How This Guy Gets 207 Million YouTube Views Per Month

There's this guy on YouTube, his name is Asmongold. So the dude is getting 207 million views a month on YouTube by live streaming for 12 hours, cutting his clips and posting them on different channels.

Wow.

The guy literally yaps for a living and makes millions. So I'm looking over here, 1.1 million views, 25-minute video, it's just like a clip, right? And then PlayStation can't keep getting away with it, 43 minutes, that got 943K views. And it says Ubisoft is panicking, 1 million views, 15 minutes, right? And so, oh, her pretty privilege explained. It ruined her life. It's basically all reaction things, but he's just yapping for 12 hours. And this might— I think the whole point of calling this out is there's no right or wrong format in YouTube. It's just whatever works for you. Sam Sulek, he's working out all the time. I don't know how many views he gets anymore. We nerd out on marketing for this channel. On my other one, I like talking about business, right? So he said, I especially like this because the current YouTube meta, quote unquote, feels like spend $100 grand per video, make each video perfect, abuse viewer psychology. There's a guy I follow on YouTube. Have you seen this guy? Clear— I think it's Clear Value Tax is his company. So his main business is tax. It's a Korean dude, right? And he wears a tie all the time. He's always wearing like a blue, like, you know, dress shirt. And it's like, it's like this background. There's no background. And he's just like reading off of a thing on like what's happening with inflation or taxes or whatever. And he gets a ton of views. Yeah.

Because people want to be kept up to date. Yeah, dude. It was— I was meeting with a guy that I know. He works for one of those, um, big agencies like CAA or Endeavor or one of them, right? Or United Talent Agency. So he was talking about Emma Chamberlain and he's just like, yeah, she gets tons of YouTube views. You know, she makes around like $40, $50 million a year. A lot of it comes from YouTube. I'm like, no, she doesn't. You know, when you get like 207 million views like this person did, I forgot the name that you mentioned.

Asmongold.

Asmongold. And even like a MrBeast, the revenue per view is really, really low. And I remember when MrBeast had a tweet where he asked everyone to guess, hey, here's my views, how much revenue do you think I made from this video? And everyone was off and they're overestimating how much revenue he actually made from a video.

Yep, it's insane. By the way, speaking of revenue—

Or it's a lot lower than people think.

Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. It's insanely low.

Yeah. Yeah.

Agency owners, if you want to grow faster, my partner Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills, and you're going to learn how to get more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day. You're going to learn how to recruit the right people, and you're going to be hanging out with like-minded people such as yourself. So if you want to learn more, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you on the other side. Do you remember Paddy Galloway, the YouTube guy? So he's like, he consulted for MrBeast and things like that. Did we ever talk about the MrBeast memo? I think we did, right?

Uh, his hiring?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we talked about it. Okay, so Paddy Galloway here. So he says, after 10+ years, 10 billion views, tens of millions generated for channels, I think this is the most important principle for YouTube growth. This is everything. So it's called the algorithm multiplier effect. And you can see in this, if you guys are watching on YouTube, please subscribe to us on YouTube. Um, it says, YouTube is not a linear returning platform. Slightly better strategic decisions and content optimizations can lead to outsized returns. So you see this thumbnail on the left? It says, I wish I knew this. There's an iPad, right? The thumbnail on the right says 6 UI hacks and it goes from noob to pro, right? The thumbnail on the right is better than on the left, but it's not overly different. Let's say it's perhaps 30% more clickable. However, upon changing the thumbnail, this client saw over 40%— sorry, not 40%, 40x, 40 times increase in daily views on this video. So the improvement is only 30% better, right? Sorry, this one's 30% better. The result was 4,000% more daily views, right? So what he's saying here is like, you know, small improvements and enhancements we make with each video can lead to exponential returns. So a video with 10 million views isn't just 100x better than a video with 100k views. It's likely just slightly better in a few different categories, realizing this is everything. And this is called, again, the algorithm multiplier effect.

The way I want you to think about YouTube's algorithm is think of you performing a search or you watching a video. There's a list of other videos that they recommend, or there's a list of results when you perform a search. You could be at a, let's make up the number, you can be at a 1% click-through rate. You would think that, hey, increasing it to 1.3% as a click-through rate isn't that much more. But if you're number 10 on the list and all of a sudden, 1.3 makes your click-through rate better than everyone else ahead of you. They will pop you up to number 1. If you're popped up to number 1, you're being pushed so much more. Your traffic is drastically different. It's like being number 10 on a Google result versus being number 1.

Yeah, look, we obsess over this, not enough, but enough right now where when a video comes out, everyone's looking at YouTube Studio and we're looking for it to see if it's a 1 out of 10, 2 out of 10, 3 out of 10, which means the ranking. Like, how does this stack against the last 10 videos, right? If it's not in the top 3, we know there's a problem with it. And then the team's trying to figure out, okay, how do we repackage this quickly to try to get a higher click-through rate and ultimately just get more people viewing? And maybe we might need to scrap it and then do better with the first 30-second retention, right? But this is a full-time job. You need someone that's on it. And so if you're going to do it, you know, just understand that you need a full asset, not half asset. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint, and we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. I think we can close it out with talking about like simple ways for people to get clients off of LinkedIn. And this guy over here said, Adam Robinson from Retention will lose at least $500K this year. Here's what he needs to do to not. In his last post, Adam said this, like TL;DR, right? You know, this is what we're doing. You know, retention needs to spoon-feed users on how to convert visitors into closed-won deals. Retention needs a pool of vetted experts that their customers can hire. So he's calling out all these mistakes. I'm not going to read this entire post, but the main thing is, okay, this post gets 201 likes on it, 77 comments, and then Adam says, can you just do this for me? Right? And so, and actually I had reached out to this guy too afterwards. So I think to me, calling out these case studies or calling out your ideas for someone that's especially active on LinkedIn is a smart thing to do. And that might be a way to generate leads because I know for sure he got at least 2 leads from it. The guy he called out and, you know, he talked to me at least a little bit on LinkedIn. So.

Calling out does work well. I remember back in the day I had this blog called Pronet Advertising and there was this company that was—

Pronoun Advertising?

PronetAdvertising.com.

Pronet Advertising.

Long time ago. This is when I was running ACS. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ACS is Neil's first agency, by the way, guys.

And there was this company called Raya that got very well funded.

The dating app?

Photo sharing, RYA, I believe it was.

Whatever, yeah.

So it was a photo app. And then they ended up changing the name and they had an app called Like.com. So I created an article on something like, the title was like, how Like.com is not liked by Google. It was something like that. And I broke down everything that they're doing wrong. And then what I would do is I would take the blog post and then shoot it off to their board members because you can find them all, let's say now these days on Crunchbase and their investors. And they would forward it over to their CEOs that they invested in. And then all of a sudden, you know, you'd get a call and they'd be like, hey, don't appreciate the post, blah, blah, blah. So how much would it cost for me to pay you to fix it? It was a very effective strategy. And we would try to crank out a post like that at least twice a month. And it was, you know, shooting fish in a barrel.

Yep. Shooting fish. See, he's not saying fishing with dynamite anymore. But like, remember when we almost got— so this is back when I was like 25 and Neil was 26. But I had reached out to Zynga because they're getting into poker. I was like, oh, I was like, so they're executives care about it a lot right now, right? So I reached out to like a couple of their VPs and I sent like 4 emails basically. And they're like, let's get on a call, right? And we got on a call, we started talking about how like, you know, it's— I think my point here is that when something is really hot at the moment and their executives are really interested and you see press talking about it, if you strike at the right moment, then people become interested. It's just like when there's another popular VC and you struck at the right moment.

Yes.

And that person actually responded, right? And so I think oftentimes it doesn't take that much to just go a little extra mile to understand what people's interests are. And then people respond to you, right? That's all it takes is like, oh crap, this guy does research. This guy knows what I'm interested in. Okay, I'm going to respond. It's right timing.

And you have to have value with the email that you're sending out. And if you don't have value and you can't quickly show it, people are not going to follow up with you.

And the way I think we both did those, those emails you did on your end, it was more so like, hey, I've helped with this stuff before. Yes, we've done this stuff before.

Yes. So showcasing case studies, but being short and to the point because no one, none of these people want to read a page-long thing. They just want to be like, all right, does this guy know what they're talking about? Let's just get on the phone.

So for example, let's use Brad from like recordeditpodcast.com, right? So if he reaches out, he's like, oh, you know, if you need someone like I've worked with Logan, whatever, right? I've worked with this person, I've worked with that person. Like I'm just naming names, right? Like, oh, you work with these people? Oh, that's cool. Okay, let's give it a shot. And that's basically it, right? Or—

Wait, is that how you found him?

That's how he found us. You shot out an email? DM. He slid into my DMs.

So you literally just sent him an Instagram direct message? It was a story reply.

Yeah, it was a story reply. Yeah, I forgot what I said.

Yeah, what did I say?

You're looking for like Beverly Hills studio? And I was just like— Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You just come. And I'm like, oh, okay, that sounds good to me.

Yeah, yeah, that's even better. Dude, the same thing happened to me the other day. Someone messaged me on The other day being a few months ago, someone messaged me and being like, hey, your YouTube thumbnails suck and they're not optimized. So they're like, here's all these thumbnails that are better than your existing ones and they'll outperform. And we know our thumbnails suck. And I talked about this on our podcast episode here earlier. It doesn't help us generate multimillion-dollar clients. Now don't get me wrong, we still believe in being on YouTube. We think it's good branding indirectly in the long run and maybe can help us potentially get included, but it all adds up. I don't think it's going to be a direct contributor. So I sent it to my team. I'm like, hey, can you guys get this implemented? Did an email intro. After a month, nothing happened. After a month and a half, nothing happened. So then I was like, dude, I'm like, do you just want to do it? I can create an account. Don't screw things up. So then he started doing it. Views started going up, not by a lot because we only did a test on a few videos, but the percentage— For those videos went up quite a bit. And when I say quite a bit, you're talking about maybe like, I don't know, like 300%-ish. And he picked easier videos to do it with, of course. But he's just like, yeah, I think I can double your YouTube traffic really quickly. I just need to spend more time. I was like, cool, sounds good. Send a proposal. My team will manage you and you'll deal directly with them and you can just make the changes directly.

Look, I think the final thing that's worth calling out related to this is if you want to get clients using Instagram or Twitter DMs or whatever, don't be like all the people that said, hey, I noticed something's wrong. Can we have a talk? Like, no, I don't want to talk to you, bro. Like, it's like, no, hey, I noticed something's wrong. Here are some things I've done already. Show me the work already.

Yes.

So then it's less friction for me because that shows me that you stand out versus the 20 people I get on Insta— sorry, Twitter and Instagram every day saying, hey, you know, we'll create a landing page for you for free. How does that sound? It's like, how about you just show me the landing page right now? Right now so you stand out beyond all the other people. That's all you need to do to stand out.

Dude, and when it came to YouTube thumbnails, I get so many messages and emails of people being like, oh, we can better optimize your YouTube channel. And I'd always message people back and be like, show me some examples or how. And most people would ignore me. But the guy who sent me a message and sent me in that first message images of what I'm doing wrong, and I'm like, we already know what we're doing wrong. The problem is, is our cost of labor here in America to end up having someone full-time do it. Just the ROI is not there. So you need someone from overseas and this person is overseas. And I was like, okay, cool. An extra few hundred thousand views a month doesn't cost us much. Not going to have a direct ROI right away, but it's so cheap, it just doesn't matter. It's just the cost of doing business.

And just to drive this point home, the difference here with us responding is if you send a message and you include the work upfront without us having to ask, because when I don't see the work upfront, it makes me think back to my 22-year-old self or whatever, and I'm just really disappointed. I'm like, man, you just needed to go a little further and you couldn't do it. And then it makes me think like, man, such a disappointment.

So when you were in your early 20s and you do cold outreach, you would actually provide the work right then and there.

I would make a 20-minute video. There's no Loom or anything. I'll make a 20-minute video. I wait for it to upload and then I send— I find a way to send that video to people. I was doing the work upfront. 20 minutes, 20 minutes, 20 minutes, 20 minutes every day. I think I would spend like 4 or 5 hours a day doing that.

And when Eric was young and he was hitting up people, not only would he capture a percentage of their interest, he was also willing to do more after that for free to prove his value before he would get paid for anything.

Yep. And that's what makes you stand out, doing the things that other people aren't willing to do. That's it. You've done the same thing. I've done the same thing. And then eventually, like when other people don't do it, you're just really disappointed. You're like a disappointed father. That's what it is.

Dude, and I hate to say, I'm not trying to pick on the younger generation, but I kind of am. A lot of them just believe that they should just get the results with less work, and they have this, you know, delusional fantasy that's like, yeah, I'm just going to be an influencer and make money and travel the world. Good luck.

Good luck with that. All right, that's a good place to end. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to learn more about the agency owners Association, where Neil and I will help you get more clients and, uh, grow your agency. Goodbye. Bye.