🕹️Helping Twitch Streamers grow on YouTube. Studying hard so you don't have to 🤓 📧 [email protected]
Joined August 2012
- Tweets26.4K
- Following2.4K
- Followers3.1K
- Likes64.5K
I can't even begin to explain the excitement that I have with the power to edit a website, deploy it live, and editing videos all through my phone while waiting for my flight at the airport. 🤯
This is why branding is more important than ever.
Before the quantity era we had pillars of established trust based on the higher barrier to entry. Back then you HAD to have something good to be worth spending all that money to market your product.
Now that almost anyone can make anything (physical goods included) and the cost is relatively very low, the ones who actually make quality products and services have to differentieate themselves by having strong branding.
Strong branding draws the line between quality and slop.
This is a SKU swap, a known tactic with Amazon sellers (just update an old product and keep it rolling).
That said, most brands have the ability to spend 4 figures and get their item to 4.5. It's also easy to ask creators on Amazon to post videos for the potential revenue boost. Most of the time, it's a how-to video.
It's so hard to trust...anything.
AI is and should always be a tool.
Not a replacement for thinking and definitely not a replacement for vision.
Shigeru Miyamoto shared thoughts on generative AI and its meaning for creativity in game development.
He compared AI to the evolution of computers and design tools. As technology handles more technical work, human design sense and creative judgment grow more important.
Miyamoto distinguishes between “creating something” and “doing the work.”
Creating starts with deciding what to make, building the overall structure, and having clear intention. The work that follows fills in details, polishes, and executes the idea.
“People can become so satisfied with the work itself that they start mistaking that satisfaction for having created something good.”
Miyamoto believes AI taking over repetitive work could give people more chances to focus on what they truly want to create.
“The more AI takes care of all kinds of tasks for us, the more opportunities we all have to think seriously about what it really means to create something.”
He acknowledges AI could eventually handle almost everything in the creative process, but for now:
“I think there’s still plenty that we humans can do.”
With the amount of slop on the Internet increasing everyday, it's obviously horrible. But I do believe there's a bright side to this.
Because of slop, eventually new and higher standards will be put into place.
Things like game development, software, art, video production, etc will all have a higher barrier of entry into the market.
People already are raising their standards of acceptance and I can forsee marketplaces like Steam also doing the same.
It will be a few bad years of drowning and sifting through slop, but afterwards will come a new era of high quality output.
Everything in life rubber bands. This is just one of those moments in history.
Man I love this!
Real sets and real people with references to a time where the Internet was a simpler and silly place.
This is really good marketing that hits the right target audience.
When making your YouTube titles you have to be brave enough to stretch the truth.
Maybe the title doesn't represent the WHOLE video but it does represent a section and that's good enough.
Movie posters and trailers do it all the time. It's not deception. It's creating curiosity with the strongest thing you got.
I know too many people who want their titles to be straightforward and do well but unfortunately being straightforward rarely tells a good story.
I accidentally found myself doom scrolling again and I thought to myself...wtf am I doing?
No wonder why I stopped scrolling in the first place. Almost everything is so black and white. Almost everyone is arguing for or against something using nothing by fighting words.
Peter Lam retweeted
Nobody wants to hear this. Many things we call talent are really the result of intense practice (Ericsson et al., 1993).
And it's not just putting in hours. It's effortful practice designed to improve.
Are you willing to do that part?
Peter Lam retweeted
Content creators...most of them are on their own. I would say three-quarters of global creators have no help. No editors, no resources, no support for the amount of content they put out.
For larger creators with those resources, their blockers are often ideation, time, and contacts. Just trying to keep it all afloat is far more demanding than people realize, and you are far less free to pivot and experiment.
For both parties, managing it all is rewarding and challenging, and I commend the folks doing their best to help bring sanity and help to this work.
From @SchviftyFive's work with Starside to help them bridge those very difficult gaps to brands and @TheTrueVanguard bringing the genuinely valuable level of stability to community and content management for creators with Hot Drop, I am inspired to see these efforts and it's helped me align with what I want to focus on too.
There is no shortage of companies and "agencies" who claim to work with creators, but they are no more than glorified content farmers chasing cheap videos, throwing them in ads and selling products. It works for some folks, don't get me wrong, but it's not what I set out to work on. There is far more value to what you bring to the table and that is where my mind will remain. Be it UGC or just making dope videos and streams.
Peter Lam retweeted
If you're a Deadlock player with any value and an org approaches you, you do not want to sign a deal over 6 months for the current state of the game.
Please do not get scammed into a multi year contract jail for esports orgs that are looking to find cheap lottery tickets.
Amazing feature for research! Don't sleep on this.
I still gotta test how good it is but before this I created 6 different YouTube accounts to train the algorithm for researching niches or understanding the algorithm better.
Peter Lam retweeted
Something I’ve grown to understand with age is how quietly intelligence and confidence can carry themselves. Some of the most remarkable people I’ve met have never needed to convince me of either. They ask thoughtful questions, listen generously and seem entirely at ease with not being the most impressive person in the room.
Do you like life during or after college?
For me, it's definitely after. I hated going to classes, homework, tests, etc. I feel way more free now.
Like I said before, invest your time into making more long form videos.
Shorts are cool but to grow your brand, long form is where it's at!
If you’re a decently skilled YouTuber or YouTube strategist, you will almost certainly know this already. If not, it’s important to know because it’ll give you context for how you should think of performing better on YouTube.
This has been known for ages now, but:
Longer videos perform better in terms of views.
That’s why if you’ve been on the platform, you’ll have noticed especially over the past 1-2 years, videos just seem to be getting longer and longer. It’s getting rare that we see big YouTubers go for videos under 15 minutes.
The main reason this happens is just because TV viewership has increased dramatically for YouTube. And people on TV want to select one great thing to watch.
This is pretty easy to see in YouTube Studio. You just have a look at Device Type and then can see the average view duration for each.
However, now we come to the important part: what do you do with this information?
1. Make longer videos, which is obvious. I don’t think this gap will last forever. And, to be honest, it can be actually quite tiring for YouTubers. Editing a 30 minute video can be a real slog (unless you’re using an agentic video editor; I’m developing one internally).
And now we get to thinking about how to do that well:
2. Think carefully about pacing. Too fast is unnecessary. Most good videos on the platform are feeling more and more like hanging out with friends these days.
3. Think about viewer comfort. Basic editing ideas like making sure the viewer’s gaze is comfortable, 180 degree rule, avoiding excessively flashing lights etc. are all amplified here on a bigger screen. Visual focus is more important than ever. Could do a whole tutorial on this honestly, but in summary, be aware of what exactly you want viewers to look at. Too much going on is really confusing.
4. Weave open loops well.
5. Weave tension and relief.
6. Subtitle bits where voiceover isn’t clear.
There is one last big thing, which again is well known amongst YouTube strategists but follow me on X if this is new to you.
New videos are slower to gain views when they have longer video durations.
So sometimes you just have to be more patient with them.
Of course, it’s amazing if you can get views quickly. Back 3 years ago, even with just 18K subs I helped a YouTuber get 1 million views in 7 days. But these days, YouTube is way more competitive so that’s actually a lot harder. There are more recent long videos I’ve worked on and they just get 1 million (engaged) views over a few months. Sometimes videos are like stocks, in that in the long term, the market is a weighing machine rather than a voting machine.
Very good, long videos will end performing well over time.
—
There is one last thing I want to say.
With longer videos, if you make them, your feedback loops are much slower. It’s because scripting, editing, etc. takes ages.
So it’s even more important to do a few things:
1. Be perfectionistic in the book, but practical in the main part of the video. Not everything has to be perfect.
2. Get feedback from YouTube friends.
3. Have an awareness of others in your niche. Will be launching something else soon to help with this (lol tonnes of pending products).
4. Understand that a retention curve is the total duration divided by 100 points. So for example, a 100 minute long video means each point is a full minute! (in 2026)
That is important for retention analyses.
5. Tell good stories that are actually well executed/interesting. I’ve explained how to do this in creatorside.link/long-videos .
—-
One last consequence/thought. I do wonder what the long term impacts are, of everyone making long content. What are your thoughts?