TubeTalk: Your YouTube How-To Guide
TubeTalk tackles the questions that real YouTubers are asking. Each week we discuss how to make money on YouTube, how to get your videos discovered, how to level up your gaming channel, or even how the latest YouTube update is going to impact you and your channel. If you've ever asked yourself, "How do I grow on YouTube?" or "Where can I learn how to turn my channel into a business?" you've come to the right podcast! TubeTalk is a vidIQ production. To learn more about how we help YouTube creators big and small, visit https://vidIQ.com
TubeTalk: Your YouTube How-To Guide
Stop Treating Shorts Like Trailers And Build Real Fans
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We challenge the idea that YouTube Shorts should act like ads for long-form videos and show why that mindset often leads to weak results. We break down what actually helps viewers move between formats, why even strong Shorts may not drive many clicks, and what you can control when the algorithm feels chaotic.
• shorts and long form as separate audiences with different intent
• why treating Shorts as promos backfires for most creators
• how the related videos button works and when to use it
• a real analytics example showing low Shorts to long clicks
• what a best-in-class creator does to unify Shorts and longs
• fast pacing, loop openings, and consistent branding signals
• Casey Neistat’s take on not understanding the algorithm
• Google Search Profiles as an SEO and reputation lever, plus risks
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Cold Open Why Shorts Don't Convert
SPEAKER_04This is literally the reason why you are making shorts, tons of shorts, to promote your long form videos and they're not getting views. It's not because you're not doing a good job making shorts, it's because your mindset is completely wrong. It's easy to make a short, it's hard to make a short that's very good consistently all the time. You can't waste anyone's time because they'll just swipe you off and never into the oblivion. The work that I create now is slave to this AI-driven algorithm that is optimized for something that I no longer have any understanding of. That's an interesting quote from an OG that he doesn't even understand.
SPEAKER_03What a gift for folks who have like maybe said something they shouldn't have said, and now they can have this search profile kind of, you know, hide all that other negativity. Is Google, you know, a little too powerful in the search
YouTube News Roundup And Housekeeping
SPEAKER_03space?
SPEAKER_04Hey, welcome back to the only podcast that watches your content more than you watch ours. I'm Travis, and I'm here with Dan from the main channel. Welcome back, Dan. Hey, hello. I think we're gonna do something cool this week. We're gonna do like a YouTube news roundup podcast. I think we should do this more often. Um, when we did this kind of last time, someone in the comments was like, I kind of like this format. I was like, this is a great idea. We should do this all the time. There's always news on YouTube. Just for that one person. Yeah, just for the one person. So this podcast is for one person. If you're new here, we help you grow YouTube channel in many different ways, whether we interview up to up-and-coming content creators, content creators who've really just crushed it, or we answer your questions or like this. Uh, share our YouTube news. Uh, we got it all here for you. If you're listening to the audio-only podcasts, you should also like come to the YouTube channel and watch us and look at our faces. It's amazing. Uh, Dan, let's start off with really what we've titled this whole episode about, which is uh shorts and long form.
Shorts And Long Form Need Separate Strategy
SPEAKER_04So many people are trying to crack the nut that is shorts for long form. A lot of people are using shorts as like an advertisement for the long form. That doesn't always work. We're gonna break down a couple of things. YouTube actually came out with a video just recently kind of talking about the guide on how to use shorts to get people into long form. But fundamentally, I've said this since shorts came out. You shouldn't even bother to look at it like that. I mean, some people can do it, but for the most part, it's its own thing. What do you think?
SPEAKER_03Uh we also did a video on this. I think YouTube's copying us for once. Uh, but it it is like that, right? Like we they are two separate things, and it's no matter how much we seem to say that, there's uh there's a resistance because I think people, uh appropriately so follow different channels that are doing it successfully, or at least on the surface, it looks like they're doing it successfully. And whenever I've seen it tried in the wild from smaller channels or channels that are just coming up, it's it's just not that simple. And I've tried it for myself, it just wasn't that simple. We've tried on the VidIQ channel, just wasn't that simple. Uh, but yeah, I think we have a ton of examples. It's it's a very nuanced conversation, I think.
SPEAKER_04Well, they they came out with their own guide. So we're gonna watch uh about a minute or so of what they shared, um, and then we're gonna comment on one of the things that they said. I think it's there's some good information here, but let's go ahead and watch it. This is on this is the uh Creator Insider uh channel. Let's get let's uh let's take a listen.
SPEAKER_00Some people only watch shorts. They may never click on a 10-minute long video, no matter how good it is. Others might watch long form videos about one topic, but only shorts about another. Think about it, they might watch a 10-minute tech review, but they only want one minute of a new dance trend. And some might watch both, but shorts are where they're willing to explore. So if you don't make shorts, you're never gonna reach those audiences. Shorts aren't just a promo tool for your other videos, they're an entry point for bringing entirely new people to your channel.
SPEAKER_04Let's stop there. We'll we're gonna she has something else to say after that. But this is I 100% agree with this. Uh, but I would go a step further and say shorts are its own uh uh style, like it's its own thing. You almost have to treat it as its own thing and not hope that people get into that and and use it as a gateway drug into your your normal stuff. You have to treat it as its own piece of uh content.
SPEAKER_03I agree with that. What I don't agree with necessarily is the notion that like if you never make a short, you'll never reach those viewers, as if to say, well, you're expected to do that. You have to reach those viewers. And I I think that's the thing. Ever since shorts came out, we did this too. We were saying this too, and I've since corrected the way I speak about this just from my own perspective. I don't think people have to make shorts if they don't want to. You can still have a successful YouTube channel without touching shorts ever. And same with shorts creators, you can have a successful shorts channel without ever making a long-form video. So when YouTube tells you, because they have a vested interest in you making more shorts, when YouTube tells you you can do this and you should do this, of course they would say that. But the evidence is clear that you don't have to if you don't want to. And that's the big key right there. You also don't have to live stream, but you can live stream. You also don't have to make a podcast, but you can absolutely set up a podcast playlist. You don't have to make music, but you can set up a music playlist. Like it shorts, I see it as another tool in your tool belt for whatever type of content you want to make. You don't have to do anything, you don't have to use YouTube. You don't have to, you don't have to use all the features YouTube gives you just because they're there, or you can use all of them. And I know we're gonna get into the strategy of for folks who do want to use all of them, but I just want to lay that out because this video starts off by basically saying you'll never reach those viewers if you well, you don't have to either if you don't want to.
SPEAKER_04The only thing you have to do is hit that subscribe button and hit that like button. Make sure you're subscribed to this podcast. But I agree with what you're saying here. Let's see what else she says next, because uh again, uh, she goes into another uh example here.
Building A Bridge With Related Videos
SPEAKER_00To engage them, here's what you want to do: create a clear path. Your first job is to make it as easy as possible for a viewer to go from your short to your longer content. You have to build a bridge, and the best tool for the job is the related videos button. This is a clickable link you can add to your shorts that points to any of your other videos, whether that's a short, long form video, or live stream. To add this link, sign into YouTube Studio. From the left menu, select content, click the short you'd like to edit, and then select a related video from your channel. But what you link to matters. You want to match the viewer's intent. Think about why they watch your content in the first place. Did you teach them something? Link to a longer tutorial with more detail. Did you show them a cool product? Link to an in-depth review of it.
SPEAKER_04Okay, and I agree with this. Uh, but the thing is, um, we're gonna show, I'm gonna show like what that actually looks like in practice, but I wanted to show how to do it in case people didn't know. Uh uh the reality is when this first came out, I think we were all excited because we had seen that you know, when this feature came out, shorts were and still are, but probably even more so then, so overpowered they were just it was almost easy views. So the excitement of like, wait a minute, we can finally start funneling those views into long form. We win, everyone wins. And I think even YouTube themselves thought that it was gonna be much more successful than it actually is. Um, not to say you shouldn't use it, not to say it's not good. But uh Dan, remember when this announcement came out that they were gonna do this? I think like we were all excited, even at Vid IQ.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we were excited, and to me, it was the final thing we needed them to do to make shorts, like even a possibility if you wanted them to like move people along for them. Like YouTube said we're gonna build a bridge, and then they gave us the bridge, or at least they gave us the tools to build the bridge ourselves. And in the video we just did not that long ago, I think I even said YouTube is this was definitely in the script. I think I said it. YouTube is like they're done. Like they made the bridge and now it's kind of up to us.
SPEAKER_04And that's been a good uh piece of advice anyway, to uh have a bridge between the different uh pieces of content. You should do this from long-form video to long form video, short form, it doesn't matter. Like, you need to have a through line for people to come back and binge watch your stuff. That's what you really want. You want people to come back and watch multiple videos. That's how you grow. It's just that simple. I want to be clear, it's just that simple, but just that complicated. Because getting someone to come back multiple times is hard. But if you can do it, you will grow. That's like pretty much a guarantee, dang near. Uh, and there's no guarantees here on YouTube, but that's pretty much a guarantee. Having said that, what does that look like in
Reality Check From Channel Analytics
SPEAKER_04reality? So I decided to look on the VidIQ channel and find um uh a short that did at least pretty well, right? Like um, I could have found probably bigger ones, but you know, for the sake of time, I wanted to show this one. So again, if you're listening to audio-only podcast, you probably want to watch the YouTube version for this. I'm showing a screen of a YouTube short here that currently has 130,000 views, but it's still getting like 3,000 views every 48 hours. So this thing is gonna get 200 to 300,000 views uh perhaps by the time it's dead, right? And this has been going on for almost three months. It's still getting views, but it's getting them in browse, which is something we'll talk about later when we talk about shorts on TV, because that's how you might see things show up. And also YouTube searched. So these are not shorts feed views, these are like algorithmic views, these are the some of the best views you can get on any type of video. So again, uh, this is the video that's at 130,000 views, and it is sharing uh a related video to I'm gonna show uh this one, to this video. Uh, and we pointed to this video, and I want to show you the analytics for this one. This video itself actually has, I think it's like 60,000 views or something like that. Oh, it uh it has um 260 views. 67,000 views, right? And it's still going pretty well. But what I wanted to show was how many views it's getting from uh that click, right? Uh from the short. And you can see down here related shorts, 267 views uh out of 67,000. So did it help? I mean, sure.
SPEAKER_03You got some views from it. It's worth noting the short, like the the reason we picked the short and the long is because they are related, in our opinion, to one another. Like if you watch that short and you found it valuable, we assume this video we're linking in the bottom is also just as valuable to you.
SPEAKER_04Very specifically, because they're almost called the same thing. Uh, the short is how to turn off uh YouTube Shorts, and the long is how to turn off YouTube Shorts. It's kind of the same thing. So I I you know, in a lot of, but someone might argue, well, if I watched the short and I know how to turn them off, why would I watch a long about it? Okay, fair. But still, you never know. I mean, there's more details to be had. Uh, I think it's important to just understand that this is something that we typically see, though. So it's not unusual to see only a couple of dribs and drabs view-wise to the long form piece of content. But when I said this uh before we started the podcast, uh Dan said yes, but and he had a a channel that uh he wants to talk about that does this well uh while I pull
Trevor's Pizza Channel Done Right
SPEAKER_04that up. Talk to us about uh this cook show with Trevor.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so if you've been watching me on the ViticU channel for a little while now, you've probably heard me bring this channel up before. It's probably just one of my favorite YouTube channels, hard stop. Like, awesome, awesome creator. So Trevor makes pizza, but Trevor uses his amazing cooking prowess for evil. Like it just creates a huge mess. Some of the best videos on on this channel are the shorts, and they are just like when he's just absolutely making a mockery of pizza. But if you watch him long enough, you realize he can cook, he knows exactly how to cook, he has really good equipment. This guy knows his stuff. So this is someone with like a unique skill who's using it to make really entertaining content, and he also has a really unique sense of humor that appeals to me. So I really like this channel, and I noticed he started making long form videos more consistently. And the reason I noticed wasn't because he linked one in a short, it's because I watched enough of his shorts to where YouTube pushed me one of his long forms one day, and it was recent. And I'm like, maybe he's trying long form. I'm so excited. And he did such a good job of making sure that the long form videos felt like the shorts, but longer, but more. And I that's what I wanted. That's why I was binge watching all the shorts.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and that's that's kind of the important thing. The value is so um so intact with a short. You you know what you like. You YouTube can look at your history and say, oh man, I mean, you know, he's watching all the shorts. Let's feed him along and see what happens. And then if you start watching those, then YouTube also knows that it can look to other viewers like you who've watched a lot of his shorts, and then start to kind of, hey, did you know he has longs too? And and if that works, then you'll see the the very few channels who can do this, but some have, where their shorts and their longs have a lot of views. Uh I've interviewed um Patrick Zanali, who's been able to do that here on YouTube. He does a very good job of that. And but it's still very incredibly rare. You just see someone dominate one or the other, and it's because some people say shorts are easy, and they kind of are, but they kind of aren't. It's easy to make a short. It's hard to make a short that's very good consistently all the time because they have to be so strongly edited. You gotta be right into the point. You can't fart around, you can't like you have we tell you in long form, you don't have a lot of space for the intro to sit there and waste people's time. You have zero when it comes to a YouTube short. You can't waste anyone's time because they'll just swipe you off and never into the oblivion, into the darkness, Dan.
SPEAKER_03And the tre the Trevor Channel just looking at, like, he he does that in both shorts and longs. YouTube in their Creator Insider video, uh, I don't know if we saw this already, they get to saying in a little bit, like, hey, make sure that people, when they click that little link, they you know, that click pays off, right? They just like clicking a thumbnail, like they watch the short, they enjoyed it, and so they click into the long and it feels like it's the same vibe. And that's basically what we said in our video, too. It's it needs to feel like it's from the same people. And when you look at these thumbnails on the shorts, you'll notice it's always a pizza at this specific angle on a wooden cutting board. And then when you look at the long form thumbnails, it's a pizza at this specific angle over a wooden cutting board, and he puts his face on it because his face is in the shorts, too. So it's like, boom, I recognize that guy, I know that that camera angle, I know the color palette. Like, I already don't have to think more than two seconds before I'm like, Trevor made a long form video. So he he's just like a one-to-one kind of person. You don't have to even use shorts this way. You can use shorts to do slightly different stuff if you want to, but you'll have to respect that people aren't gonna move over to your long form when you release a long form. You gotta you've gotta be okay with that.
SPEAKER_04I'm a retired fat butt, and I gotta tell you, looking at this channel makes me want to eat every one of these pizzas. For those who are listening to Audio Only podcast, these are ridiculous pizzas. So he's got a pizza with a giant meatball on it. He's got uh fried cheese curd pizza, he's got California burrito pizza, he's got a Tocho's pizza, what is it, Choc Cho? I don't know what that is. Cool ranch pizza, deep fried. I would eat any of these. I would eat all of these. Let's let's just watch one. Please, yes. And kind of get the point of like what we're talking about, how you can take a short that's done very well, make people want to watch the long version. This video, the hot dog burnt ends pizza has 1.1 million views. So let's take a look.
SPEAKER_01These
Breaking Down A Viral Short
SPEAKER_01are called hot dog burnt ends. Is that a thing? Well, it was on TikTok, so it's a thing now. They're made by putting hot dog chunks in a pan covered in brown sugar, some mustard, liquid smoke, and a spice rub. And then they're cooked in the oven for a whole 40 minutes. Not how I'd normally choose to make hot dogs, but the video I saw these on had the tag LifeHack. And my life needs all the hacking it can get. Okay, now that our hot dog timer is up, we need to cover these hot dogs in more spice rub and barbecue sauce this time, and then we'll throw it back in the oven for another 40 minutes. You've heard of eight-minute abs? Well, I am now proud to present to you two hour hot dogs. Okay. I figured out how they make slim gyms. Uh, now we'll prepare our hot dogs. Very interesting.
SPEAKER_04First of all, the first thing I noticed is his voice. It's very interesting. Yes. Very interesting. And it makes me want to listen more just to hear how he says things. Yes. Um that and not everyone. So here's the funny thing about that, because you look at that and you go, well, some people might say, Well, I'm a content creator and I have a funny voice, I have a lisp or something. You know what? That actually might work to your advantage. Let's be clear. That actually might work to your advantage. Um, I do want to let me break this down a little bit because I think it is interesting. Let's watch just the first couple seconds here. One of the I noticed something he does. So, first of all, he's right into it. Hot dog burn ends. He's showing the end result at the beginning of the video, which means, okay, he's confirmed the click, which in this case is a short, so it might have just come up, right?
SPEAKER_01Is that a thing?
SPEAKER_04And then he comes up and is that a thing? So you know the question to people might be like, oh yeah, what's that thing? And then he explains where he saw it from. I saw it on TikTok, it shows a little screenshot of TikTok. So it's a thing now. And he kind of makes a joke. And then look how fast he does all this. Hot dog chunks in a pan. This is like a second and a half.
SPEAKER_01Covered in brown sugar, some mustard, liquid.
SPEAKER_04He's he's in the before the brown sugar is done, the mustard's already up liquid smoke. This is all in like a second and a half. You don't spend 10 seconds dumping all this stuff on here. This thing's a YouTube short. So this is the type of thing if you're looking for something that's going to work, you need to look at channels and videos that are working and understand why they work. This is fast, fast, fast, fast. But what's interesting is that he takes these moments in between these segments.
SPEAKER_01So, like he now puts in the oven for a whole 40 minutes and now he makes a joke. How I'd normally choose to make hot dogs, but the video I saw these on had the tag life hack. And my life needs all the hacking it can get. And then he's back into the thing.
SPEAKER_04And he does this again later on. He does like the spice up and everything.
SPEAKER_01And barbecue sauce this time, and then we'll throw it back in the oven for another 40 minutes.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so another 40 minutes and watch, he takes another break. Nothing about this is an accident, and I think it's super important when you see videos like this to break them down just like that. Um, yeah, so what are your thoughts on this, Dan?
SPEAKER_03I mean, obviously, you know I like it. This is my, like I said, this is my favorite channel. I'm not exaggerating. Uh, and you're pointing out all the things. This is the analysis I've been wanting to do for a while of this channel, too, but you're pointing out everything that I've noticed about him. It's just so well done. It's just so well crafted, everything he's doing. And the long forms are the same. What he ends up doing, he doesn't take more time to put the mustard on the hot dogs in the long form. Instead, he takes a bunch of ideas and themes them. So he did one video of like Italian pizzas and stuff, and that can become multiple shorts as well. And he uses the same footage, but redoes the voiceover and maybe his shots on camera, and he'll have like three or four shorts from that one long form recording session, but it's all like pizzas with like a different Italian themes and stuff. Like he has one like a spaghetti on pizza. He literally puts a whole pot of spaghetti on top of a pizza crust. It's really funny. And that that's like his whole strategy. That's how he's merged the two things together. But it's always the same storytelling, the same beats you picked up on it. Like, in order to show the passage of time, he puts it in the oven and makes a joke. Like that is that is purely to help move the story along in a way that feels natural. You know that when something goes in the oven, it's kind of jarring to say, and now it's out of the oven. It that could be kind of funny, but it also could be kind of boring. So he uses his writing to like fill that little tiny gap. Just a little tiny gap. It was in the oven for hours, and he still filled that gap with just a couple seconds of a quick little you know joke, and then boom, it's out of the oven. And it just the movement, you just it's like opening and closing loops over and over. He's just working so fast. Like, so I don't expect anyone listening to just suddenly get to this level if they don't feel like they are at that level. I want people to understand why creators like Trevor can be successful going from shorts to longs, or vice versa, if he wanted to, because he's consistent and he's smart and he's funny, and he's just you know, he's giving people exactly what they want. I'm a big fan and he just never he never stops. He doesn't take a break from doing his regular pizza shorts to tell me about how his dog had to go to the vet or something. It's it's just the channel is focused on this thing. Like, this is what my channel is, this is what people want from me. And yeah, like I can't think of a better example right now of channels that I'm a big fan of that are just doing YouTube so well at like such a high level.
The Mindset Shift For Growth
SPEAKER_04This is literally the reason why you are making shorts, tons of shorts, to promote your long form videos and they're not getting views. It's not because you're not doing a good job making shorts, it's because your mindset is completely wrong. See how I made that stinger for the intro? That's pretty good, right? That's that's gonna be in the intro. It's gonna be hot fire. It's gonna be spicy hot. No, but it's true. Because your mindset has to be that these videos aren't a promotion tool for the long form video. I've got to make these excellent so that people are addicted to them, so then they will move over. Just assume that when you make the short, the person has no interest in your long form video. Just assume that off the bat, and you're probably right. Make that short as best as it possibly can be and make a bunch of them and make them interested enough to go, hmm, what else does this person do? And if nothing else, YouTube is going to give it a shot, like it did with Dan. Dan didn't even know he had long form, and boom, there it is. Um, I feel like this is as much of a mindset shift as it is some little technical do this thing and then another thing works, and do this thing and then another thing works. It's not paint by numbers, but it's it's a lot more human psychology uh in order to get the end result you're looking for.
SPEAKER_03It's organic too. It's just like a lot of people try and cheat it. They're like, I get a lot of views and shorts, I want to move those to over to long form now. Like it's organic. I wanted to go to Trevor's long form video. He didn't ask me to do that. I wanted to do that because I was entertained. And that's what you have to do. That's why YouTube's so hard because people run into this where they they're like, I'm enjoying myself, but I'm having this problem. And a lot of times the problem is just solved by continuing to level up and be creative. And that's advice that is so frustrating. People don't want to hear that. They're like, no, I know that this is like something that can be like uh I can just flip a switch. I know I can. Like, yeah, no, not really. Like, some of the people that you're comparing yourself to have been either doing this for a long time or they just have that natural talent, that really annoying talent that like they're just they were always destined to be famous, and there's nothing you can do about it except work really, really, really hard, way harder than they probably had to, the jerks. Like, that's just sometimes there's people out there like that, but I've had to accept that I'm I'm not one of them. I can't just, you know, cheat my way to the top when it comes to whatever niche I want to be on on YouTube. I've had to work really hard, and to this day I still have successes and failures, and that's because it's it's difficult. Like, if you want to keep standing out, you have to continue to be creative and continue. Evolve as a person.
SPEAKER_04What have your experiences been? Leave us a comment below. We'd love to hear about those.
Casey Neistat On Algorithm Uncertainty
SPEAKER_04Next up, next story, Casey Neistat, no G and GOAT of YouTube, says he can't figure out the YouTube algorithm anymore. Well, welcome to the show. You uh Casey. Uh by the way, Casey and I have been in a long years-long DM, maybe three or four years, where he has agreed to come on a podcast with me uh for years, like once a year every year. Yeah, I'll be there. Well, what when do you want to be doing? And then I've reply and I'll hear from him for a year. It's Casey, please come on the podcast. You've he's agreed to come on this podcast like three times. Uh so Casey, we need you to come on. Uh so anyway, this this article on uh Access says YouTube star Casey Nysat says he no longer fully understands what drives success on the platform. Speaking at the uh New York Summit on Wednesday, he says um he you know he recently started coming back to YouTube. Thank goodness we get to see more Casey, which is always a good thing. He says his own videos that he considers mediocre have attracted millions of views, while ones he believes are among his best have not gained traction. Hello, that's been the YouTube content creator uh uh experience forever. I feel like that's always the case. Uh he says, the work that I create now is slave to this AI-driven algorithm that is optimized for something that I no longer have any understanding of, says Nestat. That's an interesting quote from an OG, someone who thinks is one of the GOATs in like vlogging that he doesn't even understand anymore. For for new content creators who are thinking, I don't understand this, this is a guy that's been around for years, uh over a decade and a half, I think at this point, and is is beloved by so many people. And he's like, I don't get it either. Um, the is that something that I it humanizes, I think, the experience, but it doesn't uh provide clarity to creators. What what where does that leave us, Dan?
SPEAKER_03I mean, yeah, like you said, welcome to the club. I it's we we claim to have an understanding of the algorithm, I suppose, but no, like no more than what YouTube does, definitely less than YouTube and YouTube themselves. We've had people come on these shows and talk about it, and they're like, actually, it's chaos over here too. Like, we don't fully understand it. It's you know that you have that many hands on the pie, and then you're trying to make a living thing that's like thinking for itself. Of course, you're gonna forget, or not forget, but like, of course, you're gonna lose track of how it all works, right? Because it's a very big, complex system, and it's always changing, they're always trying to tweak it to figure out like what's the best way to keep people on this platform as long as possible. And regular people are not gonna compete with that. I've always felt like there's we can do a video, whatever video we want, about a specific tip or trick to and someone's gonna hear that and there it's gonna resonate with them, and it's gonna be exactly what they needed to hear to get them over the hurdle. And someone else is gonna hear it and go, I've heard this before, or they're gonna hear it and go, Well, this doesn't work for me. And that's why we make so many videos because we know that each one is gonna be for that that it's one day we're gonna say something that helps you. You know what I mean? Like the for the the folks out there who just don't know if this is working. But my point is at the end of the day, the there's one thing that's true for everybody, and it's that you need to just make good stuff, you need to make stuff that people want to watch, and you figure out what that means for you. What is your version of that? I watched so many creators who do so many different things, and I don't know if when they made those videos, they realized that so many people would watch them. Like, because it's a lot of them you could just boil it down to well, it's just a guy talking about a thing that he's upset about, you know. Like, think about Charlie, Moist Critical. Just every video is him frustrated about something or excited about something, and he just stares at the camera with his white t-shirt, he just talks about it for 10 minutes. And I know he's had to build that up over a long period of time, but it's not that simple, right? Like, he's got this personality that's really like you gravitate towards it. He he has I I'd say he has good takes on a lot of things, and he has a unique sense of humor. He thinks of he does a this thing where he thinks of words no one has in their lexicon at that time. Like he'll always use SpongeBob terminology and like just slip it into sentences really casually. It just does he does things, he just uses his personality as his strength, and he's just made he's just doing his thing, you know? And people look at it and go, Well, I don't get it. He has his white t-shirt, he doesn't even really work on his thumbnails that you know, and he just talks to the camera. Why can't I do that? It's because you're missing the nuances of it. It's just that organic thing where what works for one person can't just automatically work for another one. There's no there's no recipe, there's no template. So people will tell you there is, but the problem is we're all humans and every single person's different, the creators and the viewers. So that's that's the truth. I'm not surprised that Casey Neistat doesn't understand the algorithm. Who who does? You know, if if we understood the algorithm, that would be a problem.
SPEAKER_04And the thing is, like, so Moist Critical also has been around for a long time. So though YouTube he started and is a very different one than one is today, but and he's still relevant. Yeah, I mean, by all by all a lot of people also who started when he started are are not even around anymore. So there's that as well. Um it listen, like we know how to help you stack the deck in your favor. That's what here at VidIQ, we know how to do that. We've done it very well, either from direct coaching people or using software, whatever, like we can help you stack the deck, which is probably the most that you can really do other than you yourself being the creator having that extra thing that you can't be taught. Like you just have to have the thing. Now, having said that, I have seen many videos on YouTube that I think should be getting a lot more attention and views than they're currently getting. And I don't even necessarily have an answer for those. Like, there's just sometimes you see a terrible video get a lot of attention, and a great video not get enough. And my only answer to that, and it's unsatisfactory, but I think it's probably the truth, is there's just not enough time in the day to serve that video to the right people, and YouTube missed it. Uh, I don't believe the the algorithm is perfect at all. I think it's probably very flawed. However, it's also very good. You you can't say one without the other. It has shown me content and content creators I would have never found otherwise that I'm so happy that I found. I made friends with Nomad Push, uh a channel that you know I've I've I've interviewed here on the podcast, but I would have never found otherwise because I wasn't looking for like a homeless Japanese YouTuber. I didn't know that was a thing. I didn't know that was a thing, I had no idea. I just found a guy the other day. I might try to get him on the podcast. Uh he's a hobo, he's an American hobo. Uh, and he just rides around on trains uh from place to place and he documents it, and it's fascinating. I've been watching the last couple days and I'm fascinated by this guy. Now I want to talk to him. I would have never found that on my own because in my mind I would have never known to search for it. This was a search-only platform, never would have found these people.
SPEAKER_03So I didn't mean to interrupt you, but back when it was a search-driven platform, it was chaos because the it was as easy as putting Justin Bieber in your tags and you could get views. And it was it was silly.
SPEAKER_04I think all that to say that while we can definitely say that there are things that need to be fixed, changed, or whatever, you gotta give it its due. Like it is an incredible platform. So many YouTubers that I talk to are so thankful that they are able to use this platform for what it is. And while it's not perfect, I mean, really nothing is in the world, let's be honest. Uh, it's a pretty darn good platform. It's definitely gonna pay you out pretty well, depending on what you're doing. Uh, and even if it directly doesn't pay you out, it gives you opportunities to be paid out by other companies and ads and stuff and other ways you can do it. It gives you a unique opportunity where you don't have to pay for this. A lot of people forget that if you were to own your own website, it is not free to upload videos to your own website. Like, and once upon a time, I don't know if it's still the case, you also had to pay for like the amount of traffic that was coming into your so like even if you were popular, you're paying for that. Like, wait a minute, what? I gotta pay for the service. And if people get popular, I gotta pay more for yes, that's how websites work. I don't know if they do they still work that way, I don't know. Um, but the the you don't have to do that for YouTube. You just literally sign up for free and they can give you money. That's crazy. People don't like they get they get so like, oh, YouTube is this and YouTube, yeah, YouTube is this and that, and it gives you a free way to make money.
SPEAKER_03Uh kind of cool, not gonna lie. It when you put it in that perspective, it just feels so like I don't know, not to be like super negative, but it feels really entitled when people jump on the platform and they're like, okay, how do I just get views? It's like, well, you gotta no, no, no, shut up. How do I get views? How do I get views? And it's like, you know, well, do you have a passion for anything? Do you it because it's confounding to folks who kind of been through it already? And because like me, I've I've been through so much on this platform and become a bit jaded. Like, once you have a little bit of success, you're like, Oh, okay, I need to actually like be myself and I need to make stuff that I'm excited about. And if I stop being excited about that thing, I need to decide if I'm gonna pivot or quit. And it's a hard thing, it's a very hard place to be, and that's you know, that's why it's so tough, and that's why there's so many channels that are like, this is how you can do that. There's also a lot of channels that's that try and feed off that energy and go, hey, this those guys, just ignore them. And this is the templated formula that'll work for you, and you can just push a button and money will start rolling in, and they'll show you some success stories where that worked for some of their clients, and then you try it, and then you realize a thousand other people, ten thousand other people saw that video and they did the same exact thing you did, and that particular niche is flooded with the same exact video over and over again because they were told that's a get rich quick scheme. And it like, so we're like, it's frustrating for us, like folks like Travis and I, because we're like constantly battling that. We're trying to like give people good advice, you know, to tell you what you need to hear. And we have channels just just you know over there that are like, no, no, no, this is what you want to hear, and that whenever something sounds too good to be true, it often is.
SPEAKER_04Usually is, yeah. Uh so listen, if you're if you're vibing with what we just talked about, leave us a comment. Let us know what you think about that. YouTube is a great platform, whether you like everything they do or not, you can't deny the ability to change people's lives on a free platform is kind of uh is kind of goaded. Uh, final thing we'll talk about today is more about YouTube.
Google Search Profiles And Power
SPEAKER_04And um, I want to share uh another video that they did, Renee Richie, good friend of the channel. Um, in one of the videos he did recently, he talked about this Google search profile. Let me just run a couple of a couple of seconds or so of this so you can kind of understand what we're about to talk about. Because in a lot of ways, we're gonna talk about is YouTube becoming a new social platform. It is kind of social media, but not in the traditional sense. Let's take a look.
SPEAKER_02Designed to help creators and publishers shape how we show up on Google search. A search profile is a shareable, customizable page that brings together our YouTube channels, all of our social accounts, posts, and links all into one place. Once we've linked our accounts, we can customize our profiles by editing our photos and banner images, pinning our latest work, and adding important links, like our websites or merch stores. Search profiles let brands and fans and collaborators learn more about us and our content and easily follow us to see more of our work. After fully editing our profiles, a visual snapshot of information called a knowledge panel may now appear when people search for us, displaying our name, latest posts, and a link to our search profiles to be able to That is really, really, really cool.
SPEAKER_04Hold on, he says to be able to let me see what he says here.
SPEAKER_02We have to have a public account with at least a hundred thousand followers on a single supported platform, Instagram, YouTube, or X. If we only have a public account on TikTok, we have to have at least 300,000 followers. If you want a profile, you can start setting it up by visiting creators.google slash profile.
SPEAKER_04This is interesting. I didn't know about that 100,000 thing uh right before we started this. I knew that this was the thing and I wanted to look more into it. But I think it's a start. A lot of these um programs do start with a specific uh uh creator size. A lot of people are gonna go, well, I'm out, I don't have 100,000 on anyone. Okay, that's fair, but we need to talk about this anyway because I think it's important. YouTube and Google are the same basic company. Google owns YouTube. So let's start there for people who didn't know that. I mean, most people knew that, but believe it or not, some people don't know that. This is important because now it becomes an SEO search play. I think everyone who's listening to the podcast, either if they don't already have 100,000, they want 100,000 followers on any platform or subscribe. They want that, right? Of course, it's a great number to hit. When you do, you're now able, you're now able to elevate your profile to another level and to be more Google searchable, which would be good for things like uh sponsorships, partnerships. And it's really cool to have like essentially a webpage slash landing page for all your stuff without having to buy a web page. Again, another free thing. But I suspect, and now I am almost guaranteed because of these restrictions, because you have to have 100,000 or more, this won't last very long. Dan and I were talking about before this. Google likes to make things and then cancel them pretty quickly after. And I'm like, most people probably won't use this and it'll go away in like two or three years. I think it'll be less than that because with the berry at 100,000, I just feel like the people who really would want to use this are everyone under 10,000. Uh, I think those those are the people that really want more ability to be found and it's going to be more valuable to them. It doesn't mean that they won't lower the restrictions on this at some point. They're maybe just starting here. But for me, this is a this that restriction is a fail, the overall idea I like.
SPEAKER_03I have mixed feelings. And I think the longer I sit with this, the more complex this will get. So this is just my initial reaction. You showed me this just before we went live, and now I've seen it again, and I'm sitting with it a little bit more. Maybe in a week from now I'll feel more, I'll have more solid thoughts on it. But here's where I'm at right now. I'm I'm thinking of the implications of for brands, right? So if you are a vidIQ and you are trying to compete for your own name in Google search, this is a gift. You know, this is great because now you get to decide to decide what shows up. It's not some robot kind of deciding for you based on whatever it can pull from the internet, or an AI deciding how it how it perceives you based on your website. No, like you get to input the information. These are the photos of vidIQ, and here's some of the staff, and here's the things they do, and it shows up at the top of Google search. I think that's the real reason this could go away, because Google, like taking away that kind of like competitive like nature, because vid IQ normally would need to pay to be at the top of search results or do a really good job with SEO and continue doing a good job, so we stay at the top, right? So if you type in vidIQ, maybe the sponsored result is us making sure that we stay at the top. Now we don't have to do that. Now we can just make a profile. Stuff like that. That like what are the implications there? And what what about this is a silly one, but I've I've come across this and I now I'm worried about it. What if somebody happened to um say something a little uncouth and the internet got mad at them for good reason? What if this person deserved the ire of the internet? And so you're you're thinking, Travis, I might want to have this person on the podcast. And so you Google them, and what shows up? Their search profile. And you see a very long search profile of all the things that they said that they did, and maybe you don't scroll just below the fold on the that top Reddit post that's like, hey, this person blew up an orphanage. And you don't you'll never you don't you never know that, you know, now that here they are on your show. And that like that seems a little that's like probably really weird to even bring that up. I'm just thinking about like what a gift for folks who have like maybe said something they shouldn't have said, you know, and stand by it. And now they can have this search profile kind of you know hide all that other negativity, all that stuff we don't need to know about. There's there's just so many things. I just it goes to this larger conversation is of like, is Google, you know, a little too powerful in the search space? And are they wielding that power for good or not for good? And I don't even know if they could answer that necessarily because this thing, I'm very interested in this. I think there's like positives that could come out of it, but I'm also like, there's gotta be a there's gotta be something to this that's like also what's the trade-off here? The trade-off is those top search results that would normally be like SEO driven, and I don't know if that's good or bad. I'm I'm really like I'm still sitting with it.
SPEAKER_04I just signed up while you were talking.
SPEAKER_03You didn't even know what to do.
SPEAKER_04I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to see what would happen. Uh, and this is kind of where I am. Welcome to your search profile. Review your profile photos. Okay, go to profile. And uh, okay, it's got some of my latest YouTube videos. There's my Twitter stuff, Facebook, Instagram. Okay, that's cool. All right, so I don't know what to do with this, but it's neat. I mean, I guess I can write about myself and I can have a pin post and some links. Uh again, I'm more interested in like, where does this show up in Google? Like, if I just Google myself, will this show up and how long will it take? I don't believe this is gonna happen like right now. Like, if I were to search for my name, I don't think it's gonna show up right now because I literally just did this in seconds ago. Um, but all that to say for people who can um who can do this, uh give it a shot, but I I don't think it's going to last unless they open it up to more people. If they open it up to more people, then I believe I think the smaller YouTubers and stuff are gonna jump all over this, they're gonna love it, they're gonna think it's amazing, and they probably will use it. I think larger creators, some of them will use it because they don't know what it is and they'll try it like I just did, and then they won't see any benefit from it, and then they'll be like, all right, cool, cool story, bro, and they'll move on. Google, if you're listening, open it up to smaller creators. I'm just gonna end it like that. If you have uh think thoughts about this, leave us comments and uh I'll let uh Renee know to take a look at the comment section of this video and see what they have to say about it. I I like the idea. I think the execution, and maybe they're doing it this way on purpose. It's easier to get more feedback and check out bugs at larger because there's less of them. So maybe that's why they're doing it this way. Um, this this video is from three weeks ago, so they announced this three weeks ago. It's available now. I'm very curious to see where this goes. And all the things that Dan said, I totally agree with. Um, but it's a wait and see for me. It's a wait and see, but I signed up, so we'll see what happens. Uh maybe I get all the sponsorships now. I don't know, maybe.
SPEAKER_03I I think yeah, it is really when you think about it, it that all that information does feel very relevant to people who would want to work with you.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Or not work with you. Yes. So that's why I said, like, if you were doing research for like a guest on a podcast, like those those numbers would be flashy and interesting. But are you getting the real story? Are you getting all the information you need to properly vet this person uh for whatever it is, whatever business you're going to conduct with them? And I, yeah, that's that's why I think it may or may not last. I don't know. I still don't know what other implications it could have. But people have to know who you are to even search for it. So I don't think this will have massive rippling SEO like implications. I, you know, you're still going to be competing to even get people to learn what vidIQ is in the first place or whatever business you have. But once they know it and they type that in, now you get the first word. Is that a positive or a negative? I think for the company it'd be a positive. For the average like consumer, though, is that I don't know.
SPEAKER_04Maybe we should sign up for it. Um, I'll uh we should probably bring it bring it up in a meeting tomorrow.
Final Thoughts And Viewer Questions
SPEAKER_04Uh anyway, if you're new here, hit that subscribe button. You've gotten this far under, you might as well. Uh, I got another great episode here. By the way, if you like this format, leave me a comment below so I know if you want to continue on this. I have some other ideas for formats in the future, but let me know your ideas below in the comments. And again, like I said, I got a video right here. Make sure you check it out. We'll see y'all in the next one.