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[Music]
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all right welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez and i'm andrew
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and today is a very special episode of the waveform podcast i would say for a couple reasons but number one first
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in-person guests we've ever had in the new waveform studio colin smear welcome to waveform thank you we're honored to
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be here so some of my favorite youtube creators and i my goal is to have all of my favorite creators come to studio so
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we can talk about youtube and talk about everything related to this job but we share this job of making videos on the
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internet and i have a lot of questions that are sort of generally in the like creator economy world and we'll talk
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about a bunch of that stuff but for the for the uninitiated do you have like a like a spiel that you give for
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like we have we have many many spiel will do it as quickly as possible sure um we started on youtube
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10 years ago we started making extremely niche content on youtube just because there was no other place to make it and it was
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all content about the sport of lacrosse which we played right both of us played that and that kind of helped us navigate
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through this you know this world of making content and aggregating a community of
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like-minded people that that really couldn't exist anywhere else and it was a network and and content that we wish
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we had when we were younger like we wish we had a place to hang out and watch videos about athletes and you know what
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was going on in our community and so we went through that process um we built a network we turned it from one channel
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to 60 channels and we ended up selling the company in 2014. we stayed on it with the sports company
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that bought us and we worked with you know all types of different creators most notably dude perfect uh found our way through like working
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with brands working with creators and fell in love with just this just the world of youtube because it
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gave us a career and we felt like we wanted to help others get a career as well so today we make content about
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creators for creators where you know not only are we trying to tell the stories of creators
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but also having creators like you on the show to help people who are just starting out or even other people in this career learn
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about what is this career of being a creator and how do we pull a community together of people who are taking this
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really seriously and want to do it as a profession yeah i've been watching you guys videos on creators and interviews on the youtube
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landscape for a while you've been also andrew you've been watching a couple of them i've been telling everybody to
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watch them just because they're really good but also like let's find as many different ways to tie these experiences
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we've had together as we can um but one of the common things i've noticed so we've talked about like
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everything from like the mr beast of the world to all the other tech youtube creators and one thing that i keep noticing that i always want to like
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explore is the advice that you can get from a creator about youtube about the platform
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about how to make better videos doesn't necessarily always apply and so watching so i'll just go ahead
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and plug right off the bat it'll be in the show notes the video you did with jimmy where you hung out with him you were in his studio get all kinds of this
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awesome information out of him and about youtube and about the way he approaches making videos and i want to listen to
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that whole thing and just just take every little bit of advice i possibly can to make our videos better
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but not all of it actually works and applies to tech so i'll just give a quick example you might say something
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like you really want to be introducing people to a story line
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within the first 10 seconds of a video but that bit of advice might not work if you're trying to review a product for
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example and you have to talk to the person considering buying the thing immediately they would leave if you
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started telling a story and it has nothing to do with the product so i'm curious when you guys talk to a
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bunch of different creators in different genres who have different pieces of advice that they give
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do you find that there's more overlap or almost no overlap between let's say a
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beauty creator or a tech creator or a vlogger and all the different types of youtubers you've talked to so i
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personally actually disagree about what you just said about tech videos interesting i actually think you can
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introduce multiple narratives introduce new stories when it comes to the product it's just not the same way it's not you telling a story but if you said like
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there's two things i really like about this and one thing i really don't all of a sudden you've just introduced
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something that i'm waiting for i see that's a story what's the thing marquez doesn't like about this and i'm waiting
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for that and so i think actually a lot of the advice that he's giving is the way i take it is more of this just
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general storytelling advice and if someone's you know you're introducing a product
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and there's no tension there's no nothing new that's gonna happen um
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then i might not stick around and i think you know i think colin should explain also this advice from the creators of south park when it comes to
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storytelling and i actually think storytelling advice applies to everyone who's telling a story
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yeah there's this clip where the creators of south park are speaking to a class and they said
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that a really bad story will go like this it'll go this happened then this happened then this happened then this
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happened and you think like that's an extremely boring way to intake information yeah and what you want is a
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story that goes this happened but then that happened therefore this happened
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so you want some causation between the beats in your story and i think that's something that could exist completely in
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a tech video where you're saying here's this new phone that was just launched
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history has shown us that it's been really incredible it's been an incredible line of products but
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this one is different therefore you should think differently right and if you can keep that going
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throughout you'll hook people and keep them longer i think one of the interesting things about reviewing tech
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products is a large part of what we do is actually deciding which products to review especially if
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i'm just like narrowing it down to reviewers and so it usually turns out that the stuff we review is at the most extremes
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it's either the best stuff and we want to highlight it and show you or it's like the worst stuff and it's
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like i gotta warn you not to buy this and then there's a whole bunch of stuff in the middle that's like
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most tech which is like fine and sometimes it can be really hard to
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pull a story out of the stuff that's fine like you'll you'll get to this whole line of products has been fine
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this one's also fine stay tuned so i find like a lot of channels are
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like trying to pull a story not even a story but just trying to like exaggerate things to create a better video which
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may actually shift the conclusion about the product yeah so i think there's two things one it's like
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the way you the way you reveal information to the audience is
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you know part of that kind of retention strategy that you can pull it's like okay i'm gonna save this piece of information for there but i'm gonna tell
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them i'm gonna say there's a little bit of like i can hook them but i also think there's completely different
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tension and release points in different formats so all good storytelling is gonna build a
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ton of tension in the viewer and then release it right that's what it is it's like i'm i wanna i'm curious about
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something and then you let me know and so i think a tech review is inherently a bunch of tension because it's like i wanna know marquez's take on this and so
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that that's the tension the release is watching it so i agree with you that it's not apples to apples but i also
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would say that i think that some of the storytelling advice that you can take from you know someone who's able to capture
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you know 100 million people's attention then i think you can apply small bits of that and i think
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the the thing is like jimmy on our interview but then also jimmy uh spending four days with him in north
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carolina like the in-between moments you get a lot of jimmy where he's just
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speaking more directly to us at least like about our content and being more
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you know kind of understanding of what our goals are and so i think the more time we spent together the more
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he started giving us advice that was catered to our channel and i think that's a pretty unique experience yeah
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um but i think there's like general storytelling advice and and at the same time i would say that
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you know he reaches an incredibly broad audience the most the most broad and i think there's different tactics to building a
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niche community and i think the way i view the internet and how i like to interact with it is
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through niche communities i mean our first business was a network a sports network dedicated to lacrosse yeah that's a niche community
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that i'm a part of and the creator community is another niche community i feel a part of right and so now i think
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we're creating content for that community so i want to be a little bit more narrow and i don't actually want the most broad
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audience yeah and we won't take his advice to the fullest extreme because if we did our
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videos would be edited down to six minutes for retention they would take us forever and we would leave out valuable things sometimes letting someone speak
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for us for four to five minutes is valuable yeah right and so we need to make that decision of yeah no our
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audience because we know them because it is niche wants to hear about that right got it
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do you think you would you think you would last in a mr beast challenge which challenge i'm trying to think i
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feel like i'd be pretty decent keeping your hand on something i mean keeping your hand on a phone that's his app i
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could definitely get my hands on this no i'm pretty i'm pretty um i'm decently like mobile and athletic and i don't i
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don't know like if i if you put me up against other creators and editors i would feel pretty confident because most creating and
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editing is like sitting down like endurance yeah i feel like i have a little bit of a
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physical advantage but again it depends on the channel so you could sit in a seat with poor posture for probably the longest
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hours um all right so a lot of what we've talked about also in the youtube world is youtube as a
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platform has relationship with its creators in a way that not every platform does like not every platform sends plaques to
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its creators when they reach milestones and has like creator you know teams that work with us and things like that
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um i'm curious from you what are like the biggest complaints that you've seen
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from creators to youtube because i feel like here were i don't want to say isolated but it
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seems like every gate or every like big problem that youtube has
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seemingly seemingly doesn't really affect our channel very much whether that's because we're a tech channel or
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we're a pg channel or a friendly channel to youtube whatever it is it seems like we've been pretty safe from all of it
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and i guess that's why but i'm curious what sort of things you guys see that ring true the most often among other
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creators i think the number one complaint from creators that i hear is the inability to a b test thumbnails
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because i think yeah thumbnails are this like incredibly stressful um part of our
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job do you remember when it was just like the middle frame of the video yeah you could game that system pretty
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easily and totally became like you need to be a partner to upload a thumbnail yep and now everyone who is like
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anyone can upload thumbnails now right i think yeah i think so yeah but like thumbnail designer is becoming it's
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great that it's becoming like a job in our world right like that's like that's a difference between
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a million views and a hundred thousand views a lot of times is your thumbnail but i think that's the the most stressful part of creating is that you
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make this amazing video not only do you have to be like to be a youtuber not only do you have to be um
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good on camera you also have to be a good producer you also just be a good director a good animator good editor
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like you have to be all these different things and then on top of that you have to be really good at packaging and that's actually what you find out over
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time is that actually the most important part of the job then yeah and i think the importance of that is really
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positive because it increases like the the barrier entry and makes the quality really good but i
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think thumbnails today are causing a lot of creators a lot of stress and are
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the biggest complaint is like can we just a b test yeah it seems like it's such a simple fix um but i would say
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that's the biggest complaint it would be nice we were just talking about this the other day but um would you be uh open to being able to
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change so when it kind of auto plays on your say your smart tv or like when you're hovering over something on the web and
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you don't get to choose what that autoplays like being able to now change that similar to a thumbnail and you
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think that could increase click through yeah definitely i think you can choose that on uh
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on instagram reels and yeah yeah just like being able to do that yeah because we've had ones where we just released a
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studio video where we had the rivie and it has this like gear tunnel in the bottom and the clip it shows was tim
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crawling through that gear tunnel so like super fun right we've had other reviews where it chooses
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like half of that one second is marquez and a role and the other half is switching to b-roll and looks terrible
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when yeah like goes up that happens sometimes well they'll choose b-roll or a graphic that doesn't really have to do exactly with the video
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yeah and i've chosen stuff on my like smart tv because i accidentally scrolled over it and that one clip was like that
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was kind of interesting i think i'm gonna watch the video now yeah i believe that's uh ai selected at this point
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whether it's be from retention or just from a random i think i try and choose a face
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usually yeah yeah i mean all of my videos have a face in them sometimes it doesn't pick a face and i find that odd
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but yeah i i think so i see a lot of i agree with ab testing thumbnails i think that would be
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great i would use that for sure um so i agree definitely that a b testing thumbnails would be fun i would love to
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i would do that all the time but i also am probably among the youtubers that i know and associate with in the
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tech world i'm probably the one that changes my thumbnails the least i think i see a lot of people upload a video
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with a title and a thumbnail and then an hour later change the title and then an hour later change the thumbnail and then change the title and the thumbnail and
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i'll come across it a third time in my home on my home feed or something i'm like i think i've watched this already
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but it has a different title and thumbnail so maybe i haven't um would you do you guys play with title and thumbnail at all do you find that
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that's like a major major part of how you package a video and manipulating it and changing the way
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it performs or not we do play with them but from my perspective if we're frantically changing titles and
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thumbnails we made a mistake much earlier in the process if if we have good ideas make titles and
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thumbnails easy yeah so we try and make sure we have that figured out before we even make the decision
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to start filming or scripting the video yeah it's kind of changed our process to to just say hey let's start that way in
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the beginning and say okay we have this idea but wait before we take any other steps yeah how do you package this idea
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yeah i think one of the conversations i had with jimmy was like when do you pick the title and thumbnail and for him it's before the video even
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gets shot at all and for us we were like well that sounds like great advice let's see how early we
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can apply it but if we're reviewing a piece of tech and we don't know how good it is and we don't know if we're going to recommend it or not i can't choose a
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title and thumbnail before testing the thing so i got to test the thing and then maybe at that point when i'm
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starting to write the actual video i can pick a title and thumbnail but that's much later in the process and at that
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point i don't know anymore if it's a good title and thumbnail but that might be with new formats because you have a
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lot of formats too where you know first impressions you're going to put that in the title that is true yeah and so that's what we're in the process of
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finding or what are our formats where we it'll make it easy for us and for our audience that does they'll get kind of
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annoying sometimes when we we know we have to put galaxy s21 ultra first
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impressions now the actual title we give it basically has to be three to four words like where we have
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to limit ourselves from that so that's kind of a pain sometimes um but yeah it is nice to be able to just always say
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impressions or something like that half the time our titles are created in the uploading process yes video is
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done we're still brainstorming it yeah i have a i have this checklist of like the process of making a video and it's
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usually as i'm uploading the video that i am finishing what i think the title should
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be i have my last two or three options for a title and we're shooting the thumbnail at that moment
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and i don't know if that's i mean there are lots of tech topics and other ways to come up with a title and thumbnail first and craft a video around
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it but specifically for reviews that's been a challenge of mine is like packaging the video in an earlier than as i upload way
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that's like us for interviews you know we just filmed an interview with you we don't know exactly what the title
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thumbnail's gonna be yeah we have like a loose idea going into the interview coolest guy ever yes that was it yeah
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yeah yeah yeah okay yeah that might work there's i think the other complaint
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about the other common complaint is like i don't make enough money you know adsense
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you know this that or the other and my perspective on that is for so many years because we were in such a niche topic
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adsense was not a part of our business model at all and i don't believe that youtube owes us
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anything for uploading videos to youtube just don't believe it and and i think my perspective is just that
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it's our job to make a business out of it if we can find audience that's that's on us youtube gives us the platform and
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it's a search engine and they give us the tech adsense i always look as like it's a cherry on top of our business
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luckily i think over the past year our growth has been such that it's a it's a
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nice cherry on top but i just don't view it i think any creator is starting out and being like frustrated that
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youtube's not paying enough yeah it's like you you have to be doing this for a long time for that to be a significant
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source of revenue yeah yeah that makes sense i feel like the uh i again i find out different things about the industry
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at different times based on the arc of me making videos and it was kind of the opposite like
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it was just adsense for like the first eight years and i didn't spend that much that was fine but then i had to learn
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the building the business part afterwards right to just to structure it in a way that it was much more reliable
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and steady and i didn't have to depend on whatever cpm it was that month right um but it's
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valuable to learn that stuff like as early as you can i feel like an another complaint we hear sometimes is that
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youtube is not serving my videos to my subscribers i find that uh kind of a cop
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out yeah yeah i agree yeah i i hear a lot of like and it's kind of comes back to what you
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said like the title and the if you're scrambling for the title and thumbnail and like why isn't it being served there's probably a reason before youtube
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makes that decision that has affected whether it's being served or not and also it's probably being served it's just not being clicked on yes it is
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being served yeah it's just not being clicked on yeah all right we'll be right back with more from colin sameer but first a quick word from our sponsors
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00:21:22
there is one thing that i think we would like to come back that would help us a lot and that's and i get why they took
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it away but annotations coming back for us would be huge i mean ultimately being
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able to re-upload a video in the same position would be the best but i also kind of understand why you know you
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don't put that in but the amount of times we make these like very very small mistakes that
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don't change the video at all like we say the new iphone has titanium rails instead of aluminum rails and the amount
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of people that call us out for stuff like that we could just toss an annotation in there like good for engagement though yeah
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yeah that is true yeah it just gets to this point where like i'd love to just put a little like astrix like we meant the snapdragon 88
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not the 887 or something like that yeah i think in the tech world that specifically it would be so useful like
00:22:10
product names are eight eight words long and you have to get every single one right and specs are very very long and very detailed numbers
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and you just want to be able to just add a little asterisk inside a video and when there is one the best i can do is pin a comment in the top of the
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description but there's no way to just or just tweet about it annotations but that's not on youtube so it doesn't
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really help i don't get why a partner like having partners like getting annotations i remember the days of you
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know like 12 annotations or a full screen clear one so when you click on it it brings you to a link
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get rid of that but yeah partners with annotations feel like it would make sense i do think that
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in in a tech review like purposefully sometimes not not not the tech itself but even
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like fumbling or saying a word that's completely off at times like would create a lot of like
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you know retention of like wait what did he just say yeah we did it one time in a short which was really fun
00:23:04
yeah we said we had we said the head of robert kinsel youtube yeah like we should have said
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the head of youtube robert kinsel said this and we said that robert kennedy has tripled yeah yeah yes
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that's funny i think some people ass we'll say that's why we're doing it yeah i think people are saying that that's what's happening when it really it's
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like we just went from reviewing a phone to reviewing a camera to reviewing a car to reviewing a tablet right so like i
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forgot that it's the triple eight not bad right um so annotations i'll put in an anyway if anyone on youtube is
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watching this annotation we'll take it we'll test it for you yeah i also think we're going to see video replies make a
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comeback really i liked video responses because now that they have youtube shorts oh yeah that's really interesting
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that so they could tie in so yeah people would reply to videos with
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and that would create more creators because there's this whole ecosystem where even people like us we talk about youtube creators so you could just go
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into the comments drop a short video yeah and start building an audience that was a really big part i mean you
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see the way tick tock does it now where videos are embedded in comments but like that was a that was a whole youtube ecosystem thing there were reply
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channels yeah and under any video you could either so if i was the creator i could enable
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anyone to submit a video reply and they'd all just show up but then people started spamming them or people would
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just like spam replies or whatever so you could only approve uh you could set it to approve only and
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then approve whichever ones you wanted and so you would often find that the biggest creators would always approve
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replies from the same creators and then those creators who were just replying to people would have their own ecosystem because of the people they
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replied to which is fascinating and i really like the idea of bringing shorts back as video reply or bringing video
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replies back as shorts because if we made a video about you yeah and then we approved you to be able
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to make a video supply if we got something wrong or if you wanted to add something yeah yeah and then it's on my
00:24:54
channel so people link to what i just made a video about interesting that's actually really good it's honestly the best idea i've heard for shorts yeah
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actually i'd love to talk to you guys about shorts to do them we've been pretty um negative about them maybe i mean or
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we've been vocal about them i'll say but we don't really do them they're very against not against but they're not like
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our right back they're very different they're definitely not our original content and that's like on the main channel the number one thing we know is
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like we have a format and we're sticking with it and we love it so obviously a 40-second video
00:25:27
doesn't fit in that form a vertical 40 second video in the same feed as our regular videos it feels off yeah but you
00:25:33
guys have you've done shorts on the main channel you guys have experimented with shorts in the past do you how would you summarize first of all your experience
00:25:39
with youtube shorts because i've had i've heard a variety of versions of responses
00:25:45
very positive yes generally positive i would say that for us
00:25:50
you know we had um we had a creator on our show who goes by nas daily and he said something to us
00:25:56
about platforms which is really interesting around like just the the concept of supply and demand there are some platforms that have enough supply
00:26:04
of content and enough demand they've reached equilibrium there's 50 000 pieces of videos uploaded per day and
00:26:11
500 million viewers per day like that's average of 10 views per video or whatever that's equilibrium platforms
00:26:18
there are platforms that don't have equilibrium right where they have incredible demand
00:26:24
for views not enough supply for content that is the place you want to be in and that's
00:26:29
why creators have such big opportunity uh because the platform wants that content they want to experiment
00:26:35
with it they want to try it yeah but on the other side of it for us what we notice is it takes us a really long
00:26:40
time to make a video but we have a lot of thoughts like we have quick takes that we want to get out and yes there's you know there's a vlog
00:26:47
or like just pop open the camera and start talking but then they're still editing and like there's just so much
00:26:52
and i think vertical short form content lowered our barrier to entry to just have like some forgiveness around it and
00:26:58
be like it's okay it's just a vertical video yeah and we shoot it straight through the phone and we do some editing
00:27:04
but it is this first opportunity for us in a long time to film something and get it
00:27:10
out on our youtube channel in the same day so if something happens we can react to it yeah and
00:27:16
from our conversations with people at youtube the you know the the shorts feed and the
00:27:22
main channel feed like short form videos and long form videos are kind of bifurcated in the back end and so it's
00:27:27
not it's not one in the same it's not like you know they know it's a different type of video it's not gonna bring your
00:27:32
average view duration down yeah so for us we were like okay if there's no real big risk to the channel yeah
00:27:40
why not like why not try them and from what we've seen is you know
00:27:46
in the past 28 days and we've done around like 25 million views on the channel and there's like i think above
00:27:51
60 of that is coming from shorts and um that has just generally made our entire
00:27:58
catalog of content uh generate more viewership because there's just more traffic to our channel
00:28:03
right and so if you think about it as like a retail shop like our channels like a retail shop we've just increased our traffic significantly
00:28:11
and when that happens then they're going to look at other stuff in our shop too right and so they're going to look at our back catalog they're gonna look at all of our and and our subscribers have
00:28:17
grown our just overall brand exposure has has grown because i'm short so i mean one of our shorts has 15 million
00:28:23
views and that converted about 16 or 17 000 subscribers wow okay and the value prop in the short is you know explaining
00:28:29
things that are happening on youtube and in media so if someone likes that and that's their first entrance to us yeah
00:28:36
makes a lot of sense i mean i so my experience has just been watching other people
00:28:41
experiment with shorts and so i've seen people try it on the main channel i think i probably will eventually start a
00:28:47
channel just to experiment with shorts because i have a lot of ideas that i think would be good shorts that channel
00:28:53
should be called mkb shorts just
00:28:59
[Music] but but also like what the studio to me
00:29:04
feels like a space to experiment like why not experiment yeah with shorts on the
00:29:09
studio channel true and especially for me i look at it as like right now again that like the demand is
00:29:15
high and the supply is just catching up right that's what i was saying so like there's gonna be a moment where
00:29:21
that swaps viewership's gonna change it's gonna they're gonna they're gonna test and iterate and test and iterate
00:29:26
and there's just a moment right now where they're just serving everyone the same small amount of charts yeah or just like
00:29:34
at least from what we've seen we've seen creators who have just taken shorts and grown to six million subs there's a
00:29:40
creator called dental digest have you seen him no he's like a dental creator and every short form video is is
00:29:47
very similar it's it's like one format where he tests different brushes and sees how well they brush his teeth he's
00:29:53
a dental student he grew from zero to six million subs this year um that's why all through shorts and now he's making
00:29:59
long-form content right and it's trending and it's doing well yeah one of his one of his longer form videos was
00:30:05
number one on trending and so he basically used shorts to build a platform
00:30:11
i think the thing that's dangerous is if the shorts have a completely different function than the long-form video right it has to all fall in the same value
00:30:17
prop and if it does then why not i think it's youtube's play to get creators from tick tock over to
00:30:24
youtube as you're saying it makes perfect sense because i i've heard from multiple different people you know tick-tock
00:30:29
creators are getting huge but ultimately even the biggest tick-tockers want to be youtubers but converting that from a whole
00:30:35
different app is is hard so if you're in the app already and you can just be on the same channel and there's the
00:30:41
long-form contact that they now converted for that's perfect they just took away the barrier to entry which was really high now you can literally just
00:30:48
repurpose a lot of your tick tocks yeah download them take the logo off upload them to youtube shorts
00:30:54
and you could have if you've been on tiktok for the last three years you could have years worth of valuable
00:31:00
content ready to go also though you don't have to upload a thumbnail for shorts i mean we just don't even do it
00:31:06
you don't have to but you can you can yeah so if you go to our like videos tab
00:31:11
it's not very aesthetic anymore right it's like it is just these like vertical shorts mixed in with
00:31:17
like our edited thumbnails so that is not very aesthetic but the fact that it's just playing in a you know auto
00:31:23
play yeah so you know you're not really thinking about getting the thumbnail and the shorts you're not thinking about the packaging because actually the audience
00:31:29
isn't even choosing to watch it the app is choosing the audience and so it's like the inverse of the traditional
00:31:35
youtube video and i think for that it's really interesting and i think youtube
00:31:41
the thing that youtube has from an opportunity perspective is that tik tok like you mentioned a lot of tick tock creators are coming over to youtube to
00:31:46
like graduate for their career right and we've heard the classic you know comparison on twitter all the time of like would you rather have 50 000
00:31:53
youtube subscribers or 5 million tick tock followers and almost it's like so amazing that it always
00:31:58
trends towards 50 000 youtube subscribers just because you can make a career on youtube so i think this is the play to say hey
00:32:05
we are the we are youtube we are the better place to launch your career
00:32:11
so we'll have these short form videos too and so if you were thinking about tick tock just do it over here because then you're already building that
00:32:16
foundation like dental digest where it's like now you have six million subscribers now you have a career it's
00:32:21
youtube yeah already there you're already there yeah i think that one point you brought up about supply and demand is really interesting the the
00:32:28
when i see new features get launched especially by youtube but kind of by any social network i always really like
00:32:33
diving into how much it looks like they've embraced this new feature does it look like they're just kind of trying
00:32:39
it on the side or does it look like they are building part of their site around it
00:32:44
and to me shorts does look like youtube is like committing really hard to making sure it's a big thing
00:32:51
sometimes i see features where like you know for example there's podcasts on facebook or like there's a video podcast
00:32:56
on spotify and i don't really see that many of them and i kind of wonder how committed they are because i see the
00:33:02
feature ad but i don't want to pivot my whole business around something that might disappear in a year
00:33:08
so i am glad to see shorts get the attention that i think that it's rightly
00:33:13
deserving and i'm i'm definitely going to want to experiment with a little bit you know those restaurants and strip malls that say like we have these in la
00:33:19
i don't know if you guys have these here it says like chinese food and donuts that sounds amazing but
00:33:26
i want one yeah i see where you're going okay all right you see where i'm going but basically like for me personally
00:33:32
i want to go to a chinese restaurant for chinese food i want to go to a donut shop for donuts so when i think about apps that are
00:33:37
trying to do a lot i think that like it overwhelms me i'm like are you are you a specialist in this is this the thing you
00:33:44
make are you trying to serve me chinese food and donuts at the same time yeah because you saw an opportunity so i think for me as a consumer i i i'm so
00:33:52
specific like i listen to podcasts on spotify i watch video on youtube i might also be the old guy who's just like
00:33:58
doesn't want to change my ways i worry about that but but that's just who i am uh and i think
00:34:04
a lot of consumers are like that too where it's simplicity wins a lot and singular focus wins a lot of the time so
00:34:10
yeah youtube was based in short form video when we first started in 2011 we were uploading 20 second videos to
00:34:16
youtube because that's where short form video lived there's no instagram video there was no there's no tick tocks there's no vine at the time so short
00:34:22
form video lived on youtube so i think they actually do have an expertise in it where they can
00:34:28
solve how to serve you videos and then their video monetization is better than other platforms so they will also solve
00:34:35
down the line how those are monetized i think it's only a matter of time until you know you open up the instagram app
00:34:40
and you're just in reals and potentially even with youtube as well because it's an extra step that keeps
00:34:46
you away from a view keeps you away from creator discovery right i could totally see youtube doing that with the with the
00:34:51
mobile app yeah netflix is also doing it too you notice that the network the netflix mobile app has a tick tock
00:34:58
feature oh gosh where you're swiping through moments of shows because you can't upload yourself no but it's like it's
00:35:04
like funny moments from their shows that are it's the exact same ui it's called fast laughs it's just for the college
00:35:10
comedy yeah that makes sense i mean netflix is serving that's their job is to find stuff for you their like smart tv app is like you
00:35:17
can't accidentally just take your hand off the controller for a second because it starts playing the trailer the second yeah hover over everything which is very
00:35:24
annoying but obviously extremely extremely successful that's a good point it's basically already auto play yep
00:35:29
it's just starting to play already i've found that my our videos have slowly gotten longer like you said you
00:35:35
started with shorter videos even on our channel i think the the first couple of years of videos i was making were all like
00:35:42
three to five minutes long and they were the same genre but they were all three to five minutes because that's all i
00:35:48
needed to tell the story or just say how good the thing was today a short video is like seven
00:35:54
minutes long and i've uploaded 15 25 35 minute long videos
00:35:59
so part of that is definitely that i feel like it's taken me longer to finish all of my thoughts on a piece of tech
00:36:05
and i generally i just want to make longer videos i think that's valid but the other half is that at a certain
00:36:12
point youtube started favoring longer videos and so i felt like a little bit
00:36:18
of it was leaning into the algorithm of like hey well that's more watch time too so longer videos is fine
00:36:24
how much do you find it to be problematic or maybe even beneficial to
00:36:29
bend your content to the algorithm because i know that's something some people just don't want to do ever
00:36:36
and that's something entire channels sometimes are based around so i'm curious your thoughts on that so we'd describe you know this term content
00:36:42
market fit as a dance between three things one is what you want to make it still has to be
00:36:49
what you want to make you have to want to make this video and enjoy making the video the second is there has to be an
00:36:54
audience for that you have to be plugging into you know an audience or you have to be
00:36:59
aware that you're going to create an audience but there has to be an audience for what you're making and then the the
00:37:04
third thing is the algorithm so i think all three actually have to play together what you want to make what your audience
00:37:10
wants to watch and then what the algorithm wants to feed and i think that
00:37:16
you have to have all three check a lot of times you know when we're thinking about packaging like we are
00:37:22
thinking about the algorithm but there's some times where we have an idea and we think about really good packaging for it and then
00:37:27
we're like uh i don't want to i don't want to make that video like that's not that's not us yeah um
00:37:32
and so i think all three have to be clicked on for it to work and for you to enjoy it um because i
00:37:38
think audience there's too much content now where if you're just doing it for the algorithm i think an audience can feel that you can sniff that out yeah
00:37:45
pretty easily like you you've probably i've watched videos where i'm just like oh this is kind of like you're almost watching like a game like
00:37:51
someone game the algorithm or like someone you know create like a it's like when you watch someone like uh like the
00:37:57
last three pages of an essay or just to reach the minimum threshold yeah just spewing words yeah like i can tell what
00:38:03
you're trying to do i get what's happening here yeah yeah and so yeah i mean when i think about it like i
00:38:09
don't think i personally watch content on youtube that's good for the algorithm i like to watch really long form
00:38:14
podcasts which probably don't have amazing retention i love to watch loose vlogs like the
00:38:21
type of content that i like to watch you know yeah but when it comes to length though there's also as a creator
00:38:27
and intangible question you have to ask yourself which is is this interesting yeah what our audience find
00:38:33
is interesting and that determines the length of our video if we have a two hour conversation with a creator and if
00:38:40
by chance only 15 minutes we actually found interesting and we asked everyone in our office did you find this
00:38:45
interesting that's going to be a 15 minute video yeah right but if we went for two hours and it was all interesting
00:38:51
and we asked everyone again in our in our office listen to this watch it was it interesting then that's what goes up i mean two of the three things i
00:38:57
mentioned though are like from a distribution mindset one is what does the audience want and one is what is the
00:39:02
what does the platform want uh okay right and so those are like distribution mindsets so two thirds of your brain is
00:39:08
distribution the third is creation which is what do i want to make and when you look at at least for me
00:39:14
when i look back at the last four years we've been we have we've had the collins mirror channel for four years and we
00:39:19
made no money doing colin and sameer for three years of that right or or maybe
00:39:24
it's now five years and it was three years of not working in the two years of working and a lot of that has been that
00:39:30
shift when i look back at the older videos i'm like oh we were creators we didn't want to cut out stuff
00:39:36
that actually was uninteresting but we liked it because we were like that was a cool shot or that was a good thing that
00:39:42
was a fun line we said let's keep it in and then today when we all watch cuts together we're watching as a group and
00:39:47
we are ruthless we're like that was boring cut it that was uninteresting cut it that was
00:39:53
interesting but not interesting enough we're gonna make it a short cut it yeah like we are constantly cutting because we're thinking about the two-thirds
00:39:59
which is algorithm and audience yeah um this is this is why i like i
00:40:05
struggle to apply it to a tech video because if i cut out genuinely useful information because it
00:40:11
was boring i'm not left with a complete video anymore yeah and a lot of what i want to
00:40:17
deliver is the best most informative thing and i have to drag you from one exciting thing to the other but also
00:40:23
make sure i include all the other things in between about how all this bent this higher bandwidth memory is much better for performance while i get to sharing
00:40:30
how much faster it was in final cut exports like the exciting thing to me is
00:40:35
surrounded by other necessary but less youtube exciting
00:40:40
things so i think i've never heard it described that way but i do feel like i am doing that balancing act in my head
00:40:46
every time i'm editing is like making sure i include the things but also making sure i quickly get you to the
00:40:51
next like highlight while making sure i include all the things that need to be included i want to be
00:40:58
careful when i give you feedback here because what you're doing is working so i'm not gonna i have not reached the you know we have
00:41:04
not we've never really made a tech video i'm not immune to feedback okay but i think when you have the opportunities to
00:41:10
and when you've done it on your channel to show and not tell that's when things get really interesting because it's a very visual medium so if it's about like
00:41:18
the processing speed can you show me something can you shoot something in 8k
00:41:23
and like bring it into the computer and show me how quick that happens while you're telling me about something else
00:41:28
you're like i'm going to load this up and then i'm going to tell you about the next thing but in the background of the video or in a second split screen i'm
00:41:34
tracking how quickly yeah something's moving right so then it's like two things are happening at once and you're
00:41:40
showing me speed while you're saying something different and i'm all of a sudden i'm tracking multiple narratives and that keeps me on the edge of my seat
00:41:47
yeah uh and i think when the times when you do that i think that's like the opportunity with tech is to show as much
00:41:53
as possible yeah i've played with that a little bit i've played i've definitely played with like how much people respond
00:41:58
to what's being said versus what's being shown yeah and again it depends on what the video is
00:42:05
but i keep coming back to your views people really linger on what's being said
00:42:10
more so sometimes than what's being shown unless they contradict yeah so a lot of times i talk about smooth
00:42:15
performance and i talk about how this is zippy and fast and i'm showing that too but sometimes i'll say something is
00:42:21
smooth and i'll show a clip of it behaving perfectly normally and people are like why do you say it's smooth it looks totally normal well i'm telling
00:42:28
you it's smooth because i can't show this as well as i need to i can show a performance hiccup but it's hard to show
00:42:34
you the smoothness so there's little bits of pieces of tech that are i just have to say it yeah like to tell
00:42:40
you what's happening so i think i mean granted this is for me who's not
00:42:46
like if a lot of stuff you say on your channel i'm like i i don't know what you're saying exactly but i like what i'm seeing uh so i'm more of the visual
00:42:54
guy for your in your audience but i think also analogy is really helpful like analog like you're drawing
00:43:00
something those those are the types of things that for me i need to be like tech explained to me like i'm
00:43:08
probably not five five-year-olds are pretty smart now so i don't know it's like zach explained to me like i know nothing about tech
00:43:13
we have done some small things like that um when hole punch cutouts for the front of uh cell phones were first coming out
00:43:20
we there was a point where it's hard to explain to someone who's never seen it that like it kind of you
00:43:26
don't notice it after a while of using it so what you did was as you were speaking in the a-roll you put a black
00:43:31
circle on the screen and then like 20 seconds later it was like by the way this has been here the whole time did
00:43:37
you notice it didn't you that's great if you didn't look you probably aren't going to notice this stuff like that but
00:43:43
i do think it's a it's an interesting thought of like performance or even like charging speeds or something like that
00:43:48
to maybe have some sort of a a ticker on the side i mean we we kind of did it with a thousand mile race where michael
00:43:54
did our whole map thing so when we're talking about different things the map is showing what's happening yeah that's cool um and michael's obviously a wizard
00:44:02
so being able to pull stuff like that off would be pretty easy yeah that was something jimmy said to us actually just
00:44:07
to go back to what he was saying when he was explaining to us like multiple stories he was saying to us he
00:44:12
was like well you know what you guys are saying is one story but your b-roll is another story
00:44:18
right and so it's actually not necessarily thinking like all about yeah one line of like
00:44:24
what you're saying but like your animations are another story and so the the viewer is tracking the different
00:44:31
information they're receiving as all stories right and if they all tell the exact same story like in a very didactic
00:44:38
way then it's it might not be as engaging but if they're doing it in very different ways then yeah that's interesting i feel like
00:44:44
that's something i've played around with a little bit more because in a tech video i keep going back to reviews yeah
00:44:50
but like yeah most of what i'm saying it helps if you can see it too so as i'm saying each
00:44:56
thing and this is how most reviews are it'll cut to showing the thing everything every sentence has a
00:45:03
five-second clip to show what's being said show it being said show it's being said show is being said and there are
00:45:08
some parts of some tech videos where it's a little bit more storytelling and it's a little bit more it's a little
00:45:15
less show something and a little bit more like telling a story of a gadget or maybe i've really enjoyed using this
00:45:22
thing or things that you don't really have a direct clip for and that's when in the edit i'm starting to play a
00:45:27
little more with visuals that show other things um but i want to find more of those because
00:45:33
i think your guys's b-roll is a story though like yeah our office when you guys upload a new video like they'll go
00:45:39
nuts over one shot or one animation waiting to see which shot is going to come yeah i remember even like the
00:45:45
studio uh intro animation was like a two-hour conversation in our office of
00:45:51
like so i think you guys do have that that narrative is a lot of like your b-roll like you mentioned you showed us the
00:45:57
robot in here it's like when you use that those six seconds that's a whole story that i'm waiting
00:46:02
for i'm waiting to see how that plays out or what's the next shot what's the next shot yeah there was also one video
00:46:09
where you had and maybe it was multiple videos but where there was a second angle and every once in a while you would turn oh yeah and speak to that
00:46:15
other end that was really good and even that was a retention strategy as a audience member i was waiting for you
00:46:20
to do that next cut in was that dogecoin i think so this is not financial events yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and that's the
00:46:26
video that reminds me a lot of like john stewart uh or some of those satire comedy shows where the
00:46:33
information is really dense yeah and they break it with a joke right every 30 40 seconds they break up
00:46:39
really dense information with a joke it kind of reminded me of that and that's what gets you through it yeah yeah
00:46:45
that's sort of something i talked about in the skillshare class it was like i like to have a common thread that goes through the entire video if i can or but
00:46:52
at least over multiple sections of the video but it's hard to keep somebody focused with all that information for a
00:46:58
long time so you do kind of need to find ways to have like beats or like bring people from point to point and
00:47:04
there's a bunch of different ways to do that and that was one of that was a fun one i did like the dojo
00:47:09
video for that reason but yeah that is uh that is that was a fun one i want to ask you about youtube
00:47:14
comments because we briefly talked about this earlier about how maybe it's not the best place to hang out in the comments
00:47:19
section on youtube but one of my notorious i think i've said this more often than
00:47:26
any other piece of youtube advice is the best comments i get are from people who have never seen any of the videos
00:47:32
before and those aren't on youtube those are on like reddit or like a random website that embeds a video for the first time
00:47:39
and like the audience for that website will be like oh this is a good video for this reason those are the most informative interesting comments that
00:47:46
and that inform how i can improve and how i can make videos better do you hang out in the youtube comments section at
00:47:52
all do you hang out on reddit on discord what do you how do you get feedback from
00:47:57
your audience and what do you think is the most valuable i'm pretty plugged into the comments but
00:48:02
um i wouldn't i would say there's like always four in a month that are like
00:48:09
really good feedback just like there's a few and then like i'll screenshot it and send it to colin
00:48:15
and we'll like talk about it and there's there's only youtube comments yeah there's only like a few yeah and it'll be something about like
00:48:22
hey guys that one part was unnecessary i got bored during this part and it kind of irks you because you're like because
00:48:27
like i agree with you yeah yeah it's the worst one it's true but yeah i think that type of stuff or like when someone's like why did you
00:48:32
make this video like if there's some like more comments around like our entire brand
00:48:39
like is this on brand for us so there's some that are from like people who are watching video to video the worst is
00:48:44
where it's like hey guys i typically love your videos but you know and you're like oh god
00:48:50
it's worse when you let down someone who's like a fan yeah and then there's also the people who come in they're like
00:48:55
wow i hate these guys or like these guys but at that time it probably means we made a video that a lot of people are watching if like the hate really starts
00:49:01
pouring in which doesn't happen to us that like in that like crazy to a crazy degree but yeah there's a bit of it where we talk a
00:49:07
lot where if it gets beyond our audience and we start receiving some of those comments of like negativity then we know
00:49:14
that the video was good enough to get beyond our audience and so we're like and
00:49:19
i think you know you're making something that is of value and that has its own
00:49:25
perspective if people disagree with it or dislike it if you're you know appealing to everyone
00:49:31
you're very much like in your bubble and so i think that the comments indicate to us not only like certain feedback from
00:49:38
our community but also you know when we do make something that allows us to grow
00:49:43
the brand yeah when there's negativity and i will say that i want a more
00:49:50
tight-knit group where we can have more actual feedback from our audience
00:49:56
and that might play out over over discord uh in the future it might play out in other places but i would say that
00:50:02
like we've also built a culture internally in our office of of a lot of feedback and i
00:50:07
think that's been really beneficial because there's a lot of times where colin and i have an idea and we're excited about it we tell the team and
00:50:12
actually happened recently and they were like no we don't think that should be a video that's made on this channel and we think
00:50:19
it should be this one and we went with the team's advice and it was one of our most popular videos and so we were like oh wow
00:50:25
like it's so helpful to surround yourself with people who deeply care but also really understand
00:50:31
the brand that you're building so that the feedback is beyond just us too yeah the diversity
00:50:37
of thought yeah yeah yeah do you ever look at like other random places outside of the comments section where you might
00:50:43
find video feedback like if a video is embedded somewhere and you see like traffic from a new audience i'm terrified by reddit um i just think i'm
00:50:50
always there yeah i think i'm always gonna get like kicked off or like i feel like an imposter on reddit like i feel
00:50:55
like i'm not cool enough on the internet to be there um so i do sometimes search our name on reddit
00:51:01
and look at some of the conversation and i find that to be really interesting because people who are on reddit are the
00:51:07
ones who are really engaged the most positive negative even if someone like says
00:51:12
something like oh yeah like you know colin and smeared to this and someone's like who i think that's interesting too where it's like oh wow okay like i don't
00:51:18
know i just i find reddit to be interesting to search your name on yeah because i also think it's a validation
00:51:24
point that if people are talking about you on reddit then there's you're at you're at least a part of the internet culture yeah you contributed to
00:51:31
something that people find useful and they're sharing it amongst themselves yeah which is a good start and then you
00:51:36
get feedback from that i feel like reddit was a ahead of its time uh and it's it's still around but i feel like
00:51:42
youtube could have made a reddit like comment section like that would have been really amazing
00:51:48
if youtube had made reddit or even like a community chat that that could like the mkbhd
00:51:55
community could live within a google or youtube ecosystem it feels like reddit and discord and youtube need to have a
00:52:01
meeting yeah
00:52:08
the best feedback we've ever seen because it's like you know you can post a really nice well thought out comment
00:52:13
and then because of their organization you can have a really great conversation under that and very quickly pick what that is but man they also know how to
00:52:20
leave some very yeah negative hurtful stuff and yeah it's rough to go through
00:52:25
sometimes yeah if you had any feedback now this is for your audience members maybe they want to
00:52:32
provide feedback you said you've seen maybe four good comments that you really thought was good feedback and there's
00:52:38
somebody out there who's a fan of you and maybe wants to suggest something what would be the best way to get the attention because
00:52:44
it feels like there's a lot of comments that i've responded to that seem super negative and i've gotten like in a tizzy
00:52:50
about it responded and then i realized they didn't mean any harm yeah they were actually just
00:52:55
sometimes it's hard through text it tends to get off so i think two things one the the absolute way to not get our
00:53:00
attention i'm sure you experienced this too is to write us like a essay of an email yep yeah just
00:53:07
i can tell from the first sentence of the email what's going to happen yeah and like just just imagine us opening it
00:53:13
on our on our mobile device and then scrolling nine times like there's no way we're going to read it we get so many of
00:53:20
those on on the contrary like there's very limited amounts but people who make videos about our videos i just consume
00:53:27
information through video that's just how i like to probably the fastest but the hardest way to get
00:53:32
our attention yeah the best way someone has ever gotten our attention is they venmoed me a dollar
00:53:38
and then wrote their tip like in the description yeah they wrote their message in the description of the payment because i was
00:53:44
like why did i just get a dollar and then i looked and then i read and it was like hey smear i found you on venmo and i was
00:53:51
like wow that is that's unique and it was like video feedback no it wasn't video feedback it was actually like wanting to collaborate on a project oh
00:53:57
wow and we ended up doing it the guy wanted us to on his podcast i was gonna say like hey if you have video feedback for us
00:54:05
we take feedback in the form of ten dollars we won't listen your feedback unless you donate yeah right no that's that's
00:54:11
really interesting yeah i think i mean i'm on twitter all the time i see a lot of yeah it's become also though you have
00:54:16
to be careful about um what you address because if all you ever do is respond to negative feedback then people see that
00:54:22
and they figure the way to get your attention here's some negative feedback so it's a it's a healthy mix of like reading
00:54:28
understanding maybe if it's a genuine question you can engage and go back and forth with people and you'll get some actually good advice and things like
00:54:34
that um but you have to be careful you have to be careful do you guys ever get feedback from fellow tech creators or
00:54:40
creator friends not enough i think that's that's one thing also jimmy was talking about like we we should network
00:54:46
better with fellow tech creators i've been friends with some of these guys for literally a decade and it's like we grew
00:54:52
up together and now these guys have kids and i'm like oh my god we've been making this stuff for so long that we've grown
00:54:58
up and yeah no we should have more inner dialogue we should have like we have we
00:55:04
made a discord server a while ago and then it died and then it's overwhelming like i think even right now the amount
00:55:09
of chats that i'm a part of i can't i just can't i can't i can't stay on top of it
00:55:14
all yeah yeah i can't but it's all it's all useful like it's all genuine like there's i'm in several discords i'm in
00:55:21
like a couple slack groups and like random group chats on whatsapp and stuff and i'm like all of this is great
00:55:27
information i'm just like if i if i sit here processing it all i'll never make another video i'll just be reading and replying to everyone
00:55:34
what's crazy is like i think the value of internet community is at least for me i find like 12 people to be my cap of
00:55:43
anything beyond that i start to lose track of what's happening you know and like even
00:55:48
in discord too i think you have to the culture of discord is like you have to have it up to be able to
00:55:54
to catch up with what's happening yeah uh because otherwise behind yeah you just fall behind and then you you feel like uncomfortable contributing yeah
00:56:00
it's good advice i'm gonna i'm gonna try to find my like t-mobile phase five yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah it's a good idea
00:56:06
i feel like we get good feedback generally when we see people in person so ces is always like a great time where
00:56:12
we we love ces lately the tech there is not that great anymore but we get to see all the tech
00:56:18
friends that we know and like a lot of them are on the west coast we're obviously on the east coast the best part being able to see everyone go out
00:56:23
and have dinner it just it comes up in conversation and that's all great but you know covet now
00:56:30
and everything we've seen juddner we've seen i haven't seen austin we haven't seen linus like we haven't seen anyone
00:56:36
forever and it's a lot harder i think to and maybe we should normalize it a bit but just text someone or send them a
00:56:42
message be like yeah maybe this could be done a little better because it probably comes off as rude if you're just sending
00:56:47
a message out of the blue and offering advice jimmy's not shy about that i love that i've had a couple phone
00:56:53
calls with jimmy yeah i love that about it so useful he's not shy about it yeah i will say that our our designer and
00:56:59
editor chris is in a thumbnail discord for people who work with creators and design their
00:57:05
thumbnails and it's like a very niche and very small group of people get tim in there yeah yeah i i find it like when
00:57:12
i look when he tells us about it and sometimes he'll hit our slack because we'll post a video and then the other
00:57:17
designers in there will be like hey maybe you guys should tweak it like this and then he'll send us the the chat and
00:57:23
i'm like yeah they discuss our thumbnail every monday morning yeah and it's far better we used to just put out thumbnails on
00:57:30
twitter and ask twitter what they thought like was this i did enjoy that to be honest which was yeah it was very
00:57:35
fun it was fun but the feedback was all over the place from some people who like we're like all right that's that's
00:57:41
pretty good feedback but you i don't think i've ever made a thumbnail before and yeah we also found one time we did
00:57:46
it yeah one time we did it and we were going to put the video out like a week later
00:57:51
and then another organization did that thumbnail that everyone voted and put the video out before we did
00:57:57
with the same title and we were like oh okay we i don't know if we can do that publicly because again like titles and
00:58:03
thumbnails are that valuable yeah that especially for complex topics like recovering sometimes that's interesting
00:58:09
so we stopped doing it after that yeah because you don't want to share too early do you find that you see uh other
00:58:15
channels like copying things that you do and do you do anything about it
00:58:21
um at times yes but we've also been inspired by others you know and
00:58:26
like there's there's a difference yeah for sure we've we've seen it
00:58:32
more across other projects now now that we you know we have our newsletter the published press we have
00:58:37
um you know we we have what we're doing on shorts we have you know what we're doing in the in the on on the main channels
00:58:43
sometimes we see like a concept that we say in the main channel and then we see a tick tock that has 5 million views
00:58:50
with the same concept but someone just kind of just posted yeah yeah so we don't know um the newsletter
00:58:57
is more obvious when it happens but there's only so much information and i also think that what
00:59:02
i've learned especially in media is oftentimes like you are as a media
00:59:08
organization you think of yourself as like a i think of us as like sprinters like we're sprinting and
00:59:13
there's a lot of people who are gonna start taking off right behind you as you start going and that's natural because
00:59:19
they see something that's working and they're like let's do that version or our version of that
00:59:25
and if you ever start running it's possible they'll sprint past you and so my visual once people start
00:59:31
you know taking some of our concepts or anything that's potentially inspired by us is like okay so there's something's
00:59:37
working that we're doing because people are thinking they could they want to do something similar and so we just have to
00:59:42
keep on a sprint or we have to go in a direction that they can't even predict we're getting a robot yeah so
00:59:48
that's basically we just need a robot and just like don't don't look behind you just be like all
00:59:53
right i just have to get a bigger robot keep going forward yeah i like that i like that all right so i promised i would ask you guys this
01:00:00
okay okay um you've talked to so many creators and you've you've sort of analyzed
01:00:06
the behavior of so many creators that i'm curious if you were to
01:00:11
roast me create critique my channel and don't be shy about it because like you're saying like oh something must be
01:00:17
working yeah things are working but like we're all pretty much experimenting with
01:00:23
a large majority of the things we're doing and we're willing to take that feedback i would love to like when you guys watch our videos what do you like
01:00:30
pausing the video and saying you know what they could have done better here or are you saying like their thumbnails should be better or something like that
01:00:35
what do you guys talk about with our channel and could do all channels too waveform waveform clips studio like the
01:00:40
whole shebang because i mean three of those are fairly new to us and there obviously could use more work those ones
01:00:47
aren't at the level the main channel is so everything could use work and the most people we talk to are tech youtubers so it's nice to have an
01:00:53
outside perspective on things who you've seen everything you could imagine yeah
01:00:58
so a couple questions before we get into this yes first of all how do you define the
01:01:04
audience for the mkbhd channel like because i fit into a certain audience category but i'm curious how do you
01:01:10
define the lion's share of the audience there well i do i have two buckets i have one
01:01:16
which is the the subscriber who is watching the videos for entertainment value and is
01:01:21
somewhat into tech and i have two which is the person who is searching for the device and is making a purchase decision
01:01:28
and usually the lion's share at the beginning is type one and then over time seo takes over and a
01:01:34
lot more people watch the video making a purse decision and that's type 2 later
01:01:40
and it depends on what the video is a lot of times if it's not about a gadget it's more type 1 here for entertainment
01:01:45
tech related but a lot of times it's a video that is just about a gadget not
01:01:50
many people care about and the type 1 audience is very small and it's a 9 or 10 out of 10 and then over time seo
01:01:56
takes over and it does much better because it's an interesting or popular device for headphones or something like
01:02:02
that but it's generally those two buckets for me so here's what i would say i'm i'm
01:02:07
watching for more like edutainment right like i'm looking to get educated i like to be i'm not
01:02:12
necessarily like an early adopter i'm not watching to potentially purchase tech yeah i'm watching because i'm
01:02:18
getting educated on what's happening so i don't get left behind in the world of of innovation and then also for
01:02:24
entertainment purposes one of my favorite videos and i think both of us why we were able to cite like even your head turn in it was when you
01:02:30
started talking about dojo or when you talked about dogecoin um and i think it was something that was like tech
01:02:36
adjacent that was in the zeitgeist that was really interesting so what i would say
01:02:41
is like uh getting a little bit more comfortable outside of your typical topics and
01:02:46
thinking about starting to step into what's tech adjacent yeah i think is would be really interesting teslabot
01:02:53
explained was great yeah basically the majority of your explained series and thinking about like how can i apply the
01:02:59
mkbhd format and style to things that you know more people are are interested
01:03:05
in is it like the tech behind certain you know movies or shows is it like
01:03:10
you know like squid game for example squid game is a massive topic what's the mkbhd video on squid game is there one
01:03:17
right or is that really out of line and so that's what i would say is that i think there's an opportunity to not
01:03:22
necessarily cut out like like broaden the niche too much but to step into more zeitgeisty topics that
01:03:30
are you know taking over is it like you know the audio waveforms behind old
01:03:36
town road like why does that sound you know hit us in a certain way why are we
01:03:42
receiving this audio waveform in a way that's taking over the world i think that's the
01:03:47
type of stuff that i would want to start to turn to you for and be really interested in and maybe that starts at shorts on the studio channel or
01:03:53
something right i'm i'm really glad you said that because part of my struggle every year and i sort of explained to
01:03:59
you like the way i divide up the year of like first half is trying new things second half is like gadget gadgey gadget
01:04:04
every time i try a new topic or like stepping a little outside
01:04:11
of what's typically like a gadget video i'm always the back of my head is always nervous about like no one's gonna want
01:04:17
my opinion on this or no one's gonna really care like people are here for like i can very quickly associate the
01:04:24
best performing videos typically with the most interesting gadgets yeah and so if it's not one of those interesting gadgets why
01:04:30
would anyone care about my video and then i make the video and inevitably it does really well right and it
01:04:37
it it always hits me as a surprise every time but like that video you mentioned or even like the youtube rewind video i did
01:04:44
or random videos about like the teslabot or things that are adjacent i always have that concern and i i
01:04:51
wonder where the line is about like how far out is out of bounds because i have interests that are all over the place
01:04:58
um but i like that i'd also i would be really interested to see you react to
01:05:05
certain things like how other people are maybe it's like hollywood vfx maybe it's like
01:05:10
you know this other like you're really into video making as well yeah and so i would be really interested like peter
01:05:16
mckinnon does a series like that i love his series right that series is really fun to watch where he reacts to like hollywood vfx um i'd be really
01:05:23
interested to see you do some of that like and and you can dial it into like tech related so is it like
01:05:29
you know and this could be on the studio channel but like reacting to robotic camera movements
01:05:35
yeah i would be really interested in watching you do that because i like content and this is across everything i
01:05:41
like content that has those like double narratives where instead of finding those robotic camera
01:05:46
movement videos on instagram myself i'd rather watch them through your perspective
01:05:53
where i'm watching them and discovering that content for the first time plus i'm hearing your thoughts on it and i think
01:05:58
that in a world where we are so inundated with like the for you page and with instagram and like all these algorithms are feeding us content i
01:06:05
think we want our favorite personality or a trusted source to curate the internet for us
01:06:11
and so i think finding like what's happening on the internet that's adjacent to what i talk about and how do i put my spin on it and dogecoin was one
01:06:17
of those things it was just one of those it was one of those things i think there's more of those things yeah um and
01:06:22
then the overarching i think like to keep you know someone's attention again it's
01:06:28
what i said earlier it's i think it's like the opportunities to show not tell to say like you know when
01:06:34
you're if you're reviewing the rivian uh during the process are you trying to make it to the other side of the city
01:06:40
while someone else is trying to make it there in a tesla during the same while you're reviewing
01:06:45
the car right so two things are happening at once i'm tracking a map oh yeah you know that stuff i love those
01:06:50
ideas and then the logistics of actually yeah shooting them i guess yeah so i mean we had the car for 24 hours so
01:06:56
that's an extreme example but i i do think like the dual narrative type thing yeah would be fun to play
01:07:02
with more especially in like the classic gadget review because it's there's there's lots of opportunities for it lots of gadget
01:07:08
reviews are pretty straightforward you know what's coming you know i'm going to get to the specs you know i'm going to get the design you don't wanna get to the battery life i'm
01:07:14
gonna get to the camera and then we're gonna close it out like let's let's have a little more fun with it you also mentioned fitness tech with
01:07:21
chris paul as like a dream collab when we talked yeah i think fitness tech though just with you would be
01:07:28
interesting yeah like i would be interested in other versions of tech i'm terrified of
01:07:33
crossing those lines but i might have to eventually i mean the tech in the fitness world is cut with tempo and
01:07:39
tonal and peloton and everything now it's really blowing up and it does make a lot of sense yeah yeah but you also
01:07:46
have the studio channel to like test these formats which is amazing i think yeah i think we we also have a little
01:07:52
more of that flexibility to play with new formats and ideas and things like that on the studio channel and i think that's what we will be doing in the next
01:07:58
year or so is just like hey i wonder how well shorts will work i wonder if we can we can do a storytelling type of
01:08:04
thing i mean we did a thousand mile road trip but we'll have more things like that coming up that'll be fun to play with um i was saying i was i'm afraid of
01:08:11
crossing those lines because the the fitness world and the the ultimate tournaments and
01:08:16
everything are like my offline time and i i i unplugged so hard for like two
01:08:24
straight days when i go to tournament and i i know that the second i connect those i can never unconnect them again
01:08:31
and i'm like all right do i really want to start doing fitness tech videos because then that's i'm plugged in forever i can't unplug i don't know
01:08:38
maybe that's just me yeah i get it i mean it's interesting how much i think fear is attached to youtube like as a
01:08:45
creator like so much so much of your decision making is based on like this this fear of
01:08:50
you know is that it's because is that part of my identity or am i stretching but i think it's because those that two-thirds of what we talked about with
01:08:57
the with your content market fit where it's like the algorithm and the audience or two-thirds of your decision making so yeah you know it's not necessarily it's
01:09:04
only a third of what you want to make yeah all right well i have uh i have one more question
01:09:10
how fast can you type the alphabet do you happen to know off the top of your head i do not know okay well actually we can
01:09:16
find out real quick uh do it do you have the uh the keyboard please all right here we go so we have a little game here
01:09:23
do you guys watch top gear at all or have you ever seen it you know the the race the recently placed car they kind
01:09:29
of all the guests they come on they put them in this car and they race them around the track and they keep a leader so we kind of wanted a version of that
01:09:36
for the podcast where all our guests were doing it we have a leaderboard um and we have a little i could type
01:09:41
sentences faster than i could it is the alphabet it's so much harder yeah um by the way my palms are sweating that's
01:09:47
right now i'm terrified but i also because we're prepared and a tech that keyboard is terrible because it's a
01:09:53
macbook we have a chiclet style keyboard or a mechanical one if you'd rather dealer's choice but or
01:10:00
so we've got these i don't know what you're more comfortable with but we want to give everyone a fair shot to be uh both our parents do the best we also
01:10:07
give three tries so it's not right we both use this this yeah that's more
01:10:12
attention that's more interesting because we've never used visually interesting we both are on the same playing fields because we've never used
01:10:17
a keyboard like this wow i have like
01:10:22
seventh grade you forgot to do the reading yeah and they just called on you nerves the only thing we're a little
01:10:29
worried about is how easy it is to if someone's a regular watcher all the time and starts learning that this is what we
01:10:34
do to guess they'll practice but so far everyone has been equally as nervous i mean this is terrible so if i mess up do
01:10:41
i so just if you mess up it's not deleted just get to the next one um yeah we'll give three tries it basically
01:10:48
starts when you hit a and then we'll reset it um no pressure and then at the end we can
01:10:53
we'll pull up the leaderboard after we're done and we can see where everyone uh
01:11:00
all right here we go whatever you might do it like this you don't i didn't home run but you can you do everything it's
01:11:05
home row home like uh like just resting your hands on the keyboard like like you know you know that's
01:11:17
all right here we go
01:11:25
asmr mechanical keyboard
01:11:33
super accurate that was it yeah what was your time 13 13. do i do it again i get one more you
01:11:40
can go one more yeah okay
01:11:45
i don't know why i'm nervous right now i'm not gonna do anything it's like being worried you're gonna get
01:11:51
called on next except you know you're yeah like having to do a presentation
01:11:57
hoping they go too long so the this bell rings and you're enough to do 10. three seconds that's a huge try again
01:12:20
this is a great sounding keyboard uh screen recording is going wow yes this is do you want to know your place now or
01:12:26
do you want to wait no i want to wait if i want to win i don't want to wait so should i reset this yeah uh yeah just don't mess up
01:12:33
oh my gosh oh my god there we go
01:12:38
what what is this pace but he got to watch me
01:12:44
oh my god how'd he do 8.177 that's a pretty good first round
01:12:50
that's a wild first round i was going through it in my head like it's there's a couple scanners
01:13:04
i'll do one more all right oh please
01:13:10
oh man this one i'm going to get in the groove six seconds nice yeah but i think it
01:13:17
it won't accidentally count one if like you missed it or just wait till you finally get it right so six point six seven seven i mean you shave two seconds
01:13:24
off you you want to go for your third thing yeah yeah yeah at this rate at this rate this is frustrating for me
01:13:31
okay do i get a rebuttal or no uh no we'll look all right
01:13:37
i should have gone second oh you missed c by the way all right that's over then yeah there it
01:13:43
is okay so it's my second one that's pretty good you want to take his third try do you want to you can take my
01:13:49
third drive then you'll go now you've seen him do it okay
01:13:54
if you get first place off of this one there will be an asterisk but uh okay
01:13:59
i i don't think yeah okay i think i've had too much coffee for this
01:14:05
yeah this is already a mess
01:14:13
oh i've missed this anyway okay i didn't even yes i was gonna say if you're not looking you can just totally miss yeah
01:14:19
it's gonna be nine seconds it's good that's good all right all right well we'll get that we'll get how about we'll
01:14:24
have the best number represent colin and samir okay
01:14:33
uh let's see it's pretty good team score would be what was it 6.8 we're looking
01:14:38
at seventh place out of oh my god what is first place fourteen four point four
01:14:45
three two four points who was that yeah uh quinn from snazzy labs tech channel i'm not sure if you guys are dude doug
01:14:51
demurrow's on here at 5.9 wow he did pretty good yeah he also did it on his lap like laying down on the couch yeah
01:14:57
so that was pretty amazing that's pretty impressive we'll say that you know you're not used to the the keyboard this is that's what did it for me yeah that's
01:15:03
what it was if this was in a gmail and on your laptop yeah
01:15:12
we appreciate the time and uh i'm glad we got to have you guys in the studio in person we're going to probably do these
01:15:17
more often but thank you for for coming out here thank you for spending the time if you guys want to watch the video that they've
01:15:23
done on their channel visiting the studio a little mini tour little rapid fire 20 questions stuff
01:15:28
like that definitely check out their channel we'll link it below but obviously you want to watch their other videos too so if that's not up by the
01:15:34
time this is up watch those and i think that's pretty much it for waveform this week thanks for watching
01:15:39
catch you guys next time see ya peace [Music]
01:16:08
you
