How To Build A YouTube Shorts Empire With Automation

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We talk with Devin Sinath about building a scalable YouTube Shorts business using automation, niche research, and analytics that most creators ignore. We dig into proof, pitfalls like demonetization and reuse policies, and the retention tactics that can turn a flat channel into explosive growth. 
• running a portfolio of Shorts channels for diversification 
• why low Shorts RPM can still work at scale 
• handling skepticism by showing real analytics and payouts 
• avoiding account structure mistakes with emails and manager access 
• niches that perform well for Shorts commentary and rankings 
• starting with $0 using sourcing plus simple editing 
• reinvesting early AdSense into editors to automate production 
• making reused clips more transformative with commentary and voice 
• targeting swipe ratio and understanding total addressable market 
• designing “emotional retention” to reduce drop-offs 
• setting realistic expectations based on implementation and consistency 
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Transcript

Big Numbers And Quick Hook

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We're running around 40 automated channels right now. We're getting around 1.5 to 2 billion views a month. And last month we generated $120,000 in AdSense revenue. A week ago, he was at $7 million for the hour. Now he's at $71 million. You go from $7 to $70 million in a week. And they only have 80,000 subscribers, which is even crazier. That first $103,000 payout he got, he actually just bought a supercar. Same day. And then he posted this. He was like, best scam ever. Thanks so much, Devin.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Hey, welcome back to the only podcast that's here to help you make money, even if you don't do long form content. I'm Travis, and I'm here every single week to bring you some of the coolest and hottest tips on YouTube. And today I got Devin Sinath here to help us with that. Devin, how are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 0:39

I'm doing great, man. How about you, Travis?

SPEAKER_01 0:41

I am super excited to dig in. And if you're new here, this is what we do every week. I talk to different creators and uh people that in the industry that are helping make you a better creator and hopefully change your channel into a business. And if you're listening to the audio only podcast, there'll be links in the description and in the show notes to help you find out more. All right, Devin. First of all, who the heck are you? What do you do? Let's start into that, and then we'll get more into some of the things you do.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Yeah, bro. So, I mean, let's get into it. So, yeah, my name is Devin Sinath. Um, I'm currently running a lot of YouTube short channels. We have a YouTube short empire. We're running around 40 automated channels right now. Um, that basically we have equity in. We're um basically scaling on masks. We're getting around 1.5 to 2 billion views a month right now. And last month we generated $120,000 in AdSense revenue just across the personal channels that we're running right now. And then we're also helping a lot of people scale as well. We have lots of people that we work with that we help bring up, and you know, I can't wait to get into all that.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

That's amazing. How did you get started? What were you doing before all this? Like, what was Devin doing just a couple years

From Dropshipping To Shorts Wins

SPEAKER_01 1:39

ago?

SPEAKER_00 1:39

So, I mean, a couple years ago, I was doing drop shipping. Um, and I basically was just taking products from China and trying to market it. Um, and yeah, I mean, that's the main thing I was doing before that. Like, I actually went through a YouTube era, then dropshipping, then back to YouTube. I was like, this is my bread and butter.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Was dropshipping uh like something that was helping you uh sustain yourself, or was it were you was it kind of a failed experiment? How was that?

SPEAKER_00 2:01

So so I'm 20 years old, so I really didn't need to sustain myself like a couple years ago because I was living with my parents at the time. Um, but I was making good money. I had my best month was a $20,000 month in revenue, but that was only around 7,000-ish in profit because you know dropshipping margins are insanely low.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Um, so how did you come to learn all the things you're now kind of teaching on YouTube Shorts? Because uh YouTube Shorts is something that a lot of people want to crack. Uh, there's a lot of views in shorts, but the the monetization part's kind of real fuzzy. You hear people just like you talking about all this money that can be made, but we also know that CPMs and stuff are are kind of low because of what you shorts are. How did you learn about this stuff? What what what uh was it someone you saw or what happened?

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Yeah, this is a really great story. I love sharing this all the time. So, first thing, a lot of people think that you know shorts is not a good revenue stream because everyone always talks about long form. YouTube is a long form video platform, and people don't think you know, shorts is not really a good way to make money, like RPMs or like they see like 40 cents or even 30 cents, and they're like, oh my gosh, like I'm not touching that, right? Um, originally when I actually got into it, I actually came from drop shipping when I was trying to make money. Um, and then I ended up making money from shorts. So the story was I rented this product, it was like a little Kia truck that you could like remote control. And um, I I grew that on Instagram and I was just trying to get more you know sales on my drop shipping store. So around a couple of years ago, I started posting these drop shipping videos, like the shorts, on some of my short form. I ended up getting that channel monetized and ended up growing to like $7,000 in like the next month. So I ended up making $7,000 from the YouTube, and then I had the drop shipping that was ultimately, I was like, wait, I don't need to do anything with this, and then I could just make more money from the YouTube. And then I got into it more. I started scaling more channels, and then you know, I I really like I was watching a lot of Mr. Beast back then. I was really trying to just understand how can I maximize um you know the most amount of money here. Um, and then eventually I started scaling into more channels, so I got into ranking and then ranking commentary, and then I got into you know biker commentary, I got into Roblox animation, I had Roblox channels, and we'll show it all in uh later, and I'll show you guys all the channels and stuff. Um, but you know, when I was originally starting, I really didn't think I'd be able to make this much money, but shorts can bring in so much revenue. And you know, the the warrior that like RPMs are low, well, you end up getting a you know billion views. The RPM really doesn't make that much of a difference compared to to long form. And one last thing, I mean, like shorts help long form channels grow, which is something I really want to get into later.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Yeah.

Monetization Reality And Skepticism

SPEAKER_01 4:28

So I, you know, there's a lot of people that have uh that you see online, especially on Twitter if you're on Twitter or X, that say, you know, I have these shorts channels are making all this money, and you never really know if like it's a real thing. It always seems cool. A lot of people think it's engagement bait. And I know you've been uh people have attacked you and said, hey, you know, it's fake. He's showing stuff that isn't real. Uh and one of the things we talked about before we went live is like, I want to see the real numbers. And you have said, in no uncertain terms, okay, I'm gonna show you. So talk to us about what that was like when someone came at you and then uh what the reality is of all that.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Well, I've been attacked for like things before. I mean, it's it's pretty normal. I mean, like when you see someone, you know, doing really well in anything, you're gonna be, of course, suspicious. Um, the main thing that people even attacked me for in the first place is because someone basically said, Hey, you're a viewer of this channel and you're showing this on your channel. That doesn't make any sense. So let's get into that, right? Right now, you know, my business model, when I'm scaling, I basically have a lot of YouTube shorts. I have seven AdSense accounts. If you don't know what an AdSense account is, you basically you need an AdSense account to get paid on YouTube. If you have multiple AdSense accounts, YouTube will actually terminate all of them, right? If they detect that, they terminate all of them. Same thing for channels as well, right? If you have one channel underneath the same email, if you start running multiple channels underneath the email, one gets terminated. Guess what? All your channels are gone. So my way to kind of combat this is I actually, anytime I make a new channel, I basically make underneath a new email. And then on Google, you can only have up to 10 accounts on that Google account, right? So if you add another one, it actually signs you out of one or signs you out of all of them. So what I did is after making all these email accounts, I made myself a manager or viewer or editor underneath these channels, underneath one email. That way I can manage everything. And that's where the suspicion kind of came from in the first

Proof With Explosive Channel Growth

SPEAKER_00 6:08

place. And here's a channel right now that we've been working with for the past like year or so. Um, really, you can kind of see, actually, it's right around like eight months or so, I've been working with him. And what's crazy is I actually met up with this guy yesterday. I did an IRL interview with this guy yesterday. It was really fun. Um, his name is Rith. He has a pretty big shorts channel, and actually, there's a picture of me and him yesterday. Uh, it was really fun meeting up with him. But um, you know, one thing that kind of happens is when people say, Hey, you don't really know what you're talking about with shorts. Well, I want to kind of show you the shorts growth for this channel, and then I'm gonna go through more and more and more and show you everything. So, for this channel here, you can kind of see this was actually a long form channel. A lot of you guys run long form channels. Long form is kind of your thing where you're trying to scale, you're trying to build a personal brand or even faceless long form. And you can see here he was making very good money. You know, this is $200,000 in long form the past year. It's really good, right? He has five five million or four million subs when he joined. Um, I started working with him. And as he started joining and scaling, basically we started scaling up his shorts. So I want to show you guys kind of the shorts growth here. Um and show you guys what kind of the growth can look like when you're scaling short from content. So here's a shorts. This is 1.5 million views in the past around five months or so. And this is basically someone who was not doing shorts at all to joining and then starting scaling up shorts like crazy. And at some point during this, we were making a consistent four or five thousand dollars a day. Now we're down to like two thousand, one thousand dollars a day. And this is just one example. I have so many examples of this on my channel. For example, like this is another guy. I mean, this is a channel that we actually helped scale together. And um, I could even show you this. This channel actually only started a couple months ago, like around like six months ago as well. This is forty thousand dollars, and um really a lot of people kind of get worried and think like, okay, well, shorts is not sustainable. Like, this is an only shorts-based channel, right? And you can go to revenue here, I can show you. There's not a long form video on this, it's all shorts. You can see that six cent RPM that people kind of get scared about. This is forty thousand dollars in around like eight months, you know, and this is completely automated. You know, we have editors in place who edit these videos and do it all for us as well. Here's another example, right? This is a channel that you know we actually only started working with around six weeks ago now, and you can kind of see they were at a pretty big dip over here as well. And um, you can kind of see the just kind of flatline a little pickup here, it was flat, and then we have a huge push. Um, yesterday, this channel had a 71 million 48 hour mark. It was insane. And um, here I'll actually show you this as well.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Actually, I mean, right now they're at a 57 million view 48 hour mark, which is insane to think about. And they only have 80,000 subscribers, which is even crazier.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Yeah, you don't need a lot of subs. Like, hey, this is the guy right here. I mean, like, he basically uh a week ago he was at 7 million 40 hour mark and now he's at 71 million. Um uh a lot of people also think as well, it's another misconception people have that like you know, uh long form takes a little bit longer to scale because you need to build up that audience and takes a little bit longer. With shorts, it's just instant. You know what to do? You go from seven to seventy million in a week, you know. You can see this giant jump. I mean, this is like you know, went from like a dollar to four hundred dollars a day, and then four hundred to almost four thousand dollars in a day. And this is like in the span of one week.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Yeah, and I'm looking if for those listening to audio only podcasts, I'm looking at a time scale of like a month and a half where nothing really was happening, and then all of a sudden uh there's millions, tens of millions of views and thousands of dollars uh per day. And this is someone that you've helped. Is that what is that who this is?

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Right. This is this is uh one of my students. He actually joined like a week ago. Oh no, wait, he joined up, he joined a month and a half ago. I'm sorry. Yeah, he joined a month and a half ago. His name is Marcus, he's goaded guy. Um, yeah, but I mean, like, you know, for example, you'll have channels like this as well. I mean, like, you can have again explosive growth with YouTube. Um, this is a channel that we actually we own this channel, um, and we can see this explosive growth here. I mean, we were getting like literally no views, instant explosion, and then it dropped back down because um the channel did get demonetized, and then we ended up monetizing it back. And it's it's making some money now, you know, but you can kind of see how explosive YouTube can be.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Yeah, I actually wanted to ask you about that.

Demonetization Risks And Niche Choices

SPEAKER_01 10:20

So, um, because I when I had 10 download on, this has happened to him a couple times or the people he's known, where some of these channels get demonetized. What type of content, generally speaking, are you guys doing, and how often does it get demonetized?

SPEAKER_00 10:31

So um typically I'm doing ranking content or clipping of people's content, doing ranking commentary. We do run a lot of Roblox channels, Minecraft channels as well. Uh, we run Minecraft meme commentary, like all of those niches I just listed are golden niches to get into right now. Um, as for demonetization, it kind of goes a little bit all over the place because sometimes you'll get randomly demonetized for like reuse, you know, the reuse and inauthentic swept that like went around recently. But you know, we have YouTube reps in place. So I have a personal YouTube rep that kind of manages my channels, and then in that, um, because we have him on our team, a lot of our channels don't get demonetized. Now, there's not really a criteria of like if you do this, you'll get demonetized because YouTube sometimes messes up. And I realized this a couple years ago because um I used to actually run all my stuff underneath one AdSense account and one email, and then I had like five accounts, all of them got demonetized. And I went back into it um and I was like, okay, I need to do this a different way, which is what happened with the viewer and manager, how I run all these underneath multiple channels now or multiple emails. The main reason why I have so many channels in the first place is one, because my lifetime goal is to get to one trillion views. So short form content on mass scale is gonna help me get there. I'm like 31 billion right now, but also revenue diversity, right? So, like if one channel gets demonetized, well, good thing I have 39 other channels that's bringing in revenue, you know?

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Well, and I also noticed, and this is actually the same thing happened to Tim Daniloff, where once that thing kind of got demonetized, it really hasn't recovered since. Is that something you've noticed, or at least it doesn't seem like it has?

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Honestly, so I I work with a lot of channels. We get a lot of data sets here. Um, this the reason why this one hasn't picked back up is because just the overall niche has kind of died down. It's very saturated now. If you have a channel that is doing well um and then it gets demonetized, if you keep uploading on it and then it gets remonetized back, it'll get pushed back up again. That's usually not an issue. Um, demonetization does not mean like the channel's just done.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

I'm curious because uh we've we've actually had uh Renee Ritchie from YouTube on and talked a little bit about uh monetization versus views. And um, whenever anyone asks, hey, you know, do monetized views get more views? What's been your experience? Obviously, YouTube says that's not they're not uh the same, they're not connected. What has been your experience? Do they seem to be connected? Like, do your channels before they get monetized seem to get more views after they're monetized, or is it about the same?

SPEAKER_00 12:50

I think about everything from a business perspective here. So um when I'm doing all this, I run myself like a business. I don't think like a YouTuber, right? A lot of these guys who are making money on YouTube, they think like I'm gonna upload videos and then hopefully it gets views. But like if you think about it, how is YouTube actually making money in the first place, right? So we have Google advertisers who are spending money on Google for ad placements, and then the ad placements get shown on our videos or the short forms um feed, and then we get paid a percentage of that. So if YouTube is making money from our videos, then they'll push out our videos further, right? Because at the end of the day, YouTube is not just a social media platform, they're a business, right? YouTube wants to make money. Um, so I haven't really seen anything about like, oh, okay, I wasn't getting that much views, and then like I was really hard to get monetized or something, and then when I got monetized, it instantly just started picking back up. Nah, like um, if you just make really, really good content, you increase your trust score, um, you know, you're getting really good push, you're in a really golden niche, and um, you're doing all those things, your views will go up instantly. Like, I've had channels before that like we upload and it just goes first video, 10 million views. You know, that has happened before.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

And how are you picking these niches in a way that uh not guarantees, but really stacks the deck in your favor?

SPEAKER_00 14:01

So I usually do my niche research. Well, I have a niche research team now, but before when I was kind of picking everything, I would honestly just look at competitors and see what they were doing, right? Um, the market is your best teacher. If you look at what other people are doing and you have the skill to replicate it, it's gonna be so easy for you to scale as well. Like, I don't think of original ideas, man. I I look at other people's videos or see other niches that are doing well. I see a channel that got like 400 million views this month. I look at it, I break it down, I'm like, okay, why are they getting these views? Is there anyone else in their niche? Nope, they're number one, why are they number one? Okay, they're doing ranking videos and they're only doing it on animals. Well, all their outlier videos for animals are parent videos. Let me make a ranking parrot channel, and then I make that channel and then it starts picking up.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

I always talk about in these episodes that um YouTube is about also, especially for people who want to do this full time, is about having a business. And you have to have, even if you're just a creator and don't think about those things, that at some point you have to come to the point where you have to be a business person. And I I like the idea of diversification in this way because it might be that uh you might be a long-form uh content creator, like myself. I consider myself a long-form content creator that wants to do more interesting long-form stuff, but maybe it takes money or or whatever, or maybe you have a full-time job that takes so much time you can't get around to it. What if you could subsidize your passion project with something that just makes money by changing your mindset just a little bit and doing something like this? And this sounds to me like something that would allow content creators to do that. So let me ask the reality of a scenario.

Zero Budget Workflow Then Automation

SPEAKER_01 15:32

If someone um really wants to do this and they like, listen, I'm just gonna really put everything I have into this, what do they need to start off with? And like, how much does this cost to get started? Because there's uh inevitably something that costs something, like, what is the reality of a stuff of someone starting into this?

SPEAKER_00 15:47

Reality of someone starting is zero. You don't need money to really start any of this. You just need to build the skills. And if you have the skill of being able to make good videos, understand the sourcing behind it, understanding how to edit those videos, you're going to get views and make money. I would say the number one reason why most people are not able to do this is because they're misguided, right? They don't know the right direction of what information they need to consume in order to actually implement it, or they have the info and they're just literally not implementing it. Like maybe they don't have time, maybe they're working eight hours a day, they get home, they have a family to take care of, right? Like, oh, I don't have time to make it or make these videos. So I would say it takes zero dollars to start, but if you have the skill set, it's it's very easy to scale. And we can get into the skills you need in a second.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Let's do it. Let's let's get right into it. Why wait? Let's get right into it.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

All right, this is a channel right now that's making around $4,000 to $5,000 a month. This is like the average salary for an American right now. That's amazing. All right, so this channel is completely automated, but it wasn't automated when we started it, right? Um, originally when um this channel was you know really starting to scale, it was really just going on YouTube, finding compilations of like, for example, you know, uh this channel is an anime channel, right? It's a one-piece channel, you know, one piece, um, Luffy, all of that. So basically we went in, we found compilations of like, you know, funniest one piece um compilations. We take individual clips from those and add captions to it, and that's it. That's all that's in this video, right? And maybe we'll add some comments here, here, and there for these videos. And we just started uploading it. And you can see here the growth was a little bit slow in the beginning, and we've been running this channel for a little while now, you know. We started this channel up. I mean, like, it started off pretty slow, and you can see every couple of months we have a bigger spike. Um, and I would say, because a lot of people wonder about this, like, how much time does it take to do this? Right? Because like if I'm working eight hours a day, it's 40 hours a week, you know, I'm doing a couple things extra, maybe it's an a couple hours. How much time do you have? So I always do this. I always usually break down what I'm doing throughout the day. So like I break down how much I'm sleeping, how much I'm working, and I try to find time in between. I think this takes around an hour and a half to two hours a day max to be able to do this. And what's great about this business model is it's free to start because you know you source videos for free, you edit for free on Cap Cut or something like that, and then you just upload the video, right? After you get monetized, let's say you make like even a thousand dollars, right? You invest back into editors, you just saved yourself time, right? You saved yourself time. Now you have the time to make a second channel, a third, and eventually you start making enough money to you know quit your job. And I'll tell you right now, the cost for this channel is around like a thousand two hundred and fifty dollars a month right now. So like this is just a thousand profit, yeah. Right, like three thousand pure profit. Yeah, and um, you know, I I think a lot of people, if they just had the information, they'd be able to do it, you know. And like the main stuff you need to understand is like, well, uh, what niche do you pick, right? So again, look at what niches are doing well on YouTube. I the best way, best teacher guys, again, is the market. Go on YouTube and start scrolling. You see a video has a hundred million views, click on their channels, see what they're uploading, right? If they're making videos that's getting, you know, 20, 30, 100 million, and then two million back to 20 million, like that's a guy to look at, right? So look at the stuff, try to like break it down, like, okay, what are they doing? Okay, they're doing ranking videos. Oh, they're doing ranking videos of creative sports moments in the World Cup this year. That's why they're exploding so much right now. All right, let me look at these stuff. Where are they sourcing it? You look at the little World Cup compilation, you find a World Cup compilation, and you're like, okay, what are they doing here? They're adding captions and they're just putting numbers next to it and sorting them. Huh, that's that's not that bad. I I could do that, right? You don't you download it, the uh you know, download the video on like cobalt that tools or YouTube video download or something, chop it up in a Cap Cut and upload it. And then bang, you just made your first video.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

So what what uh what are the times where you get hit by like copyright claims or anything? Because like obviously some of the stuff is copyrighted content, uh, you know, especially like uh One Piece and stuff. How how do you navigate that?

SPEAKER_00 19:46

So I personally work with a YouTube rep now. Um so like my YouTube rep is able to kind of manage a lot of the stuff for me, and he manages like every single channel I work with for my students and stuff as well. Like they manage everything. But before, when I didn't have a YouTube rep, it was just about making it reformative, right? So the best way to make reformative content on YouTube, because this it's such an ambiguous word. Like, what do you mean reformative, right? Right now, YouTube's moving in the direction toward pillars of people, right? They want personal personality, right? So if they think of One Piece on YouTube, I want to think of like, you know, uh Joe Schmoe's One Piece channel, right? Like I want to think of this guy. So when you think of One Piece on YouTube, you go to this person. So right now, YouTube's moving towards personality. So the best way to be reformative is add some type of commentary. And you can do AI commentary, but it has to be 11 labs version three with emotion inflections. If you do this, the this the stale voice, like Adam and version two 11 labs, it's not gonna do well. If you don't know what 11 labs is, it's an AI, um, it's an it's an AI voiceover basically. You type words in it and it'll spit out basically like an AI version of uh it sounds pretty human, but you need to use version three because of emotions, right? And I want to get into this a little bit as well, is like on YouTube shorts, emotions is basically key for scaling. If you understand how to use emotions to your advantage, you can basically master retention because it's not like long-term where it's like click-through rate and then um average view duration, retention. That's like the main metrics you need. But like for shorts, it's completely different. You need to focus on swipe ratio, link to video, retention, um, look at your new viewer, casual viewer ratios, all of these things. And I can show you some analytics in a second and we can break it down.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

That's one of the things is like a lot of people don't understand how important the swipe uh wave versus swipe stay uh analytic is. I would love to like pull one of those up so we can see. And again, if you're listening to audio only podcast, you probably want to jump over to the YouTube channel to watch this because this is uh we're looking at actual information that would be helpful. Let's take a look.

Swipe Ratio TAM And Key Metrics

SPEAKER_00 21:44

The first thing you guys need to understand is typically when you're looking for a swipe ratio, you need to be aiming for above 80%. But this is only given on the niche you're in. For example, let's say you're in ranking the best animal videos. Let's say you have a ranking channel. Typically, you actually only need a Around a 76% swipe ratio. And the reason why is because this thing called TAM. So TAM stands for Total Adjustable Market, and there are different sizes for markets for different YouTube niches. For example, the World Cup right now, it's going on right now. It is a very vital topic. The TAM is pretty much the entire world, right? It's like a billion, two billion, three billion people are just super interested in this, right? But if we were like making, I don't know, knitting socks for Christmas, the TAM for that's probably like 30,000 in December. You know what I mean? Like the TAM for that's very small. So you need to understand the total addressable market for whatever niche you're in. If the TAM is really big, the swipe ratio does not need to be very high, right? Because YouTube's storming it to so many people. I don't know if you heard this recently, but um, Travis, the YouTube basically beat Netflix recently on viewer's viewership of TV, right? So actually, I'm gonna show you this crazy stat over here. Uh, if you look at our audience for this channel, this is a short form channel. Look at our TV audience. That's crazy. 40%.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

That's insane. It's the number one device type on a shorts only channel. Is that a shorts-only channel or is it about it's both?

SPEAKER_00 23:08

This is short and long, but we haven't uploaded a long form video in three months on this channel. Wow, that's insane.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

I have heard about this. Actually, it's funny because we talked about this in a previous episode, and I was talking with my coach at the time, and we were saying, shorts on TV doesn't make sense. And she was like, I watch all my shorts on TV. I'm like, Really? You really do that? Yeah, that's kind of strange. But okay, there it is.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

It's pretty alien to a lot of people because they're like, who watches shorts on TV? But there's a lot, and there's this new stat that YouTube released recently. Actually, I saw a bit IQ tweet about it. It was um this thing called views per viewer. And basically, um, YouTube basically has this formula behind like each device type. For example, like a computer is usually uh the views per viewer stands for VPV, is one. So, like, if a TV gets one view, YouTube may count that as three viewers, depending on the device type. Because what YouTube does is they look at like the IPs of whoever's in the household, they look at the Google account of whoever's watching, and then they look at like the time of whoever else is online. It's a little complicated for the formula, but basically, if you're getting more TV audiences, you get more views per viewer watching your video, which increases RPM, it increases the amount of reach you're getting, it increases how much money you make. So going back to those analytics about what you actually need to hit to start scaling, I'd say aim for around 80% swipe ratio. And the best way to do it if you're you know running any channel is typically it's visual plus audio pairing, right? So if you have something that's visually very appealing and matches up with what you're saying, and then the inflection control of whatever you're saying is very uh is matching the video, then it's gonna do very well. So let me give you an example, right? Let's say we were doing ranking the best funny cat moments, right? If I said these are the best ranking the funniest cat moments, or I said, these are the best ranking the funniest cat moments, it's like the second one's just gonna get people engaged, you know? Like if I was talking to you this entire time, like, all right, so you need to get your swipe ratio to 80%, it's like you're already bored, right? Like you need to um do inflection control, and typically you need to go high, low, high. So like go high, then go low, then go back up high. And this goes into kind of emotional pairing. Actually, can I pull up my Myro board? Can I break down some stuff for you?

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Sure,

Emotional Retention That Lifts Views

SPEAKER_01 25:17

yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

All right, let me pull it up real quick because it's really easy for me to explain this if I'm like drawing it on my um my MIRO board at the same time. Sure, yeah. Um, for all you audio listeners, really hop onto the YouTube videos so you guys can see this. Okay, so you guys know retention, right? Usually you have like a retention like this, it dips and then it kind of flatlines out if you have a pretty good retention. Now, there's a thing on YouTube called emotional retention, right? And emotional retention is basically understanding how to use emotions to your advantage to increase it. So let's say again I was doing ranking the best funniest cat moments, and I had let's say seven clips, right? And in that ranking the funniest cat moments. In the seven clips, let's say I had three videos that were funny and four videos that were kind of more a shock factor. If I sorted these clips by let's say like F for funny and then S for shock, and I go like FS, FS, FS, F, right? So funny shock, funny shock, funny shock, funny shock. What's gonna happen here is the journey the viewer is gonna go on through this one video, they're gonna go through emotion A and then emotion B and emotion A. So like it's gonna look like this on an emotional graph. And I'm a math guy, so this will make sense in a second. All right. Now, on a retention graph, what happens here is like it actually every single time we change emotion, we just keep it pretty straight. Now let's look at scenario B here, where we basically have the same emotions, but we do the first funny videos are four, and the last three videos are shock. Right? So if we have like funny, funny, funny for the first four videos, and then we had last three is shock. What happens here is on a motional graph, it'll basically look like this, where it goes like this, it's flat, and then we go to shock, and it's flat like this. And what happens here in this retention graph is every single time there's a funny video, and then another one after that, you just have dips every single time. And then you will see here from funny to shock, it actually flattens out. And then you have shock, shock, it dips more. So, what I'm trying to show you here is when you have emotions that are backed by another emotion. So let's say you have a video that goes from funny to sad to funny to happy, the emotional retention graph is straighter, which makes the actual retention graph straighter. If you just do if you just keep doing the funny videos, like for example, when I say ranking the best funniest cat moments, your idea may think like, okay, I'm gonna find only funny cat videos. But if the viewer is only feeling these emotions, the retention's gonna dip because they're you know, they they get bored of it. You know what I mean? And it's that's like one example of just understanding retention for shorts.

SPEAKER_01 27:46

That's crazy. I I mean as someone who has spent years coaching uh long form creators on retention acts, because it's one of my favorite things to talk about, never heard it like put in that way before. It's very interesting to think of it as the emotional journey, which makes sense because um you know, for better or worse, our attention spans are so much more uh smaller than they used to be. So you almost need that shock factor to wake you back up to know like, well, what's going on? Oh, wait, oh I just it's it's a different type of pattern interrupt in a weird way, like an emotional pattern interrupt.

SPEAKER_00 28:20

Exactly. And you know, going back to this channel here, you know, this was uh one of my students, Marcus, he joined like around six weeks ago. You can pretty much see how flat this was before. Um, and I basically had this one call with them, and it was just exactly what I just told you. It was like, listen, like your videos, you're kind of doing like rant a biking commentary, but it's kind of just pretty flat and emotional. If you include a person B of like you're doing biking commentary, but this cop is chasing him behind him, right? The emotion goes up, and then the cop runs away, and then the cop pulls on the other corner. It's like we went through three different emotions of like uh anxiety, relief, shock, back to anxiety, curiosity, what's gonna happen. And you can see, I mean, it's it's instant reflection on your videos, right? Like, this isn't a gradual thing where if you change this, you'll start slowly seeing results. Like, you change this and you'll go from like 7 million to 70 million 48 hour mark, you know.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

Yeah, and what's uh also interesting about this particular graph is um uh it says like he's gotten 77,000 subscribers the last 90 days, but he only has 79,000 subscribers, which means almost all of his subscribers have come in the last like month and a half, basically, just by looking at this, which is crazy.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 29:31

Yeah, but what is a realistic? So we see all these really amazing, like uh transformative stories, and it's definitely inspiring. And I I love that you're sharing all this. But what's like the reality of someone who just comes in? Like, what is a more realistic uh kind of uh performance you might see from someone who maybe doesn't get it? Like maybe they they understand what you're saying, they try to do it, but maybe their execution isn't A or S tier. So they're just throwing out stuff that is better than what they had been doing, but it's you know, it's not all the way at the top.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

So is this this person you're talking about? Is this someone who's already doing YouTube a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Yeah, they maybe do a little bit of YouTube and uh they you know they they hear this podcast, they're like, I want to try this. And maybe they've been doing YouTube for a couple years, so they're decent, but they're not like A tier storytellers, they're just trying to figure this out. What is a realistic kind of expectation for this?

SPEAKER_00 30:17

Okay, so I may this may be a little bit of pushback here, but your realistic expectation is the amount of work you put into it, right? For example, when I was studying YouTube and I was really trying to understand this, like I would listen to these podcasts and I would keep them on loop while I'm sleeping. Like I would be consuming content in every type of way. Um, realistically, you can get to probably four to six thousand dollars per month in your first month of scaling, you know, on a YouTube shorts if you have the exact path in order to do that, right? That's like a number I would say. But again, expectations, you know, let's say I said this four thousand dollar limit, right? You know, like you could also get to like, you know, 30,000 if you really know what you're doing. But let's say you're a beginner, let's say you just started YouTube, you're doing some long-form content, you're viewing some short form content, you're trying to make some videos, maybe you have a little personal brand, you're reacting to some stuff, right? If you follow the proven formats of other creators, you can easily get to $4,000 per month. For example, like this channel right here. This is a channel that's making $4,000 per month exactly right now, right? We upload a short, make a short every other day. Um, and it's just quality, right? This is a sports niche, right? So we're basically just uploading videos on uh commentary over American football. That's it. Right. And we're basically just explaining like you won't believe what happened when this linebacker did this, right? And he just blows through everyone, and then he just gets a touchdown. And we just find clips like that, we upload it, and you can easily get to $4,000 a month, but again, you need to know the knowledge. The knowledge is like the most important thing.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

Yeah, I think that that's the part that uh, and you know, I I love that you're willing to share this, and maybe that's the next question.

Realistic Goals Teaching And Takeaways

SPEAKER_01 31:57

What do you get out of sharing all this stuff? It almost is like um it's almost like, well, why are you giving away the secret sauce? Like what's the you know, what's the point there?

SPEAKER_00 32:06

I'll I'll tell you this, right? Right um last month I made around $260,000 in total, right? I made around $120 from YouTube. I have this uh other company that I'm running right now that I'm not I'm not gonna share on this podcast. And then I also have my program as well, right? Um, and right now my long-term goal isn't even revenue because I'm at like around after 70k revenue, I was pretty much set for like any type of responsibility or anything I would need. So right now my goal is actually getting 1 trillion lifetime views. So my strategy is basically any channel that I work with or contribute to, I add it to my lifetime goal, right? So like right now I'm at 31 billion views across the students since I started working with my program. I've added like an extra 15 billion views to my thing, right? Right, and like I I want to get to one trillion, so I'm just adding people to my portfolio and I'm teaching people, and also there's a lot of course sellers all over. I'm not gonna attack anyone or say any names, but there's lots of course sellers that sell stuff, and like I believe information should be given for free, which is why I don't actually sell a course, right? I don't sell any course or anything like that. Like every video you see on like any channel or anything that I upload, it's just it's just like everything I know. You know, I'm not like gatekeeping anything. The thing is, I can't really teach individual implementation. For example, like, you know, if you're a dad and you have two kids and you have a wife, right? Let's say you're working nine hours a day or something, like I can't break that down your specific scenario and what you need to do to get out of there in a video, which is why I have the program. Because, you know, I I I guess like I sell like my time technically, right? But there's there's no course, all this information, like like there's no gatekeeping here. There's not anything like you're you're missing from this. Like everything I've told you, it's already everything you can implement and start making money.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

Yeah. And that's something that uh people who have been around for a long time, uh, Eva uh Eve, uh um Daryl Eaves has done for many years where he's given away the same things, but also he's like massive in the creator space of like education. But he said a lot of the same things that he does in his more expensive courses, so it's not completely out of the realm of possibility to see that, oh yeah, you know, we're just and I think a lot of people will pay to have that personalization. It's like you can tell someone everything, and it could be exactly what you're gonna tell them in person, but sometimes it's worth paying to get that one-on-one, which we also have here at Vedic. We have one-on-one coaching. Um, and I get that. And there's that's also why when we talk about content creation, it's sometimes if you're looking to monetize in other ways besides AdSense, doing things like private courses or something, if you're in a subject matter expert, it people will actually pay for that sort of thing. So, in your particular instance, people are paying for essentially the time you've put in for your expertise and um kind of uh more of the blueprint of exactly like what you do and how you do it.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

Yeah, and it's like more implementation. Like, um, and I if I'm gonna be real real with you, Travis, my first video on like my personal Devin CNAT brand was actually a video like a cry for help. It was like a loneliness call because like I actually didn't have any friends when I was like starting my businesses and stuff, so like it was at a place of loneliness, and I was like making these videos just hoping like I hope someone who's also making $30,000 per month on YouTube sees this and reaches out to me. And it worked, but it didn't work that well. And then people started basically asking me, like, hey, like, can you teach me? And I actually used to teach people for free, you know, because like, oh yeah, sure, I got a lot of time, and then and then it became too much, which is why I started the program as well. But I mean, like, I gotta meet some amazing people. Like, um, you know, that Riff channel I just showed you and the guy I showed in the beginning, like he went from 15,000. Actually, let me share my screen. He went from 15,000 to 103,000 in a single month. Um, like you can see here, like the revenue growth was like 15,000, 20,000. And then he all we all got him a Spotify deal. So it was it was like $103,000. And I got to meet him up with him yesterday in Florida. I flew out, I got to meet him up, we spent the day together. And being able to do that with people and just being around people is just I value that so much, you know. Um, it's it's very fulfilling to me to be around people like this, even even being on a pod with you, man, and being able to talk to you. Like, I used to watch Vitat Q when I was a kid. Like, I I would watch these videos, I'll try to learn everything. And you know, connect those connections are just so important to me. Like, I can't express enough how much I value in my heart. Like it really means a lot to me.

SPEAKER_01 36:18

What's weird about this is um I when I've talked to other uh entrepreneurs in your age group that are like crushing it on YouTube, especially from a financial perspective, I do get that feeling from some of them that uh this shocks me. Like I'll go into it thinking I don't really know what to expect from this interview. We're gonna find out when dig in. And that some of them really feel like you do, like they really just want to give back. Is that something from your upbringing, or just because you made it, you're like, oh, it'd be cool if other people were doing that sort of thing too?

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Yeah, I I love that. So I used to watch a lot of Alex Schremozzi. He's like one of my heroes. Uh, so is uh Mr. Beast as well. And like I just see them always giving everything. And going a little bit deeper with my personal stuff, um, my mother, um, you know, she's been someone who gives so much. She actually runs a nonprofit homeless shelter in my local area, you know. I I used to work there. I used to work there in the homeless shelter. Um, you know, I'd see these people in these situations. I actually back then I used to teach, I used to try to teach them how to do YouTube too. I was trying to teach them, but but they they didn't really catch on to it. Um, it's a little bit harder for them. But, you know, like I've grown up in a kind of family that like always just gives and gives and gives. Like my mom, she's great. I love her so much and she gives so much. I've been around places where like I've seen poverty and stuff like that. I live, I live, I grew up in a very nice house, you know. Like I live in a nice apartment now, I have a nice car and everything, but like I've seen what those people have gone through. Uh, I wouldn't, I won't go as far to say like I do this just for those people, right? Because I I get some joy out of it too, helping these people out as well. You know, it's fun for me. Um, but you know, I a part of the upbringing, I definitely think my mom definitely contributed to that and watching Mr. Beast when I was younger as well.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

What do you think your five-year goal is then? Like what's what's what's the next thing for you personally?

SPEAKER_00 38:02

My goal in the next uh year is to get to a million dollars a month, uh, because I'm at around 260 right now. And then my five-year goal, I'm not sure, but I'm gonna be getting to 10 million uh um in revenue. Uh it's a whole process I have. I I'm gonna be at 10 million revenue uh in the next three years or so per month, but that's gonna be through other businesses I'm starting. Um, you know, I'm expanding above YouTube. What's great about shorts is it takes no money to start. You make a lot of money from it, and then you can invest in other things, you know, like you know, houses and stuff like that as well. Like um, you know, that guy again, Rith, I told you about um that first $103,000 payout he got, he actually just bought a supercar. Same day. Uh same day he got the payout. It was really funny. I let me show you this. Uh yeah, same day he um he got the payout, he bought this Z06 same day. And then he posted this. He was like, best scam ever. Thanks so much, and then and and then he was like, he posted it. It was really funny.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

Yeah. Um, yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, uh, I think I'm at a point in my life where I'm not buying a sports car, but uh yeah, but I get it. No, I get it. Like YOLO, I totally understand. Um what do you think are the things that uh you know, kind of smaller content creators or even beginning content creators right now are missing out on? Obviously, we've talked about some of the things every time, but like what are the things they're doing wrong right now that they're if they just change a couple of things, they could be changing their life.

SPEAKER_00 39:30

First thing is implementation, right? Don't just watch this podcast of this information that we just shared and then go watch another podcast. Like, stop right here, take the info and go figure out how you can implement it. Action is everything, right? Like you can know all the knowledge because like sometimes I have people in my program who join, and like I'm like, why are you here? You know everything. You just just do it, you know? So like action is so important. Um, also finding your why. There's this quote, I'm not sure who it's from, but it's like a man with a very strong why can overcome any how, right? So if you have a strong why you're doing this, for example, like if you're in a position where you don't want to be in financially, you want time, location, um, you know, financial freedom, figure out why that is. Dig deeper, right? Like that something happened when you're younger. Why, why do you need this? Right. And if you figure that out, getting to the how becomes a piece of cake, right? And then action becomes a lot easier. Um, yeah, I think that that's like that's that's the main thing I would say. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 40:27

I think, I think for me, the takeaway is that it is still possible to change your life with something as uh as quote easy as shorts. Now, of course, there is more to it. There's you do have to put the work in, but it's doable. So if you're listening to the audio only podcast, there'll be uh links in the show notes and in the YouTube video, we're gonna link out to Devin's channel and some other stuff that he has going on. Be interested to see if any of y'all take advantage. I think I'm gonna talk to Devin about a little secret project we might do. We'll see where that goes. I've been really curious as to what y'all think it is. So tell me in the comments, what do you think Travis and Devin are up to after the podcast? Uh it's gonna be crazy, guys. Leave us a comment below. And maybe we'll have a follow up in a couple months of whatever that is. And if you're new here, feel free to hit that subscribe button. And there'll be a link right here for another episode of someone I just talked to who's absolutely amazing. See y'all in the next one.