Samir Chaudry talking with Colin Rosenblum about how creators can solve for continuing ad dollar uncertainty on YouTube:
I would— I would caution against chasing the advertising market. Because, I think, once you go over to short form, they’ll swing back to longform. Like, it’s just— you’re just chasing the ad market.
And, the best way to safeguard yourself is to be niche— is to be extremely hyper-relevant to a specific audience, and be really clear about what that audience is.
And then, I do think it is— there’s a couple models:
One is, like, if you’re truly a content producer and you’re ad based, keep your overhead as low as humanly possible.
The second is, YouTube as a top-of-funnel for another thing.
That, then— that thing can operate differently.
Right. So that could be, Mark Rober with Crunch Labs. That could be, you know, us with education. That could be, you know, another creator with Patreon let’s say, like, The Yard with their Patreon that just dominates, right?
It’s like, you can use YouTube as a top-of-funnel to build another business, and then, that business can hire employees, right?
Ludwig talked about it, too, in our video more recently — like, Mogul Moves. He wants his employees to transition into Mogul moves because the YouTube stuff—
Colin:
Out of Mogul Moves.
Samir:
…sorry, out of Mogul Moves, into Offbrand, because the YouTube stuff is too up and down.
And so, I think it’s— it’s not necessarily like, when I look at our business, of course, in the short term, should we be making more short content? Yes. As a business.
But, in the long term, it’s, ‘How do we stabilize the business with non-ad revenue, if we want to be building company?’
Or, don’t build company. And, like the audience said to Watcher — I bet our audience would be okay if we didn’t have this space, and this lighting grid, and the— but we like it.
At the risk of becoming an exact fit for the old saying,
- “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail,”
…I don’t see a way around pointing out that, platform ownership is the solution, yet again.
OG’s like Samir and Colin clearly understand this (although I disagree with the mention of Patreon as a favorable platform alternative).
As I eluded to last week, the problem was not that the Watcher team asked their audience for money. The problem was the cringey and insensitive way in which they went about it.
If you’ve already built a healthy audience on YouTube, there’s no sense in torching such a valuable asset — not unless your health depends upon it.
Samir’s advice is spot on: Leverage YouTube as a discovery engine by migrating the best of your fans to a platform you own — in a gradual and tasteful way.
Unfortunately, the Watcher crew’s bungling of their platform launch is going to scare off a ton of creators from ever even trying to have one of their own.
Sad for them… but good for you, if you know better.
— Tang
Colin and Samir’s owned platforms include: The Publish Press and ColinandSamir.com.
