Ronaldo joins YouTube, AI scraping on YouTube and the 25 most influential creators

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.

0:38Today, we're diving into the remarkable story of Colin Rosenblum. Wow. Did you pay it to say that? That's crazy. That's very kind. It's crazy, but it's my favorite way to learn about a subject matter. I'm learning about so much more now that I can turn this research into like a seven minute podcast that I can listen to just when I'm walking. Did you tell it that I worked at the front desk of a hotel? Dude, the prompt is just make me a podcast about Colin from Colin and Samir. That's it. I may be biased, but I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm hooked. So if you guys haven't checked out Copilot, check it out.

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. Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to this episode of The Colin and Samir Show. On today's episode, we're talking about Cristiano Ronaldo and Tom Brady joining YouTube and giving our honest feedback on their channels. We're also talking about the top 25 most influential creators according to Rolling Stone. And then we dive into the world of AI scraping and recap Hank Green's video about how our data is being used by Google.

1:47If you make it to the deep end of this episode, you will know it because it kind of hits you in the face. You will definitely know it. We'll know it. We are also audio only this week. We're in between trips and we're actually heading to Dallas for VidSummit next week. If you're going to be in Dallas for VidSummit, we'll see you there. Love to hang out. Come to our panels. We got panels just about every day. Panels on panels on panels. Come hang out. We'll be doing some live creator support. We'll be doing some activations with our partners at Spotter. It's going to be a great time. So if you're in Dallas for VidSummit, come hang out with us.

2:18All right. If you make it to the deep end, again, you'll know, but just let us know.

2:28All right. I think this is technically the last episode of the summer. Does that feel right? Ah, I'm trying to live in a world where the summer also includes September and maybe even October. Oh. Is that okay with you? I just would rather not. I don't know. I have this thought still from like being in school that like September is the school year starts. That means it's the end of the summer. Yeah, that's a world I'm trying not to live in currently. I want to extend summer. If I could have it my way, I would. So I'm bringing this up because as I look back, I feel like it's been a pretty wild summer on YouTube.

3:05A lot has happened this summer. Something relatively notable recently is the addition of two creators, Tom Brady and Cristiano Ronaldo. Two fresh creators, up and coming, rising stars of the YouTube platform. Now, Ronaldo broke some crazy records day one. The MKBHD tweet was amazing. It said like, congrats, Ronaldo, on 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, 4 million, 5 million, 6 million. It went up to 20 million subscribers today. and I was like that's amazing the guy went the guy crossed 20 million subscribers in one day of creating a YouTube channel he is breaking records and he's also breaking all the rules yes of YouTube yes he is I maybe there are no rules but it doesn't when I look at his channel well here's the question he's making like one minute videos three minute videos that are kind of just like high like lifestyle highlights does that sound right like I went and played pickleball and here's some like dude the paddle video here's a film burn and like some the paddle video is insane the paddle video has 16 million views it is an iphone clip of him playing paddle with his sons that is cut in imovie 2014 with like star transitions that has a 10 second full intro that's like cr7 videos and like the style of every thumbnail is completely different.

4:38There are new fonts on every thumbnail. There's no consistency to the colors. It's chaos. It's anarchy. I'm losing it. It's anarchy. It is. You look at that and you're like, oh, if someone wanted to, you know, those videos of, I don't know if you've seen this, Josh Peck on Instagram does these videos where he goes like, how's your day going? And he's like eating a ice cream cone. Okay. He's got an ice cream cone in his hand. He goes, how's your day going? And then he lifts the ice cream cone and he bites the end of it, like the tip on the bottom. And he goes, how about now? How about now? Because he's done something that's like aggravating and weird.

5:15That's how I feel about Ronaldo's YouTube channel. That took me a second to follow, but it's like, how's your day going? And I look at Ronaldo's channel and I'm like, well, now it's going terribly. Now it's going terribly. Because this guy got to 50 million subscribers in five days by doing the chaos method. Yeah. Everyone, everyone has to start somewhere. Few people start at 50 million subscribers and upwards of 40 million views on some of your videos. Now, he's got this format where him and his wife sit next to each other and they do like these kind of funny reacting videos, one of which is like his wife is reacting to his outfits.

5:52That's a fun format. I'm fine with that. It's overproduced, in my opinion. Like, that's going to fizzle out. The thing that shocked me about his channel is that there's no multi-language audio. Ronaldo's content is in Portuguese. And what is surprising is that I went to click in the settings. I've become so accustomed to the fact that like major channels have multi-language audio. I was like, cool, I'll watch this in English. It does not have an English track. And that's like, that to me was like pretty surprising. A lot of it's surprising to me. I'm looking at this thumbnail right now, this title and thumbnail, the golden button for my golden kids.

6:26In the thumbnail, it says a golden button for my golden kids. Sure. You don't repeat. Samir you don't repeat that's the thing that got you about that video when you click into that video it's like a grainy iPhone video of him holding up his gold play button and then it ends yeah it doesn't make any sense it's complete chaos yeah okay so feedback for Ronaldo and Ronaldo's team if they're listening because we're not look we don't roast people we're not here just to roast Ronaldo sure sure right I think we got lost there's something that feels good about it I know that's not who we are it's very cathartic to roast Ronaldo I can see why channels like to do that, but that's not what we do.

7:02Okay. Okay. First thing I would do is I would come up with concepts here that bump the length, right? I think people are willing to watch Ronaldo at 20 minutes. Yeah. His views are astronomical. Now imagine if he was uploading at above 20 minutes, to be honest, people could sit and really dig in. Here's what I would do. I would, I would, that's my first piece of advice. I would just pull popular Conde Nast formats and do them with Ronaldo. 10 things Ronaldo can't live without. I would do the Architectural Digest, his home tour. I would do 73 questions with Ronaldo and I would just own those style of formats.

7:40Just to kick things off. Get to know Ronaldo more intimately than you ever have before here on Cristiano Ronaldo's YouTube channel. I'll tell you what else I would do. I would hire a really expensive creative director. Okay. What would you do with that person? What would they do? Just be like, hey, like work on my shots, on my thumbnails. Like he's a premium. Ronaldo is an extremely premium luxury brand. Yeah, that's true. Like. And anything he uploads is going to get views. These fonts are out of control. Yeah, the font. This is like, he hired the. Use Google fonts. There's some nice Google fonts out there.

8:18There's some good Adobe fonts. He hired Ryan Gosling from SNL, the papyrus designer. He's like, there's borderline papyrus on here. And I just think he's better than that. His brand is better than that. So yeah, I would kick things off by asking the question, like, what are we trying to do here? Are we trying to make him more of a luxury brand? Are we trying to get people to intimately know him? What's the value prop of the channel? Yeah, what are we doing here? Are we like doing a family channel here? Yeah, are we trying to get like the personality behind the athlete? Yeah. Because some of these are for athletes.

8:45Who are we speaking to? Yeah. I would say get that figured out. And yeah, I think borrowing formats that work on YouTube to start is a good idea to just see what hits and what works and what your production cadence is. Like, I think the danger with athletes that we've experienced firsthand is that you do this extremely overproduced shoot, you sit them down, you shoot five videos, and then they never want to do it again. And now your production quality is only going down and you're uploading grainy iPhone videos. But I guess, I guess that's working. So I don't know. I'm curious to see where this goes.

9:14To shift gears to Tom Brady's channel, Tom Brady launched a YouTube channel. It's actually not as explosive by any means. Not even close. No. Like, I think the first two videos are in the hundreds of thousands of views. But we're dealing with two very different athletes in terms of like total fandom around the world. Sure, yeah. But Tom Brady joining YouTube should be a big deal. Now, Brady's doing like BTS content. It's essentially vlog content with someone else filming. Yeah, it's a high quality vlog. It reminds me a lot of You Nolson. Yeah, it's You Nolson. Who's a pro skier and an entrepreneur that just would like, you know, literally I think in episode one, I'm calling it an episode, but Tom Brady goes to Monaco, or I think it's episode two.

9:55But that was literally like, you and Olsen lived, I think, in Monaco. It's just like, check me out on a yacht, looking cool, diving into the water. It's uninteresting. I think it's, you look at this, and I think you assume it's interesting because it's limited access. Like, only certain crop of people in the world can do these things that Tom's doing. But if this was 2011 or 2014, I'd be like, this is super interesting. But in 2024, this is uninteresting, in my opinion. I think Tom should develop a format. Same thing that we talked about with Ronaldo. But I think the question here is, does Tom become a podcaster, right?

10:33Which is one path. Does Tom create a talk show? JJ Redick and LeBron, I actually think they've done a good job with this on YouTube. It's like going okay, but I think at least they have like a sports podcast. That's an obvious path for Brady. But I think about when Will Smith joined YouTube, he was vlogging. That was a long time ago. But one of the first things that happened when Will Smith joined YouTube was he collaborated with Yes Theory. And what was interesting was like that was this weird world of like, oh, yeah, Will Smith is a YouTuber. So I think if Tom developed a talk show format or I actually think a reacts format is really interesting.

11:10So let's call the show Tom's Take and let's borrow the format of like Jesser reacts, right? But Tom's in front of a computer. His producer is sending him content. He reacts to it. It could be football content. It could be stuff that he's into. It could be lifestyle content. But Tom is giving his take. And then you grow into the world where you can have YouTubers join him for that, right? You can have popular, you can have D-Strawing sit next to him during that. I think that's interesting because the thing that I think that some athletes and some celebrities miss is like, it's a show and yes, it's you.

11:46so it's interesting, but now people have a lot of options of what's interesting. So it's not just interesting that it's you. Because it's going to get boring. Because that's going to fizzle. Yeah, if it's a week-to-week show, which it is, the show's called Last Week with Tom, each week needs to kind of be like crazier and more interesting than the last. Yeah, and you're going to not want to do it at one point. Not sustainable, so it's not realistic. You know, the only way that gets interesting is if you implement kind of like the Kardashian effect here where something crazy happens and we all experience it in the headlines and it's Tom Brady related.

12:18And then you're like, wow, I can't wait for Tom Brady's episode next week to see what it was actually like from his perspective. But that's not going to happen. You'd have to bring on reality producers to make that interesting. Which is why it would have been more interesting to follow Tom Brady during a football season and put out a weekly episode. Yeah. But I think there's something much bigger potentially at play with this Tom Brady YouTube channel. It's called Last Week. and they've grabbed the social handles at last week. Really? Yeah. Why not just keep doing this as Tom Brady? But it's all over the YouTube videos as well.

12:53The branding is on the top right at all times, at last week. So here's where I think this would get interesting. They start a last week YouTube channel and a brand called Last Week. Okay. And potentially, every month, it switches to a new person. And it's one episode every week. In real time. So like after Tom, let's say it goes to Kaisenet or something. It just goes to another person. Or another archetype of a person. That could be interesting in the world. And as an audience, you develop a relationship with the person behind the camera. the person who's asking the questions. Like there were comments on Tom's videos that were like, kudos to the camera operator for asking good questions.

13:46Like imagine Vogue 73 questions or something like a format, but it's a week-to-week traveling vlog and each week. That's cool. And then you've got this brand at last week. That's cool. I like that. That's a good idea. If that's the play, I'm in. I don't know if that's the play. But they're not structured enough right now in their videos. You'd have to have a format that's easy to replicate. I think Tom Brady is two videos away from losing like the internet's interest. Like I think there's very minimal interest right now in the next upload that Tom has. And I think like if a big event happened in college football or something, and I was waiting for the next episode of Tom's Take, I'm back to Tom's Take.

14:28I'd be excited. I'd be like, oh, I can't wait to hear him talk about that on Tom's Take. Tom's going to have to have really good takes. Yeah, but I think Tom's going to have good takes. Is he known for good takes? I think he could have good takes. I'd be curious to hear his good takes. The last week thing, I also think is more of a, um, like a recap. I don't know. Is that like a, uh, the vlog series is cool. That's way more lifestyle luxury, um, branded. But the thing I wrote down was Krasinski's some good news. Like how quickly, like, why was that so successful? Obviously there's so many factors.

14:58Timing is a major factor in that. That's arguably the factor in that. But another thing is that it had a brand to it and it had a format. It had a show. What Krasinski did well there is he wrote a concept. And I think a lot of these athletes are coming to the platform without someone writing a concept for them. They're just like, yo, let's get a camera on and let's upload YouTube videos. And like, there's something there, but you have to be so interesting for that to work. Like you just have to be unbelievably interesting. I think there's very few people in the world who are that interesting. Which is why you got to switch.

15:31You got to move from person to person. Yeah, yeah. Because it's not that interesting in a certain amount of time. It's fair. It's fair. Right? What if he's like, hey, LeBron, you were in my last vlog. Can I follow you for a week? Can you be a part of last week? Yeah. Last week with LeBron, last week with Tom. Yeah, I like that. I don't know. There could be something. I like that idea. I think it's cool. All right. Well, to Ronaldo and Tom, sorry if we came off a little harsh. But also, like, if you want to do a session, hit us up. True. I'll hit a whiteboard with you guys. Yeah, that'd be great.

15:59No problem. All right. In other news, Rolling Stone put out the Rolling Stone top 25 most influential creators. Now, I clicked on this for a few reasons. One, I thought in my head, wow, they didn't reach out to us. Maybe they surprised us by putting us on this list. Yeah, I thought the same thing. that was quickly quickly quelled by a quick scroll through the list yeah it was a sad of going oh as a sad scroll to be honest cool uh yeah and then i was like i didn't want to be on that list yeah i was like look that's cool i uh i moved past the whole streamies thing i don't need to win a stream but rolling stone top 25 now i'm interested yeah and uh yeah they weren't there No, there was some, I think there was some creators who really deserve to be on there.

16:53Wisdom K, I think is an amazing creator. Check him out on Instagram. Awesome creator who just did this like super cool series about fashion around the world and like designing the world. Super cool. Jake Shane was on there. The top three were number one, Kai Sinat, number two, Rhett and Link, number three, Mr. Beast. I think those top three, fair. But I think when you look at the rest of the list, in my opinion, there were some big misses. And I think that you can't do that list without Marquez Brownlee on it. Like this year alone, we've had the internet and mainstream media has had major conversations about how influential he is in the world of tech.

17:39He didn't necessarily take down Fisker, the car company, but he may have. Yeah, but he had a huge impact on public sentiment of that and humane. Yeah, there was some conversation in our Slack around, you know, how can you have Anthony Fantano on the list who's a really popular music reviewer that does have massive influence and deserves to be on that list, but not have Marques Brownlee. Totally. Right, a reviewer of tech. I thought also like Brittany Broski was missing from that list. in my opinion. I thought of Amelia de Moldenburg. I think Amelia de Moldenburg. That was, you know, her show Chicken Shop Date, the guest she's had on this year in particular.

18:17Yeah. Like, I really think she deserves to be on that list. I think she has a lot of influence. I also think Ludwig is someone who could be on that list. Like, I think if you're talking about people who influence the industry and people who influence culture of creators, like, I do think Ludwig is in that conversation. Now, I also thought the biggest question I asked when I looked at this, like because I also thought about Alex Cooper, Call Her Daddy. Like it's hard to, how do you not include her? How do you not include a Joe Rogan or someone who's like really impacting the industry at large scales?

18:49This one might be controversial, but I thought of Elon Musk. Like he's actively posting on X. That is controversial. He's become a mega, mega creator. Yeah. Owns a platform. Well, I think you then have to zoom out and go, can this be done anymore? Can the top 25 list be done? It is difficult. I want to acknowledge that for all of the people at Rolling Stone that this is an incredibly difficult task because there are a lot of us and the definition of what it means to be a creator is pretty fluid. Is this a category thing you do now? Like, do you do this in the context of categories? So now you're coming back to the streamies.

19:24Yeah, but I just, I don't know. Can you do a list of like the top 25 creators? Yeah, I think you can. I think the fun of a list is that people are going to poke holes in it. Yeah, that's true. So yeah, you can do it. It's hard.

19:39Hank Green? Like, I think Hank Green and John Green, like, are they not top 25 here? I think Logan Paul and CoffeeZilla, hand in hand. Like, kind of interesting. That would have been interesting as, like, a duo. As a duo, kind of interesting. Yeah, I guess, like, what are you influencing? Sentiment, commercialization, monetization, like, what are you influencing? Platform, like, I do think there's too many definitions of that term. I was, I looked at this list and I was like, what a task. This is not, you know, something that I would, like, as I thought about, one of the first things I thought about is, should we do this with the published press?

20:14Should we release our own list? And then we're number one. I thought you'd said that with a lot of seriousness. And I considered it with a lot of seriousness. Finally, then we could be at the top of the list. Nice. Yeah. Excellent. No, but I'm curious for people to chime in on, like, what, who would you put on this list? who do you think is missing? If you've read the list, who are the most influential creators right now? Who deserves to be on the list? I think Kaysenat is a fair number one right now. Yeah, he is the same. I think that's an incredible amount of cultural reference. But like Speed's not on the list.

20:49Yeah. Well, what's that? Yeah. He's super influential. He is. And what's up with Tom Brady and Ronaldo not being on the list? Did they not - Are they not creators? Are they not creators? Yeah. Actually, I am looking through my emails right now. And Rolling Stone did reach out and ask us to recommend some creators. Oh, boy. And we did not respond. Oh, no. So. Okay, if anyone at Rolling Stone just listened to our entire feedback session, hold on, let me look. Let me sincerely apologize to everyone at Rolling Stone. You are right. We did not reply.

21:29That's on us. That is on us. And I wouldn't put us on the list either because of that. Yeah. but give us a shot next year. Okay, all right. Whoops. Okay, what else is happening in the world of Creator Skull? Well, okay, I mentioned Hank Green and I did want to talk about when it comes to, again, this summer and things that have happened this summer. One conversation has been around the AI scraping. And we made an episode about this a couple, I think a couple months ago at this point. This conversation of like, what data can be used from ours on YouTube? I watched this video on Friday and I think Hank did just an unbelievable 30 minute deep dive on this concept of what is happening with our YouTube videos and how are they being used?

22:20The question is, does Google train its generative AI models on videos owned by YouTubers? Ticket to the bottom of this question, I would like to show you two clips from a Bloomberg interview with Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube. Do you believe that YouTube was used to train Sora? If it was being used, would that be against your policy? It would be. When a creator uploads their hard work to our platform, they have certain expectations. One of those expectations is that the terms of service is going to be abided by. Our terms of service does allow for YouTube content, some YouTube content like the title of a video or the channel name or the creator's name, to be scraped because that's how you enable the open web, but it does not allow for things like transcripts or video bits to be downloaded.

23:07And that is a clear violation of our toss. And so those are the rules of the road in terms of content on our platform. If you're anything like me two weeks ago, what you think Neil just said was creators expect that their content will not be used by companies to train generative AI. But if you look at the details, that's not what he said. He said that creators expect YouTube's terms of service to not be violated. And YouTube's terms of service says nothing about AI training. And then later, the reporter from Bloomberg asks him straight up whether Google uses YouTube videos to help train Gemini.

23:40And here's what he says. And how does it work internally? Is Google using YouTube to train Gemini? Google uses YouTube content really in accordance, again, back with those terms of service or individual contracts that we might have with creators or uploaders to our platform. Lots of creators have different sort of licensing contracts in terms of their content on our platform. Lots of rights holders do. Now, YouTube has been very open about the fact that like a video's title and description, those are open and those need to be open for indexing search results. And they need to be open for people to be able to, you know, access those for different reasons.

24:22But the one thing that has been in question has been video scripts and transcripts and those being able to be used to train AI models. Now, there was a moment in time a couple of weeks ago where it had come out that a company had been scraping this content and that Apple and NVIDIA and a couple other companies had utilized this library to help train their AI models. Now, the question that's being asked is like, is YouTube using our content to train their own AI models, meaning Google's Gemini, meaning some of their generative AI efforts. Are those being, are we part of their training models? And Hank opens up this question about if we should be able to opt in.