Connor: YouTube and social media, it’s closer to poker than it is chess. You might know what is statistically a good hand and sometimes it looks. In the first 30 seconds, like 50% of people, 60% of people work up. I find the right person. 

I get crazy watch time. I would say YouTube short should be a foundation of what we’re doing. This is going to sound simple, but like just need people to watch your video. 

Spencer: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Creators Uncut. Super excited for another episode. Today, our guest is Connor Flannery from the YouTube channel, Connor Pugs. Connor, thanks for being on the show. 

Connor: Of course, man. Thanks for having me on. 

Spencer: Yeah, it’s always great to meet new people, new creators, and you are actually one of the biggest creators we’ve had on the show so far. So for our viewers who may not know who you are, why don’t you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and your channel? 

Connor: Yeah, I can give a little bit of background. So I mean, I’ve been doing social media for 10 years, started when I was 13. I just really just enjoyed watching YouTubers and whenever I like something, I always have to kind of jump into it myself. So I’ve been posting for 10 years. I’ve not been successful on YouTube for 10 years. It was kind of more or less five years of just falling on my face and doing it for fun, right? But got in the right repetitions and, you know, have this, the gold play button beside me. I moved into my apartment like five weeks ago, so I don’t really even have an excuse for it not being up behind me. I’ve been lazy with it, I guess, but it’s also a good prop for me to just kind of pick up next to me as well. But I’ve been doing social media for that time. 

I’ve about 2.6 million subscribers on YouTube. My focus on there has really just been a little like evolution over time, but big focus for the last four years, I guess at this point. Yeah. 

I’m getting old. Boy, I’m looking at story first content. I also post across all social channels. So actually, if you look at Instagram and Facebook and all those sites, I got about a quarter of a billion views per month. A lot of those short form, I will say. 

I was getting a quarter of a billion views per month and long form might be retired on an island somewhere. So yeah, I’ll put it there. But yeah, it’s like, so do social media full time now. I also have a company that helps other companies do their social media correctly. So always, always in the weeds, helping them get on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook. And that’s what that’s what I do now. 

Spencer: Awesome. That’s that’s really cool. Yeah, I like how you mentioned the long form views. Maybe we can get into it a little bit later, but there’s a huge difference between long form views and short form. So you mentioned you do quite a bit of short form and I’ve seen some of your stuff. I think it’s interesting. I do watch Minecraft videos occasionally and you have a lot of short form words like you’re telling a story with like some Minecraft, I guess, like B-roll kind of a thing. I think those are fascinating. I love watching those. So I’m curious, just for my own sake, do you record all the Minecraft stuff yourself or do you like kind of outsource that? 

Connor: Yeah, it’s a good question. So I used to be pretty good at Minecraft. It’s like the one game I could play my Mac. So I just got really good at it. 

I mean, I liked it as a kid. I kept it up. So all the all the video game footage you see on my channel, whenever I use that to kind of compliment like audio, it’s all for me. It’s getting kind of old at this point because I have a lot of footage from back in the day, 21, 22 and 23 when I was pretty good at it and would play pretty consistently. I actually don’t know the last time that I fired at Minecraft. 

So I’m sure if I try to record new gameplay, it wouldn’t look so good. But I have enough that I can kind of cycle through and it’s I haven’t really gotten complaints of like, oh, I remember this one from two years ago. It’s like, no one’s really paying that level of attention. It’s it’s it’s very supplementary to the videos or comp. 

It’s more of a compliment than it is like the main focus anyways. So yeah, I know it’s all me. I’m used to be pretty good. I’m no longer definitely falling off. 

Spencer: That’s OK. No worries. I think everyone kind of does as they get older. You know, I play games here and there. And yeah, definitely when you when we’re kids, when we have a lot of time, it’s it’s nice to get really good at games. But yeah, I was just curious. Thanks for answering that. The the videos that I see all the time are super interesting. So I guess diving more into the YouTube side of things, you know, with videos, you want to make sure that you know, you have your audience’s retention. How I’m sure your stories do that. But how do you like come up with your your stories for your videos? Do you like kind of come up with them on your own? Or do you kind of like take inspiration from other videos? Or do you kind of like work with an AI chat bot to come up with ideas? Or I guess I’m curious what your your process is for creating those stories that are so engaging. 

Connor: Yeah, no, that’s a good question. So it’s been for the last couple of years that subscribers would submit their stories to me. And it would always be something where I would kind of take this the summary of what they submitted and then make a story around it. One, just if I want a 20 minute long story, I need to like really flush it out myself. And then also to, you know, in case they submit a story and then I do all the details the same that gets back to them. 

They’re like, shoot, I should have done that. Right. So it’s almost like the basis from submissions from subscribers. So I can almost like tell their stories. But so he’s like, you know, a movie that’s like based on a true story. 

It’s like, there’s a lot of details that I kind of just change along the way. Right. Just to make it a more compelling story. And then also that as a secondary benefit to kind of hide their identity a bit better. 

Spencer: That makes sense. Cool. I was just curious about that. But so do you recommend that if there’s other YouTubers who are wanting to do like story type content, do you kind of recommend taking submissions from from viewers or do you feel like the process is pretty smooth or does it take quite a bit of time? 

Connor: I would say for me, it’s no issue just because my subscriber base is large enough that I will never run out of stories for the next like 30 years or whatever. Yeah, I would say if someone wants to do, I mean, you could do story based content. 

I think it’s great when it’s your own stories, but obviously you can’t post 10,000 videos of your own stories or I mean, you could. Right. Probably at an interesting life. I would say one thing that’s interesting about story based content is because as you said, like retention curves and we’re talking about like if someone’s like watching this, trying to do YouTube for they’re doing it for fun, they’re doing it for their business, they’re just doing it for their own hobby, whatever. 

And they’re looking to grow. I mean, one of the most important things on YouTube at the end of the day, and this is true for all social media sites is like, you just need people to watch. This is going to sound simple, but like you just need people to watch your video because every single social site or every content site, it’s not even really social media anymore. 

It’s more content media sites like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, all content. They have one objective and that is to increase your session duration. So when you open up YouTube to when you close it, the longer that number, the bigger that number can be, the more ad placements they can run. So if your content, right, takes people and has them watch it for a long time, then also a great thing is, is well about story content is quite often people will be almost more so passively consuming it. Like there’s still some of them are very active consumers, but a lot of times you’ll put it on and then you’ll do something else. 

Because you don’t need full attention for that type of content. They will then watch or have auto play or go on a playlist or just some kind of way of watching a lot of those videos. So if you have someone watch like five or your 20 minute videos in a row, all of a sudden, right, you’ve just added an hour and 40 minutes of additional retention. 

So YouTube’s going to reward you for that because they’ve been able to play ads throughout the entire process. So when you look at your retention curves, the people falling off, right, for stories, it’s actually quite interesting. Because usually in a retention curve, it’s kind of just drags down like that. And if you have some issues that might fall off, but for me, with every single story, even the ones I’ve done millions of views, the retention curve at the very beginning drops off like within the first 30 seconds, like 50% of people, 60% of people, well, 50% of people are gone. Because they’re like, actually, I don’t want to watch a 30 minute long story. 

However, it doesn’t hurt me in the algorithm because after that drop off point, it’s basically a flat line. So that data for YouTube. And if you’re a creator, you should think about not your videos not going to be right for everyone. And at the end of the day, it’s like not every person’s going to love your video. However, if you have a retention curve that almost like parts a lot of people drop off because they learn very quickly, this video is not for them. But then when someone like in that process after the hook your video, the first 30, 60 seconds opening part of your video, that’s enough data for them to be like, Oh, actually, this is a great video for me. And then they watch the whole thing. You’re going to be rewarded because for YouTube’s eyes, they’re just like, okay, well, if I find the right person, I get crazy watch time. 

Probably a crazy session duration, adding to that session duration, right? So it’s my job to find the right people. So I think sometimes when people look at their retention curves, like, Oh my God, people are falling off in the very beginning. That’s, don’t get me wrong. 

That can mean your video socks, your intro socks. That’s also very true. You should pay attention to your retention curves. However, if people are going to drop off and if anything, if it’s like the drop off is too low, but then the retention curve goes straight down, that might mean that you actually didn’t qualify the right viewer. Right. You almost want to let people know who should watch. And then for the people who should watch, you should really encourage them and incentivize them and have them be curious and open to watch the whole thing. 

Spencer: Yeah. That is, that is some good advice. I like how you mentioned a little bit earlier, how it’s more like content media. I feel like all of the platforms are kind of, you know, becoming the same thing in a way. You know, they all have the vertical video. 

You can all like post pictures or comments. It’s very, very similar. So finding that, that, I guess that right retention probably is helpful for all the platforms. I don’t know. From your experience, does it, is, I know for YouTube, like it rewards you if like they stay for the whole video. I’m assuming that’s the same for the other platform. 

Connor: The data is presented to you a little bit differently per platform. Right. So especially, I mean, also with long form versus short form, you’re going to get different metrics such as on short form, their swipe away rate, your retention curves have to be a lot crazier. Like on those, you actually, for YouTube shorts, right? It’s like, you can have retention curves that’s like 102% retention because it like loops back in the front. 

And they’re out, they’re kind of wonky to look at. It’s like they actually start above the graph, which is always kind of weird to present it that way. But at the end of the day, every platform has the same objective because these major platforms, I mean, look at the market cap of meta Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, too. But they don’t really make that much money on WhatsApp. The majority of their revenue is through ad placements. So you have Google AdSense for YouTube, right? 

You have meta ads manager for Instagram, Facebook. You have like LinkedIn has short form videos now. LinkedIn is actually realizing they need to be content first because that’s how you keep people on. If they have good content, that’s how you have long session duration. 

So every platform is going to care if the right people really enjoy your video. And if it’s only 30 seconds, yeah, you’re only adding 30 seconds to that experience. However, they know that if they piece together 30 great 30 second long videos, then all of a sudden it’s like, okay, well, that cumulative that some of all that time is really valuable. So your content has to be hold people for however long your piece of content is. True on YouTube shorts, true on YouTube long form, true on Instagram, Reels, TikTok, Facebook, all that. 

Spencer: Yeah, definitely. I just thought of a question as you were kind of explaining that with YouTube. I know you can insert ad, I guess ad breaks at certain points in at least in long form videos. I’m curious from your experience, does that kind of hurt retention? Or does that help because you’re adding more ads, which YouTube might reward? I don’t know. I’m curious what your thoughts are on those. 

Connor: That’s a good question. So for the longest time, you could manually insert middle ads. However, right, important distinction is they always said, you’re not really brute forcing an ad to play here. You are saying that if YouTube thinks it’s a good idea, then we’ll play an ad there. 

So I could in a 20 minute long video, I could have 100 middle ads and only one to three video, only like one to three mid rolls would play. So it’s something where it’s giving them the option. Now they’ve actually almost changed that feature. So right now it’s like auto mid rolls. It’s like, do you want to have mid rolls? 

Yes or no, you can click a button and you can still go in and manually add them. However, they’re very aggressively flagging them to be like, this is extremely unlikely to play an ad because we’ve deemed it as disruptive. So it’s something where it’s, I mean, I used to go in and add the mid rolls because you’d have to do them manually, but now it’s like there’s no point in doing it manually. I mean, there might be some YouTube strategist that says, well, actually, you can get a point whatever percent, like you can point to higher RPM if you do it like this. For all intents and purposes, for most people, including me at this point, like it’s just worth it just to click the button and let the video run. So it was something YouTube always cares about having an optimal experience. So if YouTube doesn’t feel from their data, their live data of how a user is consuming content, if they don’t feel as if this is a good time for an ad placement, doesn’t matter that you put an ad there, they’re like, thanks for the recommendation. 

I’m not going to take it up on that. So mid roll ads, they can be disruptive, but YouTube is very careful about when they play them and what type of ad and is it a 30 second unskippable, is it a six second skippable? Their goal is to play the most ads. However, they know that if they spam a bunch of ads in the first minute, then you’re going to leave. But if you have a great experience, you might want for two hours. So instead of spamming 10 ads in one minute and then you leave, they can give you 20 ads in two hours. So they’re playing more ads because it’s a good experience. 

So the mid rolls have always been a recommendation. And now it’s even more so like, we’re not even paying attention to you, we’re just going to do this. At the end of the day, YouTube knows that it knows best for recommendations. So that’s why I mean, for the longest time, people have been complaining about like, man, I have all these subscribers and they’re not seeing my videos. It’s like, okay, why do you think they’re not seeing your videos? And that’s something where it’s like subscriber count is like, and this is true for other social media sites too now, especially short form videos. Come on, I have all these followers and they’re not seeing the content. 

I see people complain about that all the time. At the end of the day, the goal of these platforms is to find the right video for the right person. So when they were at worse kind of machine learning algorithms, when they weren’t as good at it, really subscribing to someone was a proxy as like a point of like, this is like, oh, I’m interested in this content. 

But it wasn’t a great data point because at the end of the day, people are actually pretty bad at picking what they want. When’s the last time like, when you open up YouTube, you go to the homepage, you don’t go to like very few people are like, I’m going to go to my subscription feed. It’s because that’s your, that’s like what you’re picking. One, your choices evolve over time, what you like, like I’m probably subscribed to like a thousand people and I really only see, I probably, there’s like a couple of channels I might, that I’m subscribed to that I actually watch now. 

It’s mostly recommendations, just because my interests are evolved over time. And also it’s like YouTube just knows better. So that’s a big thing as well of like subscriptions and like follows of people complaining about them. Like at the end of the day, YouTube wants the best experience for the viewer. And if you cannot provide that, then you’re not going to get viewers. 

Yeah. So it doesn’t, it’s also great because it means you could have two subscribers and have a video do well. It’s harder in long form that takes a lot longer, especially in short form. You can have a great video, zero subscribers and get a million views on it. It’s unlikely, but that can still happen. If your video is so great and will add to the experience of all those people. Yeah. Yeah. 

Spencer: Oh, there’s a couple thoughts that came to mind as you were, as you were saying those things. First thing I want to say is I’m actually in the minority when it comes to consuming YouTube. I’m one of those people who goes to their subscription tabs and I could rant about this, but YouTube recently changed the subscription page. It used to be like a list form or you could make it view it as a list form and it was like chronological order. And now it’s more like the homepage, which is for me very frustrating, but I understand why they do it. Like you said, like, you know, YouTube usually knows what the viewer wants to see and so it can kind of put the right content in front of the viewer. 

I also had a thought back, jumping back a little bit to the mid rolls. I also watched, you know, NFL highlight videos and I’m curious if, you know, the major like business companies on YouTube, if they function slightly different than like a single regular YouTuber, like the NFL highlight videos, for example, they always have a mid roll ad right at one minute. And then it kind of varies for the rest of the video. But I always see in the comments, people are complaining and complaining about the ads or like the mid rolls because it’s like a 10 minute video, but there’s like five, five mid roll ads. And so I’m wondering if like, if it’s a big business, if they have like more, I guess, pressure and what they can push out there for mid rolls. 

Connor: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I don’t, I don’t, I just have to speculate at this point because one thing I will say is like, if you were a massive company with direct connections to YouTube, and even massive company could mean Mr. Beast or right. 

Yeah. One of these really, really kind of big, almost corporate type channels, there might be additional tools that you have access to. However, it’s something where it might be more of a, it just so happens that there’s like the midroll placement happens around that time, there might be something where they’ve gone and said one minute in, you have to insert an ad because it’s like the NFL or something that they’re have that contract. That could happen. But that would, I mean, I’m really, that would just be speculation for me. Well, I know for like, there’s partner managers at these big companies, so they probably have more tools. 

They definitely have more insight. If a video is taken down, copyright reasons, they have much better resources, which, well, it makes sense. Not everyone can have those resources and those big companies, especially those big media companies. At the end at the end of the day, the NFL is a media company. It just has live events and streaming and TV content and video content. It’s a media company at the end of the day. 

So those big media type companies, even if they’re not traditionally seen as media companies, are going to have those good relationships with these platforms. So they’re going to get a little bit more help, maybe a little bit more ability to play around in the future. So that might be something. But I could also see it as like, it just happens that they have aggressive midrolls on and it just roughly picks that time. Yeah. 

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t mean to dive too much into the speculation. But let’s get back into what can really help our viewers watching this episode. And I think that’s more of the strategy or what you can do to kind of grow your channel or social media. First, I want to ask you about your best performing video and kind of why you think it is the best performing video for you. 

Connor: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I’ve been, I’ve been on YouTube for a while. I’ve had a little bit of a mix of content. So in 2020 and 2021, it was the same like gameplay with audio on top of it, but it was more talking about trending relevant things on the internet. 

So closer to what would be called like a commentary style channel. And I had some videos that went very, very big. However, I, well, one thing I always liked the stories a bit better. I didn’t really like talking about, I didn’t really like talking about things on the internet too much. Cause I was like, well, I never want to get something wrong. 

And then there’s an impact. I mean, it’s internet, like it doesn’t really matter for being honest. Yeah. It’s like, Oh, this thing happened. 

Who cares for being real? However, the biggest thing was the variance in your results. So also like almost like the, the time content being evergreen versus not evergreen is a big deal on YouTube as well. So evergreen just being like a video can be watched. It’s as relevant a year from now as it is today, as it is two weeks ago, right? So the story content, like there’s no timeline. It’s not like this breaking news, which is going to be super relevant, but for a very short period of time. And what I realized is that content, like how it occasionally have those videos that were great outliers, but I could go weeks in a row where the topics weren’t interesting or there just weren’t any topics to talk about. 

And just the swings like that, I don’t really like building a channel around that. So I slowly shifted with the same format of audio or gameplay, speaking about stories. And it was first couple of weeks of almost having a relatively hard shift. It didn’t crush. It didn’t do really well. But I noticed that the videos before like they would get views and then they’re just immediately stopped getting viewers. And I noticed with these, they would get slower, they grow over time. So I realized a piece of content I made a month ago could be getting views today, right? So there’s almost a couple different of my biggest videos. There’s ones during the commentary era where it’s like talking about a topic and that was great. But one thing I’ve noticed with the stories and really at the last four years of doing it, I’ve had a handful of breakout outlier videos, 3 million, 4 million, 5 million views, right? One thing I’ve noticed, and this is also true about social media in general, you really can’t predict which video is going to be your two standard deviations, the right outlier video. You just can’t really affect it. 

But what you can do is if you generally look at your data, if you generally are like, okay, this is what makes good retention, this is a good retention curve, right? This is like good. Is this going to have a good click to rate? 

Is this going to have like good conversion generally? And you do that consistently, then you’re giving your one, your average viewers are going to be pretty good and it’s going to grow over time. You’re also giving yourself the opportunity to have those outlier results. Because it’s something where it’s like, you are never going to see all the data. It’s almost like YouTube and social media, it’s closer to poker than it is chess with chess, all the information’s on the table. So you have all the information and like, yes, you need to be Magnus Carlson or have a crazy deep blue computer, whatever, to really calculate all that information. However, in theory, all the information’s there. But in poker, you can play a great hand. And if you might know what is statistically a good hand and sometimes you lose, that’s okay. Same with social, like sometimes you can make a great video and it just doesn’t, doesn’t perform because there’s so many variables out there. 

There’s so many reasons. However, if you have that through line of like, I’m going to pay attention to my data, I’m going to pay attention to click the rate for my title and thumbnail, I’m going to look at the retention, I’m going to look at, you know, returning viewers, I’m going to look at all those kind of different data points and I do that consistently over time and I iterate on that data, but I don’t make big swings because one video doesn’t do great. So I’m like, I’m never doing this again. There are outliers in both directions, right? You got to pay attention to that. 

Then that is going to be how you get those outlier videos, right? So there is on social media, there’s a component of luck. And some people say that it’s all skill or all luck. 

I’m like, whenever you speak in absolutes, you got to be very careful. Everything in the media that there is a component of luck, and that’s almost getting to the whole idea of probabilistic versus deterministic, which is this crazy debate just generally in life. So all the information is technically out there, but since you don’t have access to all of it, and even if you did somehow, you wouldn’t be able to comprehend it all, that is almost categorized in the probabilistic part, where you’re just like, there’s a bit of randomness, is it truly random? 

No, because it’s all database, but you don’t have access to all that data. And it’s something where if you’re consistently making good content, and you’re consistently iterating and learning, you’re going to have opportunities to get the swings and the variants in the upside, right? So I can’t say, oh, if you do this, you’ll get a trillion view video or something. 

I mean, the Mr. B’s team, because they have such a massive audience, they have all these people and they use all this data, they have a better sense, but especially for the average creator and even creators of millions and millions of subscribers, it’s like, that’s why you got to post consistently. That’s why you got to post relatively high volume, ideally, and you can supplement that a bit with short form. You got to be careful about short form too. Short form can be great. 

However, if you gain an entire, if your goal is to have a big long form audience and you just spam a bunch of short form, short form viewers can watch long form videos, but you also got to realize that there’s a good section of people who just want to watch the short videos, not really watch long videos. However, like if you have enough volume in general and you’re paying attention to your data, then you will be able to be, you will get lucky, right? Lucky just means that you didn’t happen to understand the last 30% of the audience data because it’s just too much, but you just happened to fall into it correctly. But you need a good foundation, especially in YouTube long form, you’re not going to get lucky again and again. It’s more of the opportunity to, you have a good poker hand and you just happened to win, right? 

You could have lost, you just happened to win because you keep playing those hands. So that’s what I would say about like the outlier viral videos is I didn’t necessarily do anything different. I just did what I was doing consistently, but what I was doing consistently is looking at the data, making sure I’m iterating on that, making sure I’m always improving. And if you do that, you do that consistently, you will have the opportunity to swing into the variance in the good direction. 

Spencer: Wow. Wow. That is, I couldn’t have said it better myself. I really love that analogy of a poker hand. You know, every video is like your hand. You’re always trying to play the best hand possible. And, you know, sometimes like your poker chips are your money, like sometimes you have to invest into, you know, producing a good video. But if you consistently try to play the best hand you can, then eventually, you know, you’ll, you’ll win the pot. So I really like that analogy. I haven’t heard that one before. So thanks for sharing that. Of course. I’m curious, you know, you’re really successful now, which is awesome. 

But say you had to start over from scratch. You have a channel with zero subscribers. What would you do to grow your channel from the beginning? I think this would be really helpful for viewers who may not have a YouTube channel or thinking about starting a YouTube channel. 

Connor: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first thing is like, what is your goal with this? There’s a couple of different goals, right? One, you’re doing this for fun. I’m not, I’m not really going to talk about that because like you’re not going to care about optimization as much. But then also there’s kind of like two other big ones is like you want to be a creator and you want to generate revenue directly from your audience through traditional creator revenue models such as ad revenue, brand deals, or you’re building out content with something on the back end. So actually going from zero to one, it’s I mean, what I spend most my day, I spend about an hour, hour and a half on social media every single day for my channels. And I spend, I mean, I get up at nine, I go to about two and spend the rest of it building a traditional kind of like agency model, handful of employees, 20 plus clients like growing there. And what we do is we take people who have a good business on the back end. 

So they’re financial advisors, realtors, lawyers, startup founders, biotech company, this coach, we just like a bunch of different people. And if you make social media content, actually, you don’t need to worry as much about like getting Mr. B’s viewership because I know people who have like 20, like having really niche, this is actually really interesting. If you have a business on the back end and you have a, you have a super niche YouTube long form channel. I know people out there that have like two K subscribers and they’ve added an additional hundred thousand monthly recurring revenue onto their business because it was long form, it was value and it was just made for their ICP. It was just made for their ideal client. So what I really see for social media is like, you actually don’t have to go that. 

You don’t have to worry about blowing up. You have to make good content. You have to do it consistently. 

You have to do it optimally, but you can go really specific for a viewer base. If you have a business on the back end, you know, I actually about two years ago, a couple of days before I started my company, right? I’m doing this for businesses. I had a conversation with this financial advisor group. I can’t say the name because I know some of their numbers and probably, I don’t know what’s public, but RIA is, so these are independent financial advisors, right? 

So they’re not part of like Goldman’s unit or something like that. And they had a hundred can Instagram and Tik Tok, which I was like, you’re trying to get 45, 50 year olds with $3 million to give it to you so you can manage it. I’m like, why are you on late? At that point, I was like, I love social media. I like posting videos. 

I was big on, it was really big on YouTube at that time. And I was like, why are you doing this guys? And they said, okay, well we raised 200 million assets under management, which in a couple of years is quite good for an RIA group, right? And they said our first 10 to 15 million was from friends and family. 

So just like people that they knew that they got to manage. But the other 185 million came from social media. A people finding their content, they have a hundred K. I was sitting at like a million. 

I was like, oh my God, like you’re, I do not have 200 million assets under management, right? And they made specific content and it was very valuable to their audience. They also took a, they were sharp with social. 

They weren’t Mr. B’s level of sharp, but they didn’t need to be. So I would say if you’re starting a channel, if you’re doing it for the sake of I want to grow on the entertainment side, I want to get revenue. I will say that that is, I mean, I have some ideas for that. I was like, that’s a lot harder. It would be harder for me to go back and replicate because of all the hands I had to play, I think on for social media content, not YouTube long form only, but short form, short form across platforms, other pieces of content in 10 years, I post about 15,000 times roughly, not 15,000 long form videos alone. 

That’d be absurd. I posted a lot of those. I was actually my 10th posting like two or three long 20 minute YouTube videos per day at my peak. 

Wow. So a lot of volume, but I will say that it is much harder if your objective is to make, you know, 50, 100, 200 K per year from YouTube or social media and like your goal is like, I’m just going to do ad revenue unless you’re in financing, you have a high CPM, especially like something more entertainment music, something like that. That’s a, yeah, that’s a goal and you can do it. 

People do it all, roughly all the time. However, you need to hit much higher numbers, which means you need to be swinging these hands and playing the variants a lot more. Right. 

You need to just have so many hands and like that’s harder to do. But if you have a business, even by business, meaning like a consulting business, like you’re really good at a certain thing, like maybe you’re a music producer and you give like private lessons, you’re real produce for certain types of people. If you make content around that, you don’t need Mr. V’s viewership. You don’t need my viewership, right? To actually make more than what my channels might make if you have a business attached to it. Um, but going to specific advice, YouTube shorts is going to be the easiest way to get initial viewership on YouTube. 

Right. By far the easiest, you know, when I started 10 years ago, if I knew about YouTube shorts and that was the thing, I’d probably be like 10 million subscribers now I would play about the diamond just because of that compounding effect and what YouTube shorts can do. Uh, I would caution people that YouTube shorts does not mean you get YouTube long form views and that if I had to start someone out, right? And they wanted to grow relatively quickly for either a business or personal use, I would say YouTube shorts should be a fun, like a foundation of what you’re doing, but you need to make sure you have really intentional, consistent, long form viewers as well. Like you need to make sure that long form content, unless I will say, like, if you’re doing it for a business, your focus can be shorts and then have one or two long form YouTube videos of just 40 minutes of uncut knowledge to just trickle those people into think of it like a funnel. Um, I would say expect your YouTube long videos to get terrible views and it’s going to be really frustrating. You’re going to be like, this is a waste of time, but YouTube long videos as long as they’re evergreen, your video you posted a year ago could get views for the next year. So you might get 10 views on your video at the very start, but that one’s going to trickle up over time as long as the video is good. You can also go back and edit your titles and thumbnails. It’s a big thing like Eman Gazi, who’s a big, uh, kind of entrepreneur type channel, a big thing that he did is he actually had two full time or three full time thumbnail editors on his team. And he would post once a week, but what they would do is they would always go back to his old videos and try new thumbnail, try new thumbnail. And that would help him. Even Mr. 

Bees did this recently. I posted on my LinkedIn where I saw him. He actually changed a video from two years ago and like this account, Mr. Bees stats, whatever on Twitter, really interesting. So they just dive into his data. It showed that his, the views he was getting per day in that video spiked up like 200% and or went from a hundred thousand, like millions, like 10X, right? 

Just by changing that thumbnail on a video, those two years old. So I would say make YouTube long videos. Be comfortable with the fact that they’re not going to get viewers at the start. 

Have a big emphasis on short form. It’s just, look at the end of the day, it’s like how you can get a lot of viewers very quickly, but really make sure you convert those viewers. So related video on your YouTube shorts, where can the shorts viewers go to? Consistent, like just push people in that direction and be careful of YouTube shorts because if your objective is to only get long form viewers, then okay, that’s one thing. However, if you’re looking to grow, and especially if you have something on the back end that could really make you money doing this, then I highly recommend shorts. Like for me and my company, we actually only do short form, but we do it across the board. The big thing is if you were a YouTube creator and you make YouTube shorts, you have to take that short video and put it on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook as well. 

There’s no reason not to. There’s a really strong correlation between a good short form video performing well in one site and performing well on another site and another site like a good video. It’s all the same type issue of viewers. There’s nuances per platform. TikTok’s a bit younger, Facebook’s a bit older, YouTube shorts like higher quality TikTok. 

You can kind of be a little bit more casual. There’s a bit of nuance, but generally if we’re talking posts across the board, you’re getting 4x more opportunities where you just get 1x for the same piece of effort. And yeah, this expect the YouTube long form to take longer. It’s something where when I started, part of the reason it took me so long is just like I did not have the knowledge I had now and I wasn’t really adapting on my data. I was kind of just doing it for fun for a while. But also I only had YouTube long form at my disposal. It’s a lot harder to get in the algorithm for that. Gotcha. 

Spencer: Okay, so to kind of like sum it up, it’s like focus on short form and have that kind of funnel to your long form. I guess if you’re doing a business and have like a back end thing, that’s what you would say is like focus on short form to funnel to long form. 

Connor: And you can do long, and I see people that are like YouTube automation experts or something like that, whether they’re real or not. Some people are very legit at doing that. And they only do long form and they just slog through it. And that’s an option. 

So I will say it’s really case by case. You don’t have to do shorts, but like if I’m speaking generally to people and you want to get some viewership and you want to get some traction, YouTube shorts is going to be that because like you could post a YouTube long video on a channel with no viewers and you’re likely not to get that many views. Right. You could post a YouTube short on a fresh channel and you could get 10,000 views on that first short. Obviously, short form viewers are not equal to long form viewers. We mentioned that briefly like 20 minutes ago and it’s something where if someone watches you for 30 seconds, you also got to think of like, let’s say the average person goes on YouTube if they’re watching shorts and they watch 30 shorts. And let’s say they watch those on average for 30 seconds. 

Right. So all of us or let’s say they watch 60 shorts. So they’re spending 30 minutes conservatively. Right. They’re only spending at most 30 seconds with you versus a long form video for 30 minutes. 

So the same time they’re giving you 30 minutes. That relationship is so much deeper. That’s why I’m always like, okay, if you’re only going to do shorts, I really want you to also have some kind of long form so you can build a true audience. It’s really hard to build like a really deep audience. The shorter the content goes, but the shorter the content goes, the easier it is to get distribution. So you kind of want all those parts in your funnel, almost like a traditional marketing funnel, top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, top of funnel, it’s going to be your short form. 

But where do you bring them to? Think about who has the most engaged viewers, the streamers. Right. There’s people that sit there for eight hours a day and that audience that watches them for eight hours a day, hold this parasocial relationship, whatever. 

Not that deep, but you can look at like the TikTokers who had 20 million followers, but then conversion was hard because they never funneled them into anything longer. And that’s the mistake. Right. So you don’t only want to do top of funnel. If you’re a business owner, you know, you don’t want to just do top of funnel ads, you need them to convert down into your funnel anyway. So think of that with social media as well. 

So shorts is going to be the easiest way to get viewers, but make sure that you funnel them into something so you can actually have a fan base, actually have people build a relationship with you. And that’s very hard from short form alone. 

Spencer: Gotcha. That makes total sense to me. So thanks for sharing that. Really appreciate it. I think I hope our viewers and listeners were paying attention to make sure to grow if you want to grow, I guess, and have that purpose driven, you know, you want to make money from social media for your business. Make sure to do what Conor just said right there. All right, Connor. So I’ve got just a couple more questions for you. What you’ve said so far has been great. 

One, I guess the first question is. You know, you’ve probably worked with quite a few, I guess, businesses and maybe even content creators helping them grow their social media. What would you say? I guess for like the general public, what is like one or two things that someone could could fix today that could help them start to grow? Yep. 

Connor: So there’s actually two big things that are the two big mistakes. The first one is they’re just not posting enough. So especially with short forms, like you should put out a lot of volume. One is just you get more opportunities to go viral. You build more of an audience to give YouTube or Instagram, but let’s say YouTube more data to work with. But then also too, it’s like, how can you iterate on your data and make your videos better every single time if you don’t have any data? Right. 

If you’re posing once a month, that’s not enough information to make improvements. The second biggest thing I see people make, and I actually had someone as like a private client came in, AI founder, was just like, I want to get some viewers. I said, okay, let’s do this. He made a video and I got three million views on Instagram specifically. And I immediately like, when I call him, I was like, all right, well, you’re going to do basically that exact same video again. He’s like, no, I just made it. 

I was like, no, no, no. I said, don’t just upload the same video, but the same topic, the same style. So he did it again, like the next day, got two million views. 

Then he did it again. He got a million views. Then you got 500,000 views. 

So instead of just getting three million views, he got closer to six million. I think the biggest mistake people make. And sometimes like people are like, oh, you’re milking it. 

People don’t care. Like you have some like armchair experts on Twitter, like you’re milking this too much. But look at the viewers, look at the data that people keep watching it and they enjoy it. 

There’s a certain point where you milk it too hard. People are like, I’m bored. But as long as you’re getting viewership, that shows that people like it. So who cares if one person’s like, well, you should be more creative. Who cares? 

This is not an Oscar winning movie. This is short form social media content. And working on your data, you have a crazy outlier video. 

What does that mean? It’s not like, yes, there’s a bit of luck a little bit, but it’s also that’s proof that that style of video works quite well for a large audience. The biggest mistake I see people makes, they have a viral video. Relatively, if you get a thousand views on average, you get a video that’s 30,000 views. That is a viral video for you. Right. So a comparatively viral video. 

And then they never do it again. And I’m not saying just do the same video again, but like, what was your hook? What was your format? What was your topic? What was your style? 

What was your thumbnail? Catons, what, what, what components of that video made it be a breakout video? And I see them, they’ll never do it again. Even if on average, you get a hundred views and then you have a video that does 3000 views, you should pay attention to that because that is audience data and proof that that is something you did there was quite good. So that’s the second one. 

Well, first one, you got to post more to actually get the data. But then if you were lucky enough, lucky enough, if you were consistent enough, right, to get the luck and have a video that does well, please don’t ignore it. That is, I see that too often. I’m like, oh my God, like you’re sitting on gold and it’s going to take you another year longer than it had to. And I’ve definitely like, I got some criticism of like over milking it. I get a quarter of a billion views a month now on social. I’ve done this for 10 years. 

Like it’s worked out and like I probably over milked it at points, but it’s clearly never really hurt me. Right. It’s an, oh, a video didn’t do that well. I say over milked it. Okay, I’ll do a different video tomorrow. 

Post enough note. Like, but on the flip side, if you’re like, you’re not iterating, doubling down on what works, then it’s going to take you years longer to get what you wanted. So don’t, don’t make a, don’t make the mistake of ignoring this amazing, like golden goose that there’s more eggs, there’s more golden eggs, man. 

Don’t just take one and be like, I feel good. I’m going to go reinvent everything, make a new video and try again. It’s, don’t do that, please. Oh, God, don’t do that, please. 

Spencer: Biggest mistake I see. That is, I, I believe that. Um, and I know that that is true, you know, because I’ve seen it myself. Like I think the TikTok algorithm is really good at this, but occasionally I probably scroll too much on my own, but I’m here, you know, occasionally I see like a dramatic story and all the comments are like, Oh, I’m nosy, please give me an update on this. And, you know, I, I see those videos and I don’t specifically go out and search for an update, but you know, over time, as I’m scrolling, it’ll give me an update, the algorithm is really good at bringing me back. Um, you know, it’s a different video. 

Like you said, it’s a different video, slightly different, but it’s like the same, the same thing, basically. Um, and so I’ve seen that actually work in real life. Um, so for our viewers and listeners, make sure to do what Connor said. And, you know, if you have a viral video, make sure to copy it essentially, but make it different. 

Connor: So just, just, just take what you just got data that something worked, right? And that’s all you’re looking for. So why would you ignore what works when that’s what you’re looking for in the first place is getting data? Why would you all of a sudden ignore that? And so when I see them, like, why would you do that? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Cool. 

Spencer: Well, I’ve got one more question for you, Connor. Um, and this is one that we kind of ask all our creators and it’s what mistake have you made along, you know, you’ve been doing it for 10 years, 10 plus years. Uh, what mistake have you made that you’ve learned from that maybe our viewers can benefit from? And maybe you’ve already talked about it. Yeah. No, I mean. 

Connor: Uh, you have another two hours, two hours for that. But I would say the one that comes with my mind. Um, and this is more relevant for, besides I mean, do those two things, those are common mistakes, but for me, especially this is more relevant. The more you do this, you should always look at your audience feedback, but you cause like, you know, it’s very common on the internet. Like you read a comment, negative comment, you’re actually evolved, right? 

Used to be like, if you’re 2000 years ago, tribe of a hundred people, if even one or two people were conspiring against you, you get kicked out of the tribe and you dive starvation, right? So you’re wired to really hyper fixate on negative feedback and don’t view it proportionally to positive feedback. So I would say one of the things that, you know, just through brute force, you realize it doesn’t matter, but it’s very hard to get through it, right? It’s like, you should read your comment section, but you also shouldn’t. You should read the first hour because those are your viewers. And then you should pay attention to the data because there might be some outside person that’s dunking on you, or maybe there’s a comment says, this sucks for this reason. If you make changes based on the opinions of one or a few and you, you’re going to iterate incorrectly because you should look at the data of, do people watch this video or my viewers, my first hour viewers happy with it. That’s good actual like, like anecdotal feedback, which is in the comments because the comments of one person versus the data of a hundred thousand, like you should pay attention to the data of a hundred thousand. 

I will say anecdotally, like the anecdotal data of like the comments, look at your viewers because those are your most in tune with you and pay attention to that a little bit. But I would say, don’t read the comment section after a while. Don’t search up your name. Like don’t do anything like that. Like it’s not, it’s not valuable data and you are hardwired to latch onto it. 

You’re going to start making poor social media decisions. If you look at the wrong data, right, you should always pay attention to the audience data. Do people watch the video? Do they click into it? Did they come back? 

Did they subscribe? Like all that. That is the data that’s actually super relevant, but it’s very easy to get clouded with one-off opinions that will then skew what you do in a negative way. And I will say, like, I mean, I’ve made it through and I’ve done well, but like, I’ve made changes based on the opinions of few. And that was contradictory to the data of the opinions of many. Right. And that will never really serve you well. So I would say that’s the biggest thing for me. 

Spencer: Gotcha. That makes sense. I think that is really solid advice. You know, I’ve talked to a few different creators about comments, but I think that’s, that’s smart. You know, just focus on the first hour and then focus on the data that is, that is well said. So thanks, Connor, for being on the show. I think this episode has been really informative. So I really appreciate it. If our, if our viewers want to, you know, follow you or your business, what, uh, or where should they go? 

Connor: Yes. I mean, I have my main channels on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. Just Connor Pugs. You can go to pugs.media just as the website for my company. If you’re, if you have a company that does one to 10 million revenue and you’re like, you have a good company that functions, but you want to add top of funnel social pugs.media, you can book a call with me. 

I’ll give you a free audit and we’ll talk to you about social. Um, if you want to like follow my channels, Connor Pugs and all those platforms. I have a couple small YouTube channels. I just post what I like. I have a business one with like a thousand subs where I’m like, I’m not going for views. I’m just only giving information and I have a like a rambling one where I just talk about random stuff. So you could, you can find those through my main channels, but Connor Pugs on all socials and then pugs.media is my website. If you run company. 

Spencer: Awesome. Cool. So make sure to check them out. And thanks to our viewers and listeners for checking out this episode of Creators Uncut. Make sure to like and subscribe for more content like this, talking to real creators and a little bit of a plug for ourselves. If you need help making videos, uh, we focus on post production. So reach out, reach out to us at creatorluxe.com and we will see you in the next one.