be getting 100,000 views on our videos. That tells me that there’s definitely opportunities. I would I would essentially be more excited to do that than to start a content site at this point. Personally, I find it more fun as well, more freeing in what I want to say, etc. Anyway, let’s just sum this up a little bit. Who should do this? Who should build a format YouTube channel We’ve talked about this.

Who’s going to benefit from this?

I think really anyone that wants to get into YouTube but doesn’t want to become a YouTuber. That’s really the entire goal of this channel, and that’s why we built it in this way. I think it’s a good blueprint to do that without having to commit your entire life. Even if you don’t want to have your face on the camera, that’s also fine. You can achieve that as well.

I also I think it’s really quite interesting for the people who want to do content. You want to be just a content creator. You don’t want to run the business side of things. You don’t want to sell something. You will make less money, but you can live off sponsorship and AdSense, basically, and maybe some offers here and there, and create content in a much freer way than you would for Google. You can actually make interesting stuff. You can build a real community, add value, and people will find you all the networks, etc, much more than they will from your blog, actually, because of the level of engagement you get from doing these videos. If you want to be just a content creator, it’s a pretty cool place to start, and you could potentially run multiple channels like that and have a decent content business, a little bit like people used to run websites, pure content website, which is definitely a much more challenging model to run than this at this point. I think also I would definitely do that if you’re in a news-heavy niche, as I said. Some hobbies probably don’t have enough news to cover.

I If you’re in sports, there’s always tournaments, et cetera, you could cover things like that, it’s fine. But as I said, if you’re in woodworking, for example, I guess there is this… No, that doesn’t even work. I was going to say the Lumberjack competitions and stuff, but I don’t know if it works.

But I think there are certainly some niches where it’s harder. But those examples, the miniature war gaming one and the airline seats one. You could react as well, right? There’s so many. I think things you can talk about.

Yeah. That’s the people who should do that. This allows you to take advantage of YouTube and it’s massive rich. It’s still the second search engine in the world, far beyond Bing, far beyond Pinterest, far beyond Facebook or anything. That’s where people find information. And there’s a very, very strong discovery engine, which is really cool. Unlike Google, people actually discover new creators all the time and get attached to them because of the quality of content, which is nice and refreshing coming from a pure SEO. And you can do that without spending too much time, basically. The thing is, don’t be afraid about what we said about having a team, etc. You could hire freelancers to do that in a more cost-efficient way to get started or just to get more profit margins. We have a team that we have hired full-time, but you could hire someone from Upwork or even marketing pros who we work with. You could hire freelancers that just work a set amount of hours on your script, on your video editing, on your social media if you want them to help you with the promotion and so on. Essentially run this very similarly to how a lot of people run content websites.

So it’s like, really the only difference here is there’s a camera and the video editing side of things.

The rest is very similar skillset. If you’ve been creating content for a blog at high level, then you already know how to do 90% of this. And the camera element of it, it seems scary at first, but it’s very easy to… You get used to it quite quickly, I would say. And there’s lots of great information about even if you want to do all of it yourself, like video editing, you can teach everything you need to know. You can learn about video editing on YouTube for free. Yeah.

So all you can just hire help at the beginning. I really think some people like… It takes a bit of time. You But you could learn how to do good enough video editing in a week, I think.

That’s pretty much-Especially if you’re not doing the face video and you’re doing more like showing some slides or something on screen.

Yeah, it’s like a week you can learn that. It’s really not the end of the world. And it’s like video editing is like if you’re a content creator, it’s just part of this skillset at this point, like a little bit at least. 

So, yeah, that’s pretty much it. We hope you enjoy us sharing our own experience starting a experience starting a YouTube channel, making it work, and the behind the scenes and how we do things. I hope that inspired some people. If you enjoyed it, don’t forget to subscribe, like, check the link in the pinned comment as well. Check our sponsor. And thanks everyone for watching, and we’ll see you in the next one. 

Bye-bye. Bye.