An Honest Review of the Dude Perfect App

0:00The Colin and Samir Show is supported by Microsoft Copilot. This is something I thought I would never say, but can I share with you my favorite prompt? I mean, like when you say something like that, I have to say yes. Were you going to say no? No, but okay. Just let me hear it. So when I'm researching for a guest or I need to know a lot about a subject matter, I say, make me a podcast about. And when you do that, you're going to get a short blurb about that subject. And then in like two minutes, you're going to get a podcast. So check this out. Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. Picture this, a guy working the front desk at a hotel, making lacrosse videos in his spare time, completely unaware that he's about to become one of the most influential voices in the creator economy.

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1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. What's up, everyone? Welcome to this episode of Creator Support. On today's episode, we talk about the new Dude Perfect app. Give our honest review and explore what it means for the future of creators. We also reflect on our experience interviewing the CEO of YouTube. And we address some criticism that we got from our audience. All right. If you make it to the deep end, let us know. All right. Our first question comes from the subreddit from GotYamYati.

1:47There we go again. That's why we stopped reading the names. That's why we stopped reading the username. From the subreddit. Okay. The question is, Dude Perfect app. Would love to hear CNS's thoughts on the new Dude Perfect app. Has anyone looked into it? So when we first started this career on YouTube, there was two terms that were brought up all the time, bundling and unbundling. Now, I'm going to explain what that means. So when YouTube first came about, when people started moving content to YouTube, basically the conversation was around the unbundling of content, meaning that when we were growing up, you had to buy a cable package to watch anything, right?

2:22So if you wanted ESPN, you bought the sports package. You had to buy all these other sports channels, the tennis channel, all these channels, so that you could watch the sport you wanted to watch. That was called the bundling of content, typically done by cable providers. As we moved into streaming, everything started to get unbundled, right? So now on YouTube specifically, you can watch a specific piece of content that you want to watch. You don't have to buy a big package to watch what you wanted to watch. Also, we have Disney Plus, we have Paramount Plus. Like every studio and platform wanted to have their own home with their own content that they could charge for.

2:59Right. So over the past decade, content got unbundled. Progressively, like over time, just got more and more unbundled. Now we're starting to see that unbundling take shape in a way that creators like the Sidemen and like Dude Perfect are even launching their own content environments. Dude Perfect just launched their own app. It's available on mobile as well as on TV. And - Are you telling me that creators are unbundling themselves? No, I'm not. I mean, I guess maybe, but - Sounds like you are. I think what they're doing is continuing to push the agenda of the unbundling of entertainment to a point where potentially we are going to soon at some point reach peak unbundlement.

3:45Unbundlement, okay, got it. and have to rebundle things to be able to access content. Because essentially now you're paying for so many different subscriptions and finding content in so many different places that it might just get too much. Okay, so what you're saying is fast forward to the future, right? Right now, Sidemen have not unbundled themselves, but they put themselves in their own environment. Dude Perfect has put themselves in their own environment with this app. What if other sports creators start to do that? You have all of these standalone apps, creators who've been unbundled, take those creators, bundle them back together.

4:19That's right. And there's like a sports. I'll buy the creator sports package. I'll take a little bit of Dude Perfect. I'll take some Jesser. I don't think it'll be the creator sports package. I think that'll just be a sports app. Like the Dude Perfect app will be potentially the kids sports app. So let's take a step back and explain it. You know, like what is the Dude Perfect app? Actually, before we get there, Let's talk about what we did this weekend. We held a brunch with a ton of creators and Discord in West Hollywood in one of the nicest homes I've ever seen. Yeah, it was really great. Like a beautiful location.

4:56It was awesome. So this was in celebration of Discord officially announcing server shops that are available now. If you have your own Discord community, you can now sell products, digital downloads. Ever heard of my font? Exactly. We sell Colin's handwriting in our server shop. Actually, the second highest selling product in all server shops in the beta. How about that? Pretty good. Also, I think the next highest requested font is yours. Right. Also pretty exciting if you look at the charts. That's true. But I don't even know what my handwriting is. Every time I take pen to paper, it looks totally different.

5:30Not only does Discord have server shops, they also have server subscriptions, which offer creators and community builders an opportunity to create private channels. You can offer private Q &A sessions. It's just a really great opportunity for creators to offer more to their audiences and create monthly recurring revenue for themselves. Server shops are now available to everyone. So if you run a Discord community, click the link in our description, learn more about how you can launch your own server shop. And thanks to all the creators who came out to our Discord brunch. And shout out to everyone in the Discord.

6:01As of today, the day that we're recording, we have 9 ,111 members in the Discord. We're almost at 10K. Almost at 10 ,000. That's pretty amazing. You know, that though is another example of the like creators, you know, building their own environments for their communities. And just to come back to the Dude Perfect example, I actually think this is a really significant moment for the creator economy with the Dude Perfect app. So the Dude Perfect app is available on mobile as well as on TV. Uh-oh. That's a big deal. Now, when I first saw that this was launched, my immediate thought was, wow, that's really smart because Dude Perfect speaks to a young audience.

6:41And as more and more content gets onto YouTube, as it gets harder for parents to trust their kids navigating YouTube, right? Like YouTube can recommend all kinds of things. Things can be made for kids that maybe aren't fully reviewed that, you know, potentially have some subject matter that isn't great for kids. But if a parent's like, you know what? I trust the Dude Perfect brand. I like the Dude Perfect brand, you are allowed to watch the Dude Perfect app, not the YouTube app. That is a very significant thing that Dude Perfect just did to say, hey, this is a trusted app for you to watch good for you sports content.

7:19And it makes so much sense because it's a big part of their brand. When we were hanging out with them at the beginning of the year, they said that their mission statement was to be the most trusted brand in entertainment. Right. This is exactly in line with that. Create an even more trusted location. Right. Where you as the creator control absolutely everything, take full responsibility for all of the content in there and create the safe environment that fits with your brand. And now when you think about the opportunity, so right now I have the Dude Perfect app up. There's a homepage where they have, you know, content in here.

7:51There's also exclusive content. There's Dude Perfect app exclusives, which is like bloopers, extras. One of the most interesting things is that it's kind of like YouTube where there's a shorts feed. and you can actually swipe through a shorts feed of Dude Perfect Shorts. You can also then go into playlists where you have their most viewed videos. There are different formats. We're talking longs. We're talking long form videos. There's anything from four minute videos all the way to 40 minute videos that you can watch. They're segmented by type. It's a very interesting environment where my anticipation is that there will be advertising that supports this app.

8:30Yeah, because right now it is free. It's free. And when you join, you have to identify if you're youth or an adult, right? So if you're young, if you're, let's say, 12, 13 years old, likely there won't be advertising or it'll be a different environment. If you're an adult, you can be advertised too. Now, I think what we'll see is unique advertising that they can sell themselves, right? So let's say Coca-Cola wants to do a deal with Dude Perfect. Dude Perfect is going to have YouTube programmatic advertising that's run through Google and YouTube, right? But if they want to sell a specific campaign, okay, Coca-Cola is doing a specific campaign with Dude Perfect, they can take over the app.

9:10That's really valuable. Now, additionally, I think there's going to be a premium tier where you pay a monthly fee, but my anticipation is that's going to be for live sports. I think the opportunity here is that the NBA, the NFL, all who are trying to attract a younger audience as dude. Perfect has a young sports enthusiast audience in a dedicated environment. There'd be an opportunity to stream live games into there either while dude. Perfect is watching or just stream them into there. You know, it could be different commentary. Could be dude. Perfect commentary. It could be like more fun commercials in the middle of them that are more relevant to kids.

9:49There's a lot that can be done here just by aggregating and segmenting their audience to here's the people who are watching the Dude Perfect app. Yeah. Right now, the value prop when you watch the opening video is that you can get, yeah, bloopers behind the scenes, but they also say that you can get the videos early. Yes, that's true. That's a huge part of it. It's like, if you're a big Dude Perfect fan, this is a free place to get early access because normally that's reserved for like a Patreon or a membership, right? Normally people pay for that. Yeah. That's a huge value prop that they just included.

10:19And like you were saying with live sports, there's so many other places this app can go. But the most important thing I think is how they launched it. The fact that it's free, it's safe for parents and for kids and viewers, it's early. Like that's a no brainer. So are there any downsides to launching this app for a creator like Dude Perfect who has the scale that they have where it's amazing to me how successful they've been for as long as they've been on the platform. They do not, there's no like decline in the dude perfect brand. It's only gone up over the past decade where it's just like every year it feels like that brand continues to increase in value, increase in visibility and increase in strength.

10:59What are the downsides of creating your own app environment? I don't think a downside is going to be a decrease in viewership on YouTube. Right. Right. I think no matter what, they're probably still going to find a lot of scale algorithmically on YouTube. Yeah. I mean, what's the average viewership of a Dude Perfect video right now on YouTube? I would guess right now somewhere between 10 and 12 million. I'm looking at it. It's between six and eight million. OK. OK, so six and eight million. So let's just say a million people go over to the app. That'd be a huge win. That'd be insane. A huge win, right?

11:38A million people not watching on YouTube. It is a lot of people, but I think the difference between, you know, between six and eight million and five and seven million is not that vast on YouTube. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like if they, if they actually did lose a million people watching regularly on YouTube, which is unlikely, that wouldn't have that big of an impact, but it would be a huge impact to have an app that has a million monthly active users. Yeah, it may be more impactful and more beneficial because you can message to the people who are the most engaged. It's a more specific grouping of their audience that they'll know what types of things they would want to buy, what they'd be interested in, and what could be advertised in that environment as opposed to like the more general YouTube environment.

12:24The big question, and you mentioned this before, the big question for me is do they start platforming new talent inside of this app? Are we going to start to see the next generation of, you know, young sports creators get shows on the Dude Perfect app? Talking a little bit of bundling here. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about like Nebula, who we talked about before, right? They're operating programming in that app. They're picking up shows to play in their app. Dude Perfect can easily turn to other creators and quote, unquote, buy shows, buy programming. They can even buy early releases, right? They can say, hey, you know what?

13:02Give us your episode a week early before you put it on YouTube. I don't know if they would go that route. I think they would create original programming with new talent, but I don't know if they would take other creators and bring them in unless they know for sure that those creators, their goal is also to create the most trusted brand in entertainment. Like to be, to maintain that safe environment. The question is though, can you get athletes, can you get athletes to shoot, like can you make a show that includes pro athletes that Dude Perfect doesn't need to be in, but follows some brand ethos of Dude Perfect?

13:35Can you get, you know, the Kansas City Chiefs to do a trick shot video, right? Why the Chiefs? Because they're the best team in the league. Travis Kelsey, Taylor Swift. Yeah. That's why. Yeah, then you're gonna get a lot more app users. But yeah, you get them to do a format, right? I'm just thinking about this in the context of they kind of just launched their own TV network. So yes, they've become unbundled. But does this become a bundled sports app where you pull a bunch of stuff? Is everyone listening and watching following the bundle and unbundled? Do you know where we're at right now? Definitely.

14:05We're somewhere between bundle and unbundled. They're definitely following. Okay. So there was a more mainstream entertainment comp that happened this week as well that I think people should look into, which is Max, previously HBO Max, just added Bleacher Report as a brand into the app that at$9.99, you can pay for a live sports package within Max. That I think is a important thing to start watching of saying, okay, it is happening. We are starting to bundle these things back up. And the bundling is important, but the live sports component is additionally important. That I think live sports will become one of the most valuable programming pieces in the coming years, especially with the rise of AI, with the rise of like homogenous content, like that is going to be something that I think the leagues are going to go, the rights can go into all these different places.

14:59Yeah, so let me connect that for everyone. The AI and the homogenous content, the reason that sports will become even more valuable is because it will become one of the very few absolutely verifiably human real things that's unscripted that you're watching. In a sea of things that are made with AI that are somewhat artificial for a number of reasons, live sports is like the one thing that will remain human, unscripted, verifiably. This is not AI. This is human. There may be like augmented reality experiences that go along with watching sports, but whatever happens there, that's what happens. So, so far in using the Dude Perfect app for a total of one day.

15:42I am very impressed with it. And I think it represents a bigger shift in the creator economy right now of moving your audience into a specific environment. And these businesses like the Sidemen and Dude Perfect will likely become the TV networks of the future. Like they have the opportunity in 10 years to be the HBO, to be the ESPN, right? Dude Perfect will become the ESPN of the future. And that will start by saying, come off platform and join this dedicated environment that I have now. Now that I have my own network, I can add programming to this network. I actually think it's the beginning of them creating their own little studios and offerings that will eventually end up getting bundled into packages like with ESPN Plus and with other streamers.

16:31True, true. There's already, especially in sports, there's a meshing of like Pat McAfee, right? It's all over ESPN now. Right. Like I think if anything, in sports seems to be happening first where like creators are building really powerful audiences and then like getting, finding ways to collaborate with traditional networks. It'll be interesting to watch. I do think it's like, if you have not subscribed to some of these or just like download the Dude Perfect app and just play around with it because it's interesting to start to see where all this is going. In our conversation with Jordan Schwarzenberger from The Sidemen, you know, he said Side Plus was the biggest revenue driver for the company.

17:08that's really significant to start to look at right now. All of this to say, you know, we did release our interview with the CEO of YouTube this week. And it's interesting that we asked him about this concept of like, why not have some of these alternative monetization options within YouTube? Where like, why is it, they do have these options, right? But it is very expensive for us to launch membership on YouTube. But he was talking about how he likes that the home of these creators is YouTube. They will always have to use YouTube to drive discovery for these platforms. Yeah. I think for me, it just shows that advertising on long form content is clearly without a doubt, like the bread and butter of YouTube.

17:53Yeah. And any really strong push in a direction towards like channel memberships or even really deep into like live streaming is potentially hurtful to the bread and butter of the business. Yeah. So like it's the offerings there. You can do it. Yeah. But it's clear that it doesn't fully fit into the business model. And if it was too successful, it could hurt the business model. Lessons here. Creators, own your content so that it can be placed in other places. Right? Like when you do bring it into an app, make sure you own it and you have all the rights to it and everything. and also like bring your audience into your own environment.

18:33I know I just said that, but like that I do think is getting increasingly important. Like our newsletter, our Discord community, like bring your audience into other environments. All right. Before we move on to the next question. Yeah. I do just want to take a pause and acknowledge the interview with the CEO. I know we just talked about it, but like reading the comments, it was crazy to see. I read a comment from Tucker Pierce who has been watching our videos for years or maybe over 10 years. Yeah. And to see a comment from him on that video this many years later and to think that people have watched so much of this evolution is crazy to me.

19:08And that interview could feel like a part of just a bigger trip because it was. We did a lot of other things on that trip. It's easy to overlook it, but it's a huge milestone, I think, in our career and what we've been doing. It's the first time we've done anything like that. Of course. Yeah, it's crazy. I said this over the weekend I was speaking, and I said this, that it felt like for a very long time we loved the platform and it didn't love us back. And it's a very surreal experience to feel loved back. And this is an example of that, of getting the opportunity to sit down with Neil, to be the guys that are trusted enough to have that opportunity, I think is like, it's It is a testament to like us working really hard at this.

19:58But also just like the moment in time, it is like, I'm so grateful for that opportunity. That was crazy. Like that was a really cool opportunity. I was way more nervous than I anticipated. Yeah, and we only had about an hour. Yeah, which was scary and intense. Yeah, this is different because when you do this interview, you know that not only, you know, our audience, all of you will be listening and watching, it will be new creators who are like, oh, I don't really know Colin and Smear maybe, but I'm going to, of course, I'm going to watch this one. And then you have people just in the tech world.

20:27And then maybe some people even like in the finance world, like this is. Yeah. And there's no way to do it in a way where everyone thinks you did a great job, right? Like that's just impossible. I knew that going into it. It's like, you're going to sit down and people are going to be pissed about what you didn't ask. People are going to be excited about how you did drive the conversation. And what was really nice was as we got into it, like Neil was very easy to talk to. You know, there's obviously stuff he can't say and can't talk about. But I thought as we got into like giving feedback to him and actually talking about products, the conversation was really fun.

21:02I think also for us as creators, we got to build a deeper relationship with him and have different context on the CEO of YouTube. It was just like, I don't know, man. It was a surreal experience. It's a real experience to think about, you know, when we started to be like, oh, one day we'll sit down with the CEO of this platform. That's crazy. Yeah. In the last couple of years, I thought it would happen, actually. I just thought it would be Susan. Neil came out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it became an aspiration for me when Casey did his interview with Robert Kinsel, who at the time was the chief business officer of YouTube, who we also interviewed on this podcast.

21:36I remember Emma visited the YouTube offices and had Susan on the channel, and then Susan showed up on a couple of other channels. Yeah, I want to acknowledge Ludwig's interview with Susan because I think Ludwig paved the path for like that CEO interview and tonally being the most himself in that interview of being like, I'm not going to change my tone. I'm going to be Ludwig. And I think he did an excellent job with that and got to like really good questions. Yeah. Which the tone was a concern of ours. Yeah. We wanted to make sure that it was clear that we are creators and this guy is the head of the platform.

22:12not, we're not like journalists in the traditional sense. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And we wanted to represent creators at large, which is hard to do, you know, like wanting to represent the interests of, of creators at large and our own interests. So let us know how we did. It was fun. Interesting. Hope to do it again. And also we got AB testing, Colin. We talked to, we talked to Neil about that, Yeah. But, uh, we ran our first to be specific ABC test. Cause you can upload three thumbnails. Um, calling it an ABC test to me is like calling Twitter X. I'm just like, well, it's an AB test. You, you, oh no, I tweeted that.

22:54Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I tweeted ABC testing. Yeah. Look, I'm not guilty. Sorry. I X'd it. I used ABC and Slack, but I didn't like it. Yeah. Yeah. I've been pushing that. I've been like the annoying guy correcting everyone. Yeah, putting like an asterisk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's ABC. So we ran our first ABC test. And it was really interesting to see because this morning I started logging into YouTube on different accounts and seeing different versions of the thumbnail. And then at one point saw a very consistent version across all three accounts. And that was the one that won, quote unquote, I guess it's the winner.

23:25Yeah. The thing I really like about this is that it is based on watch time. I think that's like incredibly important. the variance from the lowest performing to the highest performance is significant. So we had one thumbnail that I, that was my favorite thumbnail. I thought it represented our brand the best. That was the worst performing. It had 30 % watch time. That was my favorite thumbnail too. Yeah. I just thought it was, it represented our brand the best. One that I knew would probably drive clicks, but it didn't feel as connected to our brand. That was the best performing at 36.7 % watch time.

23:59So really interesting to see. I think the future of this tool, like how we'll use it, I could see us continuing to use this. I like this. Obviously, we should be 100 % happy with all three because you don't know. I wonder how this is going to change. Does it keep running? I'm not sure. I think we can issue a new test if we want. Yeah. I'd be interested to see after day one, how does it change in week one and week 1.5? Yeah, and what we're going to start doing is issuing on even other videos, past videos in our library and creating new thumbnails and seeing if we're able to increase watch time.

24:34So I think the most interesting thing, and we talked about this with Neil, is when this becomes AI generated. When these are automated, where it's like, here's kind of the text, here's some of the assets. Here's kind of our brand book. You can imagine a Canva-style interface where it's like, hey, here's the font I use. This is the yellow background we want. Right, we can have YouTube buy my font from our service shop. of text. We want one, whatever. Yes. Generate something. Here's the images. Yeah. Generate based on the users. So then it goes even more hyper-targeted. Which is very Netflix. It's very Netflix.