Why shorts can crush your YouTube longform performance, People who say there is no such thing as bad press is wrong, and Why business acquisitions CRUSH paid media

0:00Here's how shorts can crush your YouTube long form performance. So there's a guy over here, his name is Jack Settleman, sports creator. He abandoned a YouTube account that had nearly 600 ,000 subscribers and he started over from scratch. So now he's got a new channel, it has 20 ,000 subscribers, but it's all long form videos only. So it's a fraction of the old one, right? But his videos are getting way more views from tens of thousands to more than 100 ,000 on the rivalry between India and Pakistan and cricket, right? He used to have a bunch of short form stuff talking about attending or mascot getting beer poured on them or whatever.

0:38But the main thing now is just like, dude, there's a lot of people saying that shorts actually harm your channel. And I was talking to a YouTube guy the other day and Josh, Josh is amazing. So Josh works with George Gammy or Ken McGraw-Roy. He's like, dude, your YouTube channel is pathetic. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, dude, you do all this short form stuff. if you do like these long form, like interviews with people where you talk about like dating or whatever. And I'm like, tell me more. Right. And he's giving it to me hard. And this guy's like 21 years old. And, um, he's like, no man, like, dude, you do so much interesting stuff in business.

1:10I was like, okay, tell me how you do it with your clients. Um, he's like, first of all, the short form kills the channels. I don't care about short form at all. He's like super intense about YouTube. He's like, you should be getting at least two to 3 million views per month on long for. I'm like, tell me more. Right. And then he's like, look, all I do with my clients is I sit with them and I understand, I listened to their soundbite. So you and I were doing, let's say you're on calls for five days. Imagine if you have someone just listening to you the whole time, there's going to be at least one or two interesting things you say in a day, probably more, right?

1:37Those are your seed pieces of content, but you and I never think about that stuff. Right. So what he does is he'll come on with the title. He'll come on the packaging for the thumbnail. And then from there, um, the guy will put out the, the creator will put out the video without even thinking about it. So you and I might just step in and start recording. And those videos do perform way better. I was like, can you do that for me? He's like, yeah. So we're going to start doing that. But I do feel like the short forms haven't really helped my channel much. And I think they do hurt the channel. So it's just interesting that this guy started from scratch.

2:07And he used to make$8 a month per month from ad revenue on shorts with 600 ,000 subscribers. Now he makes$765 per month. So with the people that he's working with, are they getting 2 million views a month? Yeah. They are. In a long form business content. Yeah. Really 2 million views. Like what's one of the users name? We can just look it up on social. Go to George Gammon. George. G-A-M-M-O-N. Let's see. Investing through real estate. So you do that one. I'm going to do his other channel. Let's see if this guy is real or full of it. You want the last 30 days video views? No, no, I'm looking at it now.

2:49177. You want to know why I brought this up? No, but you have to look at his other channel. He's combining. But the other channels, it's down. Okay, here's what you see. This one has 523 ,000 subscribers. 560K on Rebel Capitalist, right? But you see it's down a million in the last 28 days. So it was at 1.5 before, and these are all long form. What's a Rebel Capitalist? That's also his channel. So he helps with both the channels. On Rebel Capitalist, he actually spends more time on it. rebel capitalists what is it on Putin accuses dude he's going after mainstream stuff housing crash Putin evil politicians a lot of it is click down now let's go with this guy over here this is Ken McElroy are you searching it?

3:38by the way George listens to this podcast he spoke at the Beverly Hills event He was the first guy. He's amazing. I'm not saying he's bad. I'm talking about the guy who... So here, Ken McElroy,$1 million in the last 30 days, but it's down$400K. How do you spell it? M-C-E-L-R-O-Y? M-C-E-L-R-O-Y. Let's see what his video content is all about. How to raise$43 million in six A's. He'll never be successful. He's got a fund. Yeah. Your nine year plan to retire with real estate. I'm buying 90 million. I'm curious to see how much revenue this kind of stuff produces. I would consider some of this, I'm not saying this is bad content.

4:25This looks like great content, but I would consider this more clickbaity. And let's say if he's raising money and he has a fund, I don't see this content getting him like Like a Blackstone giving him$100 million. Let me give you some numbers. So the way he measures the success of this channel, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share this, but let's just say originally, let me just do the math on this. Okay, so basically he's looking for accredited investor. Sorry, not accredited investor. He wants a qualified investor, right? Qualified investor application. That's what he's optimizing for. And it's increased by 24x off his YouTube.

5:04And so I'm like, oh, that's actually pretty impressive. Because it's only been like a couple months, right? So I'll let you know how this experiment goes. It can work for consumer-based stuff or going after like what he's saying, not accredited investors, but just mass-scale people who could potentially invest. If you're looking for... Not a Blackstone. Yeah, Blackstone or big B2B deals or anything like that, I just don't see these channels getting 2 million views. One, I don't think the content that appeals to those people is going to drive 2 million views. and B, getting 2 million views is not going to get one of those guys to give you a$100 million check.

5:38I think the reason he did, and this will be the final thing, but the reason Ken did this conference with Robert Kiyosaki, he had a RFK come speak as well. The reason he did that is because everyone there is like a real estate investor and I'm pretty sure he's trying to get checks to come in, right? And I think that's what he's, he wouldn't do this, he wouldn't spend time on this if he's not getting benefit from it. And then what Josh told me was that the channel wasn't doing that well before he kind of came back in. So we'll see what happens. It's still early days, but hopefully it works out. I do have the same skepticism that you have.

6:05Try it for my channel, but it can't be sensational stuff. I do like where he's thinking. He's like, dude, just talk about your business stuff. I'm like, okay, if you focus on that angle, I'm down with that. Talking about your business stuff won't drive too many leads of qualified corporations. We'll see. We'll see what happens. For us, it's talking about the latest marketing experiments because it makes you look smart with marketing. You know what I mean? It's got to focus around that. Cool. I'm curious to see how it goes. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association.

6:33This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need. And the group responds, great experience members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well.

7:04And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. I actually have something here and you're familiar with this topic. Everyone here is probably familiar with Bolt.com, the e-commerce company that helps boost conversion rates. and you know i wrote something here in our spreadsheet in which people always say there's no such thing as bad press and i believe they're wrong and bolt is a great example of this did you see what happened recently with them so let me let me give um some backstory here so when i moved to miami 2021 so this guy lived in miami uh ryan breslow and i was like because he was like hot shit right he was always tweeting he's always getting so much reach per tweet he's like this is how we run our company.

7:58Everything seems so innovative. I was like, oh my god, this is amazing. You know how in a startup, you need to basically pay out money if you want your shares, if you leave the company. He's like, oh, we'll pay for it. And people are like, how are you going to pay for that? It's a lot of money. But anyway, this company was high-flying. They raised a bunch of money, and they were kind of like a darling. So go ahead, I'm setting up the story for you. Yeah, so Bolt raised a lot of money. I don't know how much they raised. Was it over a billion or no? No, I think it was a couple hundred million. Bolt.com raises.

8:32Let's see, total. Bolt has already raised nearly one billion from investors. So they raised a little bit less than that. And he's currently trying to raise, or the company's trying to raise$450 million. And he wants to come back. He wants to come back. And he sent out an email saying a lot of investors are on board. and some of those investors that he said were on board claimed they did not sign off so those investors as well as a few other big ones like blackrock and hedosopia and united ventures and the list goes on and on have filed a restraining order in attempt to halt bolt series f and they got lawyers involved like you look at this you're a customer of this company you're like man this is just too messy.

9:20I should start searching for alternatives. Yep. And maybe there's something to be said when you have a very charismatic CEO that's out there, like active on Twitter all the time, but then Elon kind of disproves that. So because he's on Twitter all the time, you know what I mean? But it hurts. I believe it's hurt Elon more than helped him. Yeah. Yeah. So this guy was on Twitter all the time and it seemed like he was doing multiple things as well. He had multiple different businesses.

9:51I don't know if that's going to work out for them. I think Bolt is basically not going to work out. We'll see. I don't think Bolt as a company is doing anywhere near as well as it used to be doing. No, I know their revenues were... It was like a payments company, right? Yeah. I know it was hot for a little bit and then it just shot straight down. That's what I remember. Yeah, because a lot of other people can just release the same features to make your checkout flow easy and then Bolt is not as needed. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation.

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10:52And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside. You know what I want to talk about? So I did this segment with Syed a couple earlier this year. And this segment, so I used overlap to pull this segment from the interview that we did. And it pulled this good segment. So here's why business acquisitions crush paid media. So, and it makes sense at the end of the day. It's like, okay, you know, Syed's got a couple of WordPress businesses. And his whole thing is like, look, in my space, maybe I can buy a company for two, three X on revenue.

11:32The math works out better than PPC because you just map everything out. The CAC ends up being cheaper than paid media. You get clients, right? Maybe you can acquire like an email list. You can acquire a bunch of traffic, things like that. It's almost like a one plus one equals three situation because ultimately there are three ways to grow a business, right? You have, you can acquire new customers, you can expand customers, or you can reduce churn. When you buy a company, you can potentially do all three of these things. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested.

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12:35This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. Yeah, but I look at buying a company as not you either buy a company or run paid media. Ideally, you should run paid media as long as it's profitable, which I know you agree with. And why not buy businesses when the business can afford it or your own balance sheet can afford it? I think this is a good hook to get people in just to think about it a little differently.

13:14Because I think learning about business acquisitions, even if you're an SEO, I think it's helpful to learn these things, learn how to buy websites, learn how much value. It's not just an SEO thing. It's like, what business value is a website going to add? So take that for what it is. you know, almost every single business we've bought, when we first reach out to them, we're typically not able to do a deal. Six months to a year later, we end up reconvening and a deal ends up happening. Or they come back or you guys go back? A mixture of both. We've had both scenarios. Sometimes we become more flexible on the price and they become a little bit more flexible.

13:51Or in most cases, it's a combination of both. And then when we're going through paperwork and all the contracts and all the diligence, a lot of times the number that they wanted is not what they end up getting. And it's lower because there's a lot of stuff that's off. Like people would be like, I did a million dollars or 5 million in profit this year. Well, when we got your account or your books audited, your 5 million turned into 4.3 million. So you do retrade the deals pretty frequently? Almost every deal has retraded a little bit in price. Okay. And not because we are not because you're sharks.

14:29No. And it has nothing to do with us reneging, but if you didn't hit your numbers and we're buying a business, let's say you do 5 million in profit and we're promising you$30 million. Well, if we, we always get books audited and your audited books show you did$4 million. Why would we pay you$30 million when you're doing 4 million instead of 5. The price should come down because you did less than you claimed when we gave you the offer. And we typically in our contracts write on a multiple of EBITDA. So the numbers change and it's not like we're renegotiating. It's more so the contract just adjusts based on what their numbers really are.

15:09Yeah, that makes sense. So, I mean, if you guys want to learn this stuff, there's a book called Buy Then Build. There's also Agile M &A. And there's a lot of great podcasts out there. There's one called Acquiring Minds. You can listen to that one as well. All right. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, go to markingschool.io slash agency. It is now application only. So you can't even pay to get in if you wanted to get in now. You have to apply. And so that is it for today. But other than that, we'll see you tomorrow.