What Eric Learned About YouTube By Paying MrBeast $8

0:00All right, so we're going to talk about what I learned from subscribing to Mr. Beast's paid Twitter feed. So let me give you some context here. Mr. Beast is one of the largest YouTubers on the planet, if not the largest YouTuber. And he's a very popular person. And he recently just opened up a paid Twitter feed subscription. And it basically costs you$5 a month and$8 a month if you're paying on Apple because Elon doesn't want to pay the tax. I subscribed and I took the liberty of paying the$8. So you didn't have to pay the$8. And I'm going to reveal some of the things that he has on his page. And Neil can also share some commentary here as I pull this up.

0:39So Neil, are you ready? I'm ready. Go for it. All right, here we go. So here's Mr. Beast. Now look at the first screenshot over here. So you want to read it out? Dude, I'm getting old. This text is real. Okay, I'll do it. I'll do it. If you're curious. I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll do it. If you're curious on the stats of a new video. Okay. So this is all this is showing is a YouTube studio screenshot of the stats of his latest video. And the video is titled ages one to 100 fight for$500 ,000. Okay, cool. So the views on this video is 10 million. Okay. This video on 10 million views, it's his third ranked video in the first four hours.

1:16Okay. Just understand the volume that he drives. But here's the crazy thing. If you're a YouTube nerd, like Neil and I are or Neil kind of is, your click-through rate matters a lot. His click-through rate is 9.9%. Just so you know, my average click-through rate on my YouTube videos, if I'm lucky, maybe it's like 1.52 % or so. So it is poo-poo compared to the 10 % here, which is considered below average for him. And the AVD or the average view duration, so both the click-through rate and the average view duration are critical metrics to optimize for. He has 14 minutes here. I have like three, four minutes or so.

1:50I don't know about you, Neil, but these stats are phenomenal. What do you think about these? How long is the video? Because under the title, it says first four hours and 17 minutes. No, that's first four hours, 17 minutes of being uploaded. Okay. Do you know how long the video is? Yeah, I'm checking right now. So I'm going to guess that this video is probably around 15 minutes or so. So as you talk. There's no way the video is around 15 minutes. That means his retention rate is almost 100%. You are right. It's 25 minutes. So it's still really high. Still really high. So 14 on 25 is 56%, which is he aims for about 60 % or so.

2:26The reason Mr. Beast is able to pull this off, he is really smart. He's great at what he does. But one of the big reasons he's able to pull this off is because his content appeals to the masses. Like you and I can't create, it's clickbait and it's really good content. I don't mean to say clickbait's bad. I don't think clickbait's bad. assuming you deliver on the content, which Mr. Beast more than does and he's proven to. But the lucky thing for him that Eric and I can't do, and I wish we could, is go after consumer audiences or mass appeal with us being in B2B, which is really, really tough. We could if we just change everything to make money online, but that's not what we do.

3:05Even if it was make money online, the issue that you end up running into is it just doesn't convert well for B2B. It's just like Gary Vaynerchuk. He creates a lot of great content out there. If I was 20 years old, this is what I would do. It's great content. It'll do really well, but it's not going to get him a client for VaynerMedia from that kind of content. So I think it's important to understand. I don't know if you know this, Neil, but Mr. B spends, I mean, I think in some cases spends like$25 ,000 for a thumbnail. I'm talking about a thumbnail, right? So the thumbnail makes a big impact, obviously, on your click-through rate.

3:35And then the average view duration. So I don't know if you've seen some Mr. B's video, but the way they edit it. There's constant cuts. And so you are constantly being taken into a new world and you're not getting bored. It's taking you to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. So it's highly engaging. So the way they go about picking the topic, the way they go about editing and the way they go about picking the thumbnail and also rotating the thumbnail out if it's not working well, that's a big thing. And I actually wanted to show you another one over here. So you see this difference over here?

4:02I'm going to pull this screenshot up. So the screenshot that we have over here, if you're not watching on YouTube, this was the original thumbnail. And you can see over here, he changed the thumbnail to be a little outside focused. And the performance went up by about 64 % or so. So it shows 64 % more views in the previous seven days just by changing a thumbnail. So there's some core lessons. Like the reason I'm showing you this is because this is his paid Twitter feed. He's showing some learnings here, but you have to learn how to distill the learnings. Any thoughts here? Oh, that's great. He's doing a ton of AB testing, which is what a lot of people lack with their YouTube channels.

4:37And on top of that, he has someone just focusing on these important elements of things like YouTube, which can drive a lot of traffic. And keep in mind too, YouTube is literally all he does, right? I mean, sure, he started his other businesses and all that, but that is his main focus. And I think for him still, he's in his early 20s or mid 20s now to be at such a young age and to lock in and focus and say, all I'm going to do is YouTube and that's it. And to say that at such a young age when he was like 12 years old or so, that says a lot about where he's going to go because Neil and I, we talked about on this on the phone the other day.

5:09It's just like, if you just focus and just keep going for a couple of decades, you're just going to build something great. I just don't think it can, unless you like absolutely suck. I just think it's hard to suck for a couple of decades. Um, so let me call this out too. He says, and this tweet over here says, if you're curious on how many of my views are shorts. So a lot of people, including consultants that I work with, they're like, Oh, it's all about shorts. We should just focus on shorts, shorts, shorts. And so for him, Mr. Beast, in the last 28 days, 64 % of his videos or 800 million views came from the long form videos and 35 % or 445 million of his views came from shorts.

5:48So I thought that was interesting. And he got about a million views from live stream. And then final one, did you see the one where he made a video on Squid Game, which got 400 million views? So he made a poll here and it says, if you guess correctly, I will share a screenshot. But also tell other YouTubers to sub, your boy going to drop some gold soon. So most people guessed that it made over$3 million in ad revenue on a 400 million video view. I want to see if he actually drops the screenshot in here in terms of how much it actually made. The show thread. Let's see what he's saying. Wrong. It was below 3 million.

6:24No screenshot for you. So wow, for a 400 million view video, it made less than$3 million. I can see that. I wouldn't have never guessed that it makes$3 million. $800 ,000. I don't know if it's$800 ,000. It could be a little bit more. It could be a little bit less. But you and I have both seen monetization from YouTube ads. At least I've seen it in mass quantity. And when it's consumer-based like this and it's not a specific vertical, EX like digital marketing, which has high CPCs. But Squid Game, just general entertainment, the ads aren't going to be as targeted and you're not going to generate as much revenue versus if it was a crazy B2B SaaS niche that was for enterprise.

7:05If I were to guess, Neil, I think it would be like 1.5 to 2 million or so. Some of these people are guessing a little higher. They're just doing the RPMs, like the revenue per thousand impressions or so. So most of them are guessing in that range. I would guess that his share is probably under 1.2 million for that video. Yeah, and I guarantee that video costs more money to make. Anyway, so that is it for today. I just want to share some Mr. Beast Gold so you don't have to subscribe to it. I already did it. save the$8. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate and view, subscribe, five stars, and we will see you tomorrow.