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Your weekly YouTube education in five minutes

Author

Johnathon Eva
October 14, 2024

What to Watch:

Asking Big YouTubers how to reach 1k subs - Marcus Jones

At only 18 minutes this video is jam-packed with tons of advice for newer creators. If you only have a limited amount of time throughout the week, this video really addresses some of the questions that new YouTubers have when joining the platform. You can either learn from your failures, or others’ failures. This video is perfect for learning from others. Marcus Jones by the way is a master at the craft in YouTube education.

Thumbnail Breakdown

This channel gets on average 375 views. Yet here is a video with 22k views for an outlier score of 68x. What is it about this thumbnail? Do people suddenly really care about clipper ships?
This package utilizes a couple of theories. First is the curiosity gap - What is a clipper ship? How did it revolutionize trade? Second is the familiar - Many people have seen a ship like that ‘pirates of the caribbean etc - but how does that relate to Clipper Ships. The text is also just long enough to capture attention, but not distracting. Last is the color. Look how contrasted this thumbnail is.

Creator - DailyDoseDocumentary

Don’t Do This!

Creator - DailyDoseDocumentary

This got 257 views total. Why? Let’s break it down:
The text on the thumbnail just repeats itself in the title. This doesn’t tell me why I should care. There is no contrast, it’s grayscale entirely, so it’s not as eye-catching. There are too many words on the thumbnail. Who knows if this wouln’t have seen the same results if the text said : Blitzkrieg. and then the title said the same thing. Maybe with a blue sky in the background?

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Creator’s we love

My So-Called Gen X Life:
I stumbled across this channel, and man am I glad I did. They are doing so many things right. If you’re trying to grow a YouTube channel, watch the first channel on their timeline, and their last, you won’t regret it. But let’s look at the numbers.

370k views

337k views

130k views

This Channel is doing so, so many things right. They have such a clearly defined audience. Gen X-ers who want to watch something nostalgic. Is your audience that clearly defined? This is also a showcase, that EVERYTHING must cater to your audience. This style of thumbnail may not cater as well to the self-help niche. But it’s more than that - the content itself is a cut above. Just check out the intros to those three videos if you don’t believe me.

Breaking YouTube News

If you have the time, it’s a great watch, but if you don’t YouTube thought leaders Colin and Samir talk about some of the upcoming changes that YouTube will face in the coming years.
Key takeaways:
1.) Plan for Long Form - Many YouTube viewers are switching from watching on mobile, to watching on the TV screen. This may make channels look more like series pages on Netflix.
How you can prepare:
Think about expanding your content to longer form if you aren’t already. Additionally you may want to start brainstorming ‘series based content’ as YouTube expands their homepage options.
2.) AI is ever increasing - Their conversation with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains that AI has an ever increasing role in the creator space. This means that as a tool, creators should learn how to adapt to using this kind of toolset.
How you can prepare:
As AI encroaches slowly into content, the need for something to be intrinsically human will increase as well. Think about your brand, and how bet you can implement that human element.

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