He Built Jubilee’s YouTube Channel to 5 Billion Views | Ryan Hashemi

0:28All right, marketing school listeners. Ryan, how's it going? Good, sir. How are you? Doing well. Can't complain. Ryan, welcome to the show. Thank you. The way I like to start these always is kind of who are you and what are you known for? Yeah. I am a, well, I guess, yeah, I'm a lot of things. I'm a dad, I'm a husband. But I think what most people would recognize is I built the business of Jubilee. so you know large media company digitally focused uh mission oriented behind some of the more viral formats and shows online um you know 10 million subscribers 5 billion views a figure a year business um so that that i've been doing for the past six years and i've been coaching i've been working with a lot of the top creators as well to help them grow their revenue to help them on their content strategy.

1:18And now I run an agency full-time. So helping businesses actually scale out original content. And you're also an Emmy-nominated producer. I am an Emmy-nominated producer, yes. So we've made content beyond just digital media. We've made Hollywood feature films as well. And so, yeah, our first feature was successful. So yeah, very proud of that too. Cool. So why do you think Jubilee was so successful? I mean, 5 billion views and then I think you said 10 million subs, but I think it's 14 million with all the things combined. Yeah, because we also have, so 14 million followers total, but because we're on Snapchat, we have shows on Snapchat, we have Facebook, TikTok, et cetera, but we have two brands.

2:00One is the Jubilee main brand and the other is Nectar, which is, we spun off our love content, and that lives on YouTube as well. So combined on YouTube, it's 10 million subscribers. Jubilee main channel has about nine. but yeah as far as what makes it successful yeah the secret formula the secret formula yeah I mean it's I think easier in retrospect like to be frank we didn't exactly know what we were doing but there were there were hunches we had on what would make really strong content to start we were mission oriented right about how do we bring people together how do we try to understand people way deeper than from a shallow perspective, and people who are different than us.

2:48So the idea was like, there's two things, two theses we had. One is we were looking at a lot of our friends who were creators, who were YouTubers, and the vast majority of them were either burnt out or just kind of fell out of favor or just kind of dying from a relevance perspective. So the idea was, okay, how do we build something like Disney for digital where it's not really about us? It's about the concepts, the ideas, the stories that we invite people into. So we were one of the first to really think about formats, not about YouTubers or talents or whatever it is. So I'd say that from a longevity perspective is sort of the baseline.

3:37It's like what we were creating was way bigger than who we were behind the scenes. It's about the formats, the concepts that can live forever without us. So that's like baseline. And then the rest came down to understanding what gets people so compelled to want to watch content and stay for the whole thing. And at that point, it can really be narrowed down into stakes. High stakes is very important for us. Emotional stakes. If you think about what draws people in to click into a video and what keeps people watching for a long time in a video, it's all emotion. So we spent a lot of time on, and I still do today, of emotion mapping and how do we elicit a strong emotion as quickly as possible.

4:29So I would say a lot of what we did was develop formats that were kind of like social experiments that have this sometimes cringe factor and how is this going to play out and I can't believe they even did that. and that were novel for the time on YouTube. So people were just really compelled to watch and see how they would play out. What would be an example of eliciting an emotional response really quickly? So I'd say from a packaging perspective, and by packaging I mean thumbnail and title, I would say one of the more viral videos we've made, so I'll do playful and then I'll do a little bit more serious.

5:12So one of the more interesting shows we have is called Versus One, where we wanted to sort of explore modern dating, like put it under a magnifying glass. So the idea was like, okay, people are kind of pissed with Tinder, Bumble, etc. How do we explore that? And the idea was like, okay, well, what if we bring Tinder to life, essentially, and you have a contestant or whatever you want to call them, and have just the Tinder experience, but in real life where they are swiping people to their face and having to explain their rationale behind why they swiped them. And so what we did is we had this visual of a huge stack, like a huge line of, let's call it, females standing up against this guy who's got his hand up ready to swipe left or right.

6:08And instantly, it's called Tinder in real life, or, you know, 30 versus one dating app in real life. That is, like, the clear, super clear visual representation of, like, what's going to happen here. And it also looks and feels epic. You're like, holy crap, like, he's going to be, what's he going to be? Like, his hand's ready to swipe them. He's got this giant line of people up in front of his face. And then immediately in, like, the hook, we've got this upbeat, you know, upbeat sort of, like, tense music going. We've got the girls walking out and the guy's like literally like holy and he's like like you know you could see him like sweating bullets um and so you've got that you you build the stakes um and then you and you sort of structure the the format so that stakes continue where we also are alluding to the fact that the girls are going to rate him like whether they want to even you know date date him it goes both ways um so So I think it's just, and this is now, I think, the biggest lesson of all from Jubilee, because we've made, I'd say the vast majority of the shows we've made have failed.

7:16And one of the biggest lessons that my takeaway was, it doesn't really matter how good of an idea you think you have. It truly matters how crystal clear that idea is as quickly as possible. Like how simple can you present a concept from a packaging, a thumbnail and title perspective, and then like immediately in the hook, like why someone has to watch. Because you can only hold them for so long. You can only hold them for so long. I mean, you should just assume that everyone's looking for a reason to leave. And so how do you combat that by giving them plenty of reasons to stay? Then it starts with the click and, you know, ends with the payoff at the end.

7:58So designing it for there to be a payoff in the end. So that was the more playful thing. Then we have Middle Ground, which is our more serious, super empathy-focused show. One of our most viral videos as well. We went to Jerusalem and we filmed Palestinians and Israelis coming together. Can they see eye to eye? Super emotionally powerful, high stakes. I can't believe they did that kind of thing. and so in everything we do that's the goal it's like you know this is going to be I have to watch this it's going to be crazy so hopefully that's helpful so for each video that you do and then I want to come to the business side in a second too for each video that you do how much time like if you were looking at it from a percentage basis how much time goes into the creative ideation versus production yeah I would say so and this is something we can talk about now but like prior I borrowed a little bit from like tech experience I sort of brought this like hackathon model where it's like you know in a very short period of time how do we generate a ton of ideas and test them rapidly so actually I would say even though ideas are super important collectively I think the ideation piece probably accounts for like 20 20 percent may yeah 20 percent because we would also develop the ideas even further but um then it moves very quickly into testing the idea as simply as cheaply as possible so we have this like you know we make these mvp truly like a tech sort of model like do the hackathon end with a mvp that can be made in a day or two does it feel like something's there?

9:51If so, move it to pilot. And once it's been greenlit and moved into pilot is when all the pre-production work starts. And that's actually, I would say, the vast majority of the work. So for us being format-driven, a lot of the investment is in casting. Like who are the people you're bringing in? Do they have great stories? Are they articulate? Is this going to be a good blend of people? Like from a diversity of thought perspective. So casting is super important. and pre-production and show structure and all that stuff is super important. Oh, got it. Yeah. I mean, this is a lot. The creative piece is a lot bigger because you guys are doing formats.

10:25And each format doesn't just go once. It's like a season. It is a season. Exactly. And for most of our shows, we're on season seven or eight, right? Yeah. And so I think the important thing is to, you know, this is what I continue to recommend to everyone I work with, is just because you've cracked a format does not mean you're set. You shouldn't rest on your laurels and be like, okay, cool, I figured out what the world wants. Formats die. As we were talking about beforehand, even Mr. Beast is like, oh, I got to change how I am thinking about storytelling and what these videos look like. Massive sort of tide shifts happen, and so you have to constantly experiment as well.

11:15And that's what I was saying is like, the vast majority of the things we tried at Jubilee failed. The 20%, 30%, maybe less, of the shows that we piloted. Like there was a point in time we were piloting a new show every like three and a half weeks, brand new show. And 80, you know, vast majority of them failed. It's just the one or two that popped that made all the difference. if we weren't experimenting that much I don't think Jubilee would be what it is today would you say like 90 % failure rate on shows it's almost like running a it's close 80-90 % for sure that's so interesting that's like hitting a set in poker that's like running an online marketing experiment it's all like 10 % usually that ends up working out for us we were always like and we never got there but we would always be talking about batting averages.

12:12We'd be like, okay, what's a real, batting 200 or batting 300, that's the best we can ask for. But we would always talk about it in baseball terms, just need as many at-bats as possible to see what sticks. It's very much like that with all the short-form stuff. That's just the number of at-bats that you get because you just don't know what's going to hit. Especially short-form, yeah. Mr. Beast tried to poach half your team. So what happened there? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we were talking about this a little bit beforehand, but like in this space, talent is really the biggest bottleneck. And scaling out content distribution, like getting good talent is really hard.

12:54And so when you look at teams that are doing things right, oftentimes the first, you know, your first reaction is like, well, let's just, you know, grab from that team. It's not like we haven't done anything similar where we'll look at people or folks who are doing things that we respect and see if they want to work with us. But yeah, there was like an all-out, getting a DM from Mr. Beast's Instagram is like not nothing. And so he just sent up, like hit up all of our creative team. It's like, hey, you want to hop on the chat? So he was successful with, I think, either two, definitely two, maybe three, pulling folks from our team.

13:34And yeah, I mean, a lot of folks actually, I think he would have been more successful if moving to North Carolina was not a requirement. But yeah, because he's so format oriented, because he's all about virality and now creating like an impact and that's kind of was our whole ethos. So having great storytellers that are primed to think about strong formats and storytelling on digital is a leg up, and I think that's what he wanted, was pulling people from our team for that reason. I mean, obviously, usually people look to pull one or two badasses from a company, but he's looking to pull all of your people.

14:14Yeah, I mean, I don't know if he was going to hire all of them, but he definitely wanted to talk to all of them, right? And maybe sniff out his favorite. But yeah, the people he did take were good people. So what is the secret then, I guess, for you guys? Because you mentioned a couple of keywords here. So creative, storytelling, and everything. And it's not easy. And talking about going viral, there's a whole formula to all this, and you figured it out, right? So what is it that made your people special? Did you train them up? What did you do? Yeah, so we tried a few things where it's like, what type of characteristics are we looking for?

14:50Or what experience should they have? And honestly, the best hires we've ever made, and this is what I recommend to most people, is we hired film school grads who were amazing narrative storytellers that had absolutely no experience with digital. In fact, some of our best creatives didn't really even watch YouTube at all. I'd be talking to them about examples, examples, and they just never seen any of them. And so taking someone who's a really strong creative storyteller, ideator, et cetera, and teaching them the sandbox rules of digital is far more successful and far easier than getting someone, there's a million YouTube strategists and people who are obsessed with YouTube.

15:44It's way harder to do the reverse of getting someone who gets digital but trying to teach them storytelling. So it takes a little bit of work, but by far the best success we've had is just amazing creatives, storytellers who frankly don't even know anything about digital. So where do you find these storytellers from? Because you know what's interesting to me, going back to Mr. Beast for a second, he's reversing now in terms of the super fast cuts and everything. It's like now it's a longer drawn-out video. There's storytelling, there's character building and everything. But where do you go to find these storytellers, right?

16:18Because it's like, I think everyone's starting to warm up to the fact that that's what real marketing is. Yes, it's true. It is true. I think it's very, so film school is where most of our hires came from. But it's not as simple as that. Like our creative director, who's still working with him to help vet creative talent. It's like obsessing over their portfolio. So vetting creatives by just looking at what they've made and how much heart and soul went into their pieces, how much were you moved by their piece? Were they effective in storytelling historically with what they've made? So generally, it's like once we have one or two really talented storytellers, then it becomes actually all about actually who they know and who they recommend.

17:13So I'd say your first one or two is the hardest, and that's turning over every rock, going to all the film schools in LA. I mean, it could be anywhere, but all the film schools in LA and talking to professors, students, who do they recommend, and then just obsessing over their portfolio and seeing who's made stories that actually move you. Who's been there, done that. Who's been there, done that, at least on storytelling. And then my job is to train them on the digital aspect. so you're a great storyteller how do you package that up to crush it on YouTube or crush it on TikTok um so that's how we do it yeah so what I'm hearing here is you're hiring people that have been there done that with storytelling and then training them on the facets around how YouTube works how digital works and everything so then you don't have to train them from scratch because that's arguably harder way harder yeah yeah yeah I like in fact we were testing this at some point.

18:10It's like, well, maybe we should just hire a creative who, we don't, you know, their portfolio isn't anything special, but they're just like obsessed with YouTube. And they get it and they like are a huge consumer. And it just, it almost never worked. Yeah. Because the people that are obsessed with YouTube, it's like, yes, average view duration, 30 second retention, the click-through rates and everything. But that's not storytelling. It's not, you're right. Yeah, exactly. It's, yeah, it's just way easier to be like, okay, you can tell a really good story well this is what like this is the the sort of framework to sort of you know the lens to sort of put that through as far as as far as youtube goes so yeah that worked way better for us yeah i wanted to take a second to talk about today's sponsor ahrefs ahrefs is my favorite seo tool in fact we use it at my ad agency single grain for internal uses and also for clients and we've been using for years and years and the cool thing is they have a great academy that you can go to if you're looking to just learn SEO and they have a free offering.

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19:39And now I have a sense for what they're doing in terms of strategy. So I can look at competitors. I can also look at our own stuff too, to figure out how we can optimize our own website. So you can just check out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. That's completely free. Or you can go to the Ahrefs Academy. That's also free as well to learn more. And that being said, back to the video. So Jubilee, I mean, the business of Jubilee, how did you guys make money? Yeah, I mean, it was, media company so it was majority advertising so you know platform ads accounted for a lot and we were lucky in that the content is viral on you know almost every platform we put it on so youtube facebook snapchat were a big driver of the business and then we had a so i like i built out our our sales team.

20:27So we had a biz dev working actively with advertisers, partners, sponsors to get them integrated into our content. That was a big part of our business, pretty profitable. I'd say collectively that was the vast majority of our business. But then we also had product. So we We had an apparel line. We have a card game based on one of our shows. But film and TV was probably our newest, but sizable size of our business. It's like, who are the streamers? Who are the networks we can partner with to take some of this format development to them, to Hollywood? And then the one that we're building out, what Jubilee is building out now is tech.

21:22So tech and experiences to follow, which is love is still a big interest and passion for Jubilee when it comes to human relationships and depth of relationship. There's nothing more deep than love. And there's just very low, like the NPS score of all the sort of dating services, apps is extremely low. And so our idea was like, how do we make the next generation for love ecosystem? Starting with content, we launched a sort of assessment digital platform, pushed that through the content, already have like a million users for that. And then it's what's the lot, like how do we compete at a bigger scale?

22:10And you said a million users for what? So we started with, it's almost like a Myers-Briggs assessment. So it's like, it's for love. And it's like, what type of lover are you? What compatibility? Like just deeper understanding of who you are in love. And we use that personality test in our content. So it's like, when we have contestants, we have them take the test. And so there's just this natural curiosity from the audience. I wonder what that is for me. And so just like organically has pushed a ton of users, you know, massive email list now. And that's been the seed for the app that has just launched, which is Nectar.

22:49And so slowly but surely, you know, we'll be building on top of that with the end goal being, you know, how do we conquer the love space and do it right? There's a bunch of these assessments, quiz companies that do, you know, multi-eight figures a year. and there's like a complete funnel so that's where it started from if I'm being honest I had a dream yeah this started from a dream I had which was because I read an article on what is that skills there's like a Gallup runs StrengthsFinder it's like I think I read that they have done collectively a billion in revenue and like unbelievable margins like they're just printing money with this thing yeah and yeah just my business mind was like that is really attractive that is really cool and so the very first thing we did you know i partnered with this um company called ground news they they create they have this uh sort of news bias tool we're like what if we what if we partner with them to get a custom uh quiz assessment into our middle ground show.

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26:27It was like, where do you consume your news from? How biased generally are these providers of news? And we would display their score on the show to our audience. And the audience was like, oh, this is super helpful. It gave us more context on the cast you invited. But then they all got really interested what their news bias score would be. And I think the video got 2 million views. We had like a 12 % of our audience converted into taking this test, which is astronomical from a, typically conversions on YouTube are, you know, 1%, 2%. So this to me became this like light bulb moment. Oh, we should, there's something here.

27:13this might be the foray into love is digital interaction that we can bake into our content that pushes people to learn something more deeply about themselves What was the conversion rate on these? For what? On these quizzes you said typical conversion rates 1-2 % what's this one? Oh so that one was the first trial we did was 12 % Wow Yeah So 12 % of the audience that watched this million million and a half two million view video went on to take this assessment. And then it also became like they would post their results on Twitter. It just became this moment. And that was like a light bulb for me where I had a dream and I woke up at 5 a.m.

27:55I just distinctly remember. I think I even have a screenshot still. I sent an email or a Slack message to the leadership team. I was like, I think this is our move. This could be how we enter in the love space. So that's the direction we're headed. But the long-term vision is experiences and truly competing at a global scale with bringing love to the next generation of people. I love that. And Jubilee is a good name for that. It's true. Yeah, it's true. Cool. So that's the future of it. And so one thing my chief of staff brought up before this interview, she's like, oh, Jubilee, that's so hype.

28:34And then like, so it says here, Cody Ko has 2.2 million subscribers on his backup channel and largely just reacts to Jubilee videos. And so it sounds like there's a lot of people copying your formats and everything. Like what's your take on all that? Well, it depends who you ask. I think everyone at Jubilee has a different feel about it. In general, there's no harm. There's no like, not harm, there's no hard feelings, I should say. Especially like Cody Ko is a friend. And I think reaction content, we've actually, I think we've been thrilled by Jubilee entering zeitgeist by like, you know, hundreds of millions of views from big, like PewDiePie had a whole series called Jubilee Reacts.

29:20And, you know, often sometimes his videos reacting to our videos would get more views than our actual videos. And sometimes it'd be like, well, damn, like, you know, I wish our videos got those viewership. But honestly, just being part of the conversation is really cool. It's really cool to see people at that caliber of these creators feel like what Jubilee is doing is so unique that it needs to be reacted to. And for them to... Anything they could be reacted to, anything they could be making content on, choose Jubilee. It's actually... I mean, I like that. I like that a lot.