Why MrBeast lost his YouTube record, how to improve the first 5 seconds of a video, recapping 2023 Trends

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. What's up, everyone? Welcome to this episode of Creator Support. On today's episode, we're talking about the YouTube video that broke Mr. Beast's record for the most viewed video in a single day. We also answer a question from a creator about content calendars and whether you should make one. Then we recap some of the biggest trends of the year. All right, if you make it to the deep end, let us know. Do you play video games?

1:44You know, I do not play video games anymore. I loved N64. Goldeneye? Yeah, it's a great game. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater? So the other night, I opened my little media console, and I have an Xbox 360 in there. And I have FIFA inside of there. You're telling me this like it's a guilty confession. Very guilty. Very guilty. And I plugged it all in, played for probably three hours while listening to a podcast. It was like a very stimulating experience. I'm playing FIFA in career mode, listening to a Tim Ferriss episode for three hours. And right after, I had to unplug the Xbox 360 and put it as far away from the TV as possible to be like, I don't want to do that again.

2:34But I bring this up because it's been a while since I've played video games. and we just had a new record broken on YouTube by the GTA 6 trailer. Yes, it was leaked first and then Rockstar Games, basically the story goes, was forced to release it. And within 24 hours of the release, it got 90 million views on YouTube, which beat Mr. Beast's record of 59.4 million views for his video, every country on earth fights for$250 ,000. New record on YouTube. You know what's weird when you say that, just quickly to think about, is when you said Mr. Beast's video had 59 million views at the end of the day.

3:23Because I'm so used to the numbers on his videos now, that feels low to me. Sure, yeah. I know that's crazy, but it's like... Yeah, when you think about him this year, you just think about his videos well over 100 million. 200, yeah, 200 million. Okay, so 90 million views in a single day for the GTA 6 trailer. Now, I think the leak, who knows? A leak is a great marketing tool, you know, when a leak happens, especially a leak happening around a release like this. But this is such a cultural moment. Like the two retweets that Rockstar Games did were LeBron James saying GTA 6 looks insane and that has 24 million impressions on Twitter.

4:07And then Mr. Beast saying the GTA 6 trailer just broke our record for most views on YouTube in 24 hours. So like it's a it's gaming is something that brings culture together. And I thought about it a lot in the context of even what I was doing playing FIFA the other night. I think we can't overlook how incredibly powerful interactive storytelling is. And GTA to me is like the absolute height of interactive storytelling. I think part of it has to do with how packed the trailer was with memes from moments in specifically like Florida culture. Like it tapped into a specific state, which is in itself occasionally a meme, like in the US in media.

5:00And there were all of these moments represented in the trailer, like alligators walking into a convenience store, certain people even just from news that were represented in the trailer. Yeah, so it represents culture. You can interact with it. And one of the most interesting things is that everyone can have their own unique experience and collective experience doing the same thing, which is pretty, which is, you really think about and zoom out about entertainment. So GTA V was the best-selling video game ever, sold 160 million copies. From what I'm reading here, it made over$8 billion.

5:48$8 billion from in-app purchases and, you know, purchases of the game. Like that is, you know, that's a form of the entertainment industry. And it bleeds into the creator economy as well, because there will now be people streaming themselves playing GTA. And there will be people when this really actually comes out, which is actually not until 2025. Yeah. Which is great. Which is interesting in itself because the stock of the publisher actually went down because people realized that earnings from this game would not affect the stock until 2025. Oh, wow. Which is interesting. That is interesting.

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7:01Yeah, something to talk about when it comes to gaming is the price point. You know, we were speaking the other day about music and how musicians actually make like fractions of a cent on a stream. Yeah. Back when it was a CD, they would make, you know, everyone had to purchase for a certain amount of money, whether it was, you know,$12 or 15 or even on iTunes, like 99 cents. Games come out and they're expensive. Every single person has to spend a significant amount of money. And when you have 160 million people willing to spend, that's going to add up. Yeah. If we think about, like one of my thoughts around the creator economy and even the term the creator economy, I think it all just kind of blend into this concept of the attention economy.

7:48You know, like who is capturing attention? And I think gaming is such a massive part of the attention economy. Like if I can actually interact with it, it's going to capture more of my attention than if I'm just watching it. Yeah, it's just a landscape for storytelling. It's a set of constraints, you know, whether it's Minecraft or Fortnite, it's an interactive experience for yourself. But it's also, as we've seen, it translates into video and streams that people want to watch and consume because it's its own platform for stories. I think as we look at 2024 and beyond and how creators, like what can creators learn from this concept of how popular gaming is?

8:38For me, number one is like interactive storytelling. Even as simple as what Ryan Trahan did with the Penny series, where if you donated, your name was in it. right? That is a very slight version of interactive storytelling. Or like, obviously, the most obvious one is Ludwig with his subathon, right? When you donated, the stream would extend. So you're actually playing a game with the creator and interacting with the content. I think that creates a very sticky audience when you get to engage with it. Yeah, I think it just speaks to human nature. We all have this desire to be seen and gaming allows for that to happen easier than some other mediums where, you know, TV, some channels on YouTube, all you can really do is watch and consume.

9:28But meanwhile, a lot of us deep down, I think, have this desire to take part in it. I also think there's a level of collectivism to playing a game where you're plugged in online and you're actually, you know, playing with friends or meeting other people. There's a level of community there. And I think that is maybe something, who knows, that could play out on YouTube with this new feature of like watch with friends. That new feature kind of interested me. Announced as a YouTube premium feature. Yeah. YouTube premium is like essentially watch with friends, right? Yeah. I don't know if that's going to take off.

10:06I guess like watching. I feel like it's not novel. Yeah. You know, we've seen that before. I think maybe more interesting in that announcement was an AI chatbot that allows you to summarize a video, which we were playing around with Gemini, which is Google's version of, you know, ChatGPT. Yeah. And you can ask it, or we asked it today, to summarize our episode with Emma Chamberlain. And in real time, it just listed out everything we spoke about in a matter of seconds. In a very clean blurb. Now, with ChatGPT, there's like a cutoff date. Yeah. I know with GPT-4, it's going to be more powerful and you can get data that's more recent.

10:49But fascinating to think about, you know, watching instead of actually watching a YouTube video. Summarize it. Summarize it for me. I don't even know if that's a good thing. Yeah, I don't know if that's a good thing. Again, I think that questions the base premise of the internet of providing search results for people and giving them content in exchange for their search. Fascinating how text was one of the original mediums for entertainment. Things were written down and we could read stories instead of sitting around a circle and just telling them. It was like, all right, let's write them down.

11:23And then we've come so far from there and now we're taking these mediums like video and putting them back into text. so just one more thing on this concept of like collectivism and learning from from gta and video games i do think that appointment viewing creates a moment of collectivism where if you have a specific date and time uh ludwig again just to bring him up he's really good at eventizing things this event is happening at this time i think creators even launching their videos at a specific time creates a moment where the community comes together and experiences something at the same time.

11:55And I think when you're playing GTA and there's other people online and you're experiencing this moment at the same time as this other person, that I think is going to become increasingly more important to capture attention. So I look at all this stuff that's happening in entertainment. I do think gaming is a sector that we should look at more. I think everyone should look at more. It is a massive part of the attention economy. And this GTA release dominated the headlines this week. If you're on Twitter, if you're in our world, this was a major topic of conversation. And it was fascinating to see that.

12:29Quick caveat on the record for most viewed video on YouTube. We're talking non-music videos. We're talking non-music videos because the actual record is BTS's music video for Butter, which got 108 million views in the first 24 hours. Yeah, you don't mess with BTS. You don't mess with BTS. You don't mess with... Like, it's amazing that music videos are still that big. Do you remember when we sent out a tweet one time and it was subtweeted or it was liked by BTS? Yeah. Either that or it was adopted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We tweeted about BTS. It was with Samsung because BTS is also sponsored by Samsung.

13:05There was some event that we were doing that they were a part of. They liked it and it just exploded. Yeah, it was out of this world. Okay, we are going to get to some questions, but one quick note. I don't know if everyone saw this, but Twitch shut down in South Korea. because streaming costs were too expensive. This feels significant to me because South Korea is such a, you know, we're talking about BTS right now. It's like an epicenter of culture and culture that is exported to the US quite a bit. Squid Games, Parasite, BTS. There's a lot of culture that comes from Korea. And the creator culture is often talked about as being a couple of years ahead of US culture.

13:48And this basically means that anyone who was a Twitch streamer there is just like, that is the fear that people have that feels unfounded here right now about like YouTube, right? Oh, what if YouTube shuts down? People say that sometimes of like, oh yeah, you should, you know, don't build your whole company on rented land, you know, port your audience over. It's why we launched a newsletter originally. It's why people launch, you know, Discord communities or move their audience to other environments they can control. But it's not an actual fear. Right? Not of mine. Not of mine. It's not an actual fear.

14:25But amazing that those Twitch streamers in South Korea did lose their jobs as Twitch streamers. Yeah. It's just a reminder that we actually do not control these platforms and certain things can happen and shut down because I guess operating expenses were too high in South Korea. so that's wild it's just yeah just no more yeah just no more twitch in south korea all right let's get to some questions this comes from tim tim i never know how to pronounce your last name i'm gonna try it though kiusano really i'm just guessing it's italian but i don't know okay tim kiusano um pov okay this is more of a i guess like a a story with a question in it but POV.

15:13So if you're listening, put yourself in the perspective here. Yeah, yeah. POV, you are a 46-year-old corporate schmuck who fell backwards into a bit of creator fame. You know you're sitting on an Ali Abdaal chunk of career insights, but you're mostly known for storytelling and a quirky take on a nine-to-five life. You've been doing it by yourself, minus podcast help, with no content calendar for almost four years now on top of your job. Commit to a content calendar for a while so there's a specific cadence every week, i.e. Monday, TikTok, Tuesday, YouTube, long form Wednesday, LinkedIn article, or continue to wing it based on your time and 4 a.m.

15:51inspiration. Thanks for reading and possibly answering this. Loose back to start like a TikTok loop. P.S. I love you. Things are all the value and inspiration. Oh, thanks, Tim. That's so nice. Wow, that was very fun to read. I'm going to say if it's not broken, don't fix it. Clearly, it seems to be working, and it doesn't sound like, Tim, you have a problem with currently working your job and finding a way to fit it in. I think he's talking about a distribution calendar. Sure, yeah. He's not talking about a production calendar. But he also says continue to wing it based on time and 4 a.m. inspiration.

16:26If you're coming up with your inspiration at 4 a.m., maybe you could try and find a way to make your idea generation consistent, but sounds like it's just when it hits you, it hits you. Yeah. I think, um, my perspective though. So first of all, if people haven't watched Tim's Tik TOks, they're fantastic. He is a, I watch them sometimes because I have a lot of, um, aspirations to vlog and show my life, but the way Tim does it is, is very cinematic and very, um, uh, it's just great storytelling. So, uh, love Tim stuff, but my perspective is a little bit different. And maybe that's where you and I lie on the spectrum of artist and distributor.

17:10But my perspective is if you're in the business of distribution, there is too much uncertainty for your mind to be like, if the question is, when's my next video coming out? I think it weighs on your mind. There's too many decisions that could be made. I prefer a calendar. I prefer a distribution calendar of like every Sunday we do this. I find myself if I don't have that, then I just won't do it or I'll do it so sporadically that I can't even get better at doing it. My fear is that I would have made a commitment, but I have nothing to say. Right. That's, I think, where I come from that perspective of if it seems to be working for you and you're creating based off of when inspiration hits.

18:04You know, again, I start with inspiration. It's like if you can find a way to put some process to how you get inspiration, great, because then you can make your videos consistent. So you kind of have to start there. If inspiration for an idea is like a prereq for you to make a video. Yeah, but do you not feel that having the date on the calendar of distribution is the impetus for inspiration. Many times it is. Many times it definitely is. Like I think those constraints and those boxes are what create scenarios. Like even as we are going into content planning for 2024, if it's a blank slate with no calendar, it's a little bit harder to fill, right?

18:44Yeah, but we've landed on a consistent format. We have so many processes in place. Our variables are actually pretty minimal when it comes to what we do is have a conversation with someone. So I think in that respect, definitely put constraints around it. I guess maybe I'm not understanding the question because I think he's, isn't that what he's asking? Because he has a format. He has this like daily vlog format. Is he not asking that question of should he commit to a content calendar? I don't think he's daily vlogging, but I think that's the question. Or maybe he's asking, okay, I'm reading this again.

19:23Commit to a content calendar for a while so there's specific cadence every week. Monday, TikTok, Tuesday, YouTube, long form, Wednesday, LinkedIn article. My short answer here is I would commit to a content calendar, but I would do less than that. Yeah. You know, I would just be like, think about everything you do as a show. Rhett and Link said to us, we asked them how do they remain so consistent? You remember this? And they looked at us and they were like, it's a show. Like a show doesn't tweet out like, sorry, we didn't make it this week. a show comes out when the show says it's going to come out.

19:57And I do think there's a lot of merit to committing to a content calendar. Now, I think the middle ground is to suggest, can you commit to a content calendar for a month and then be okay with making adjustments to it after that? I think what we didn't take into account is that he's actually asking about a new, potentially a new audience and new formats. So he's saying that he's sitting on all of these career insights. An Ali Abdel chunk of career insights. What do I do with those? Oh my God. Tim. Tim. Tim, Tim. This was, yeah. Tim. That's fair. You know what? For everyone who just listened. We were just lost in the story, Tim.

20:38We were lost in the story of the POV. Okay. Now, he's talking about a new content format.

20:49yeah I would definitely commit to a cadence here yeah short answer I would be like but here's an idea especially if you have it sounds like if you're sitting on a chunk as you call it of career insights you have what you need so it's just about it's more so about distributing totally than it is coming up with the idea so you've got you're sitting on the goal here's an idea Tim make it a series start with a like the Tim Ferriss show started as a six episode series. That's all he committed to. And he said if after, I think it was six or 12, but after six or 12 episodes, if he was happy and liked it, he would continue.

21:25That's what I would do here. I would say, I'm going to make 12 YouTube videos about this. Or if you want to do LinkedIn newsletters, sure. If you want to do TikTok, sure. But say you're going to make 12, make those 12 and then see if you want to continue committing to it. And if time is an issue for you, my feedback would be start with the LinkedIn article because text is the, simplest way to get your idea out into the world. And it's almost like you're writing an outline for what the TikTok would be. Right. No matter what, you have to write the text. So start with the LinkedIn article, then maybe move to TikTok because it's a lower barrier to entry there with short form video.

21:58And then if the ideas are really resonating, you're really committed, take to YouTube. All right. This question comes from Ina on Discord. Ina says, I'm a creator in the film and TV show commentary niche, more specifically in anime. Okay. The short version of this question is, is weekly content still the YouTube meta? It's a similar question around distribution cadence. And I think it's an interesting question to ask around how much does it matter on YouTube if you're publishing every single week? You know, there was a time where I think consistency was extremely valued on the platform. And that time was when we saw the rise of daily vlogging.

22:43I'll speak from a data perspective. If you look at our analytics, when we upload consistently every Monday for three or four weeks in a row, it lifts the entire ship. Our back catalog starts seeing viewership, our subscribers go up, our watch time, our AVD, everything. So, you know, from that I would say you know for us specifically it helps if I could snap my fingers and have us be every Monday next year I would have that happen right I think I think it matters like the value proposition of your videos matter I think you know with a with a talk show like ours having the cadence be regular helps you build a routine around it but I will also say that most of our episodes the majority of their viewership come months after we put them out.

23:36Right? So I also think there's something there to, if your value proposition is not consistency, like a routine for a viewer, then putting out a video that is an evergreen video that can build in your library, in my opinion, is more important than going weekly. Yeah, and as much as I talk about the data, when it comes to, in our office, when it comes to in our studio, if there's a moment when an episode is supposed to come out on Monday and it's Sunday night and something's wrong, we're having technical difficulties, or we realize we want to change something, we will push it because we're thinking about the next five and 10 years of this video, not day one.

24:21Right. Exactly. And I think that's actually been more of the conversation amongst creators is this video needs to live for years. And I don't think that was like when we first started on YouTube, I don't think that was the conversation. It was like, I got to put out a great video every week. Now, again, there's different types of creators. Phil DeFranco still uploading every single day. His videos are out of date 24 hours later. That's pretty wild, right? Or like the New York Times and podcast, The Daily. It's probably less out of date, but there's already a new one that cannibalized the last one.

25:02So it's just, you have to think about the whole thing from the vantage point of what is my value proposition to the audience on this? Is it you tune in every week and you hang out? Again, back to what we're talking about, some level of collectivism and connection of, okay, everyone comes on the same day to watch this thing and gather on the same day because this experience is happening? Or is it this person can find this video five years down the line and it's still fun and interesting? So my short answer is I do not think weekly uploads is the meta on YouTube right now. Like I don't think it's something that everyone is optimizing for.

25:39It's by no means required. No. All right. Now, question from Sidant. He says, given how videos auto play so quickly now on the YouTube homepage, what have you learned about optimizing for the first five seconds of the video? What are you doing in that first five seconds to boost CTR given the thumbnail doesn't play a role as important of a role anymore? Wow. Interesting question. And I have noticed this as a viewer of YouTube. so I was watching this video I've gotten really into these sports videos that are like um NFL plays that get increasingly crazier throughout the video that's that's not a version of the title but I saw one yesterday that was great it was like NFL uh NFL in quotes I can't believe that happened moments that get increasingly crazier sure so I hovered over it to be like what is a version of this.

26:33And I hovered over and it auto-played this crazy play. And I was like, okay. And I clicked in and watched that. I think for our videos, our intros have been really dialed from the perspective of, you know, we have a thumbnail with a creator and a mic. The video starts auto-playing. You see, yep, that is Emma Chamberlain at that exact mic. then the other thing that I think really helps with ours autoplay right now is that there's text on screen because audio does not play in an autoplay. So text on screen really helps actually tell you the story in that first five seconds of like, oh, this is an interview.