How to Capitalize on YouTube’s Big Changes

Did you see all the big changes coming with YouTube?

Are you talking about the creator stuff where you can now plug in ads like you do with television?

Yeah, stuff like that. So what do you, what have you seen so far?

Yeah, so I believe it starts rolling out end of Q4 fully, and then, or it starts really rolling out sometime in Q4, and 2026 it's fully rolled out, I believe Q1. The easiest way for everyone to think about this change when it comes to creators is let's say, A company hits up Eric and I to create a video and they pay us and it gets, you know, our average impressions that they're paying us for is, they're just paying us a flat fee.

An average video of ours gets 10,000 views.

This video gets 2 million views.

They keep making money when we just got paid one time.

Mm-hmm.

On the flip side, if Eric and I get paid one time and our average video gets 10,000 views, but this new video only generates 1,000 views, This advertiser is kind of screwed because they just paid you to create a video on them, even though you're mentioning it's sponsored and all that kind of stuff. And it got 1/10 of the views that it normally does. And when you run videos, if you think about the way most people record videos, you just talk and you record and that's it. If you look at how TV shows are filmed, you film, And they have cliffhangers right where there's commercial breaks, right? The good shows, the good producers tend to do that. And then they can swap in advertisers whenever they want. And just like the television networks, people stop paying you, swap it out with something else. The cool part in today's world and what the changes YouTube are making, it's going to be more like you have a TV media company where you can figure out where you want ads put in and swap them in and out and people can buy impressions and work out deals and I think it's less risk for the advertiser and it also gives the creator more opportunities to monetize. In the last, I think it was 3 or 4 years, YouTube made an announcement that they paid out over $100 billion to creators. I don't know if you saw that.

Yeah, I saw that.

And I think this is just going to make creators more money and advertisers willing to spend more because it makes it more trackable and more transparent.

Cool. So I want to talk about, so that's a big one, but there's a couple other big changes and maybe we can react to these changes because some are, I think, really exciting as a creator. Right now with YouTube, you know, obviously you can do the thumbnail testing. So they have 3, right? Yeah. Now you can do title testing with it as well. Yeah. So you're going to have 3 that you can test and title titles and your thumbnail. That's obviously the biggest indicator or the biggest way to get people to click. They also have inspirations coming too. So oftentimes people will have like, you know, they'll have writer's block when it comes to new ideas. So these inspirations are AI-generated to look at what performs well on your channel and to look at what else is happening in your niche and give you ideas. I think that's great. Long-form ad swapping, you just talked about. Short-form product linking, you can do with more accuracy now.

Yep.

And what I think is interesting, what's more exciting to you and me with this crappy Marketing School small YouTube channel is that we can add collaborations. So you and I, if we just add our marketing team or whatever, as managers, they can just add your channel and my channel for this long-form podcast on Marketing School, and we can add it as a collaborator, just like you would on Instagram. So what's going to happen? This Marketing School YouTube channel would collect the revenue and then you and I would just pass over some of our reach to this channel and then it would grow, right? That's exciting to me for sure. I'm going to test that for this channel. Once it works, obviously you'll be like, okay, I'm down. But you're like, I don't know about that.

Yeah. No, the other thing that we've seen with YouTube, and this is just an interesting stat that we've seen on our end, People try to optimize for the hooks. Like with my channel, the videos that don't have the best retention in the first like 30 seconds or a minute, like, you know, with the hooks, are the videos that tend to get the most views.

That don't have a hook?

No, that don't do the best with retaining people from the hook.

Because you change the subject?

No.

Sorry, I'm not understanding what you're saying.

Okay, so let's say I create a video on SEO. Okay? And if I have a video that's like, You already know what's happened. You already know that SEO has changed, but this is what's going to happen in 2026 that no one's talking about.

Okay.

I consider that a decent hook.

Yeah, you got my attention.

Okay.

I just came up with that on the spot.

Yeah.

When I hook people really strong, my retention's better in the first 30 seconds or a minute or whatever you want to end up calling it.

Yeah.

Those videos tend not to get the most views.

Okay.

All my videos have a hook, but the ones that don't have the best retention and the hooks aren't as strong, no joke, those videos tend to have the best overall views.

That's interesting. Maybe human psychology is getting used to not wanting to see these sensational hooks and wanting to see something normal.

It could be. When we start diving a little bit deeper, what we found is the videos that have the most views are on topics that people are the most curious about and they're much more likely to watch the whole thing. Yes, there's still a high drop-off at the beginning, but the retention throughout the rest of the video is fairly good.

Yeah.

And it's better than the ones that I just hook them really strong.

Yeah.

And I think what's happening, because I'm not switching it, it's not like I'll use that hook that I just gave and then talk about paid ads instead of SEO. Like I still keep it relevant to the hook or else then people are just going to be pissed off at you and then give you a, Low, you know, thumbs down on everything.

Yeah.

But what I found is more important than the hook, and this is at least for my channel, I need to look at more channels and get data on this, more important than the hook, more important than that thumbnail click-through rate is what I found is people really want to watch the whole video because it's a topic that they truly care about.

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Yes, but it comes down to what I found is it's more about the topic and is the topic interesting enough to your ideal audience where they're going to watch a large chunk of it?

Bingo. It is the topic that's number one, even over the thumbnail, the headline. It is the topic, the ideation, and I don't— I think even for us, I don't think we spend enough time on the topic ideation piece. For you, I think you guys do. I think we've got— we've kind of slipped from it and we're kind of going back to it. But 2 more things I want to talk about here before we move on. Dubbing. So dubbing has come out and I was listening to one of these influencers, I think Colin and Samir, he was switching between him in English and him in Portuguese and it was like pretty damn good. So dubbing's coming. We're going to abuse that, right?

They've been talking about that feature for a while.

But now it looks good. Yeah. And then influencers inside Google Ads. So you're going to be able to look for influencers that you want to hire inside of Google Ads.

That's cool.

Yeah. So, but the collaborations thing is the most exciting to me. I'm going to test it for this channel and if it gets enough views, I'm going to bother Neil to do it too.

But yeah, I think the dubbing, because the problem I have right now for YouTube, we have offices in 20-something countries. I stopped tracking and we generate a large chunk of revenue from outside the United States in non-English speaking countries. Of course, executives at a lot of these corporations that we work with speak English. Like we work with like Prudential in Brazil and Novartis, you know, the big pharmaceutical for the Ozempic drug in Brazil as well. So even though a majority of Brazilians speak Portuguese, on the executive level in large corporations, most of them speak English, but when they're consuming content, marketing content or content that you were marketing—

Native.

It's in their native language. And when you talk in English, it just screws up your reach in all these countries.

So I think this is going to work out well long-term. Yeah.

I can't wait to dub my video and I'm hoping it's the same video, same URL, same video, same URL.

Yeah.

In all the languages.

Yeah. No, literally there's just a, you just switch the language and I think they're already by default, they're in Portuguese or whatever. Right. It's just going to go to that. And I think that's going to drive more business and more, I think it's going to drive more brand awareness long-term too. So yeah.

Here's a hack that a lot of people aren't doing. One thing that we've been doing is we crawl and we use AI for this. I don't know what AI tools my team's using for this, but what they do is they look at all the languages that are outside of English that has marketing-related videos. It maps out how many views a video's getting and it looks for a disproportionate amount of followers to views. So like someone having 1,000 YouTube followers and then the video getting 10,000, 12,000 views. and that topic's made some topic in marketing, it's recent. Like when I say recent, last 30 to 60 days, it does really well in those countries. And then we look at the English variations, AI does, and it tells us which videos haven't been done in English yet. And that gives us ideas for topics for us to create videos in the United States that could potentially be viral hits.

Mm-hmm.

Because if they got 10,000 views with only 1,000 followers, We'll do like, let's say if it's talking about AI mode before a lot of other people are and it has a unique take, we may be like, well, we have a different take and a better take because of Chrome and all the integrations. We're going to do a video on AI mode and we're going to do a different spin on it because we think this is what's going to actually change AI mode for marketers. And then we'll do a video on it and we've seen a really high hit rate from that. And when I say a high hit rate, around like 40% of it, 40% of the time it doing really well.

That's high. And by the way, if you want to build a YouTube trending topics agent, like what Neil's talking about, I just talked to the CEO of Lindy the other day, right? And basically you can use natural language now, so text-to-agent. So like you can dictate what you want, and you know these workflow tools like N8N and all these things, you have to like make these things and click around. Literally, I just dictate what I want. After the podcast, first time I did a podcast in a while where I interviewed someone, right? I just wanted to max out what I can learn. And he's like, yeah, all you need to do is dictate out. I was dictating out, I was editing my agents, all of my agents got better, and I was making, so The thing that you just mentioned, you guys can just take this transcript, whatever Neil just said, dump it into Lindy, try it for free. He's not paying me to say this, right? But it's pretty crazy where this is going. And now I'm just, I kind of want to spend, this is why I'm leaving my Vegas trip early. I want to go home and I want to make agents tomorrow. But it's exciting because he said at his company, he's like, yeah, we're all in the office. I was like, so you guys are in the office 5 days a week? Oh, he's like, no, no, no, 6 days a week. I'm like, okay, so what are your people doing all the time? He's like, all of my people, 30% of the time they're building agents, sometimes even more than that. They're just using this text-to-speech thing, thinking about all their problems, All the annoying things. And I'm like, wow, you guys can use whatever you want. You can use Lindy. I'm sure there's other tools you can use. But the thing that the YouTube trending topics, the international one Neil just mentioned, just take this transcript, guys, and go have at it.

Yeah, we find it to work. And when I say 40% of the time it's working, like 40% of the time when we've tested it, it hits, uh, it gets over 100,000 views. We've tested it for me and it's either 2 or 3 other people.

Yeah.

Uh, one of them is in the beauty space. Uh, one of them is in the automotive space. Not like car repair, but more like exotic cars and talking about like cool, I don't know, like not hot rods, but like the Lamborghinis, the Ferraris, but not like, here's the latest Ferrari, more like, here's a tuned up Ferrari.

Yeah.

You know, and like, look what it can do. But yeah, we found that 40% of the time it gets more than 100,000 views when we do it.

You know, your recent videos, it's all like your surprise face is like—

Are they?

Yeah.

Or the thumbnail must be, I'm guessing.

The thumbnail is you like, whoa, like, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna go look at it right now.