Netflix posts to YouTube to steal back the traffic, Building startups via Telegram, and more

All right, so we're gonna talk about how Netflix posts to YouTube to steal back the traffic. And this is honestly how TV shows can start to run ads if you think about it. So—

So I haven't read this, but I'm assuming all they're doing is just posting tons of clips of their content on YouTube to gain more attention?

Yeah, I'll give you an example here. So this guy Dobby, DobbyDooYT on Netflix said, Netflix just uploaded a full film to YouTube. It's an Oscar-nominated film. Duration of 1 hour and 38 minutes with 2 million views in 4 days. This sets 2 super important precedents.

How many views in 4 days? 2 million?

2 million, yeah. And this is long form, bear in mind, which is like way more valuable than Shorts, right? Uh, number one, more big companies may follow suit and try it. Number 2, unprecedented ability to launch new IP. So, um, you know, IP protection, whatever, however you see it. Um, but what's IP again? I forgot.

Intellectual property.

Intellectual property, yes, at scale, right? Number 3, actually, macro view distribution shifts if done repeatedly and with an unhinged budget for production. Impact may be felt especially for the largest, broadest appeal creators if catalogs of thousands of movies compete for watch time, especially of those ultra long-form audiences.

Yeah, the other thing too is—

And the video is called Nimona, by the way. N-I-M-O-N-A. Go ahead.

And the cool thing is, is Netflix also creates tons of different Instagram and social accounts per show, right? So super fan pages, which helps them get way more engagement. So they're stealing traffic from Instagram, Facebook, you know.

Disney does it too.

TikTok, et cetera. Yeah, it's a great marketing strategy. But yeah, why wouldn't you want to post some of your best clips? People are like, wow, this content on Netflix is amazing. I should just go and subscribe. I don't really look at it as like they're stealing traffic. I just look at it as they're just leveraging those channels for marketing. On the flip side, YouTube can go advertise on Netflix because you can actually go and say, hey Netflix, I want to advertise and take traffic back.

That's the game. It's you have good content, you post it to YouTube, it's going to do well, then they're going to show it to a lot of people. And you know what, funny enough, I watch like a lot of World War II movies. And so I started watching like these clips of Fury, right? Like the tank movie. And then it's like 3 minutes here, 5 minutes here.

And they're like— Fury's with Brad Pitt.

Brad Pitt. And then I see it appear on Netflix. I'm like, then I end up watching the whole thing, right? And so you give them a little taste of it. It's like little ebooks basically. To get you to consume the webinar, right? So I think it's interesting. By the way, everyone, just those of you that came from the last episode, we found out that the simpledoc.pdf, which is the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper for Bitcoin, it was on the Apple devices, but they removed it recently. So 5 years later in 2023, they took it out. That's why I couldn't find it. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show.

Funny enough, dude, if you think about marketing these days, just look what's happening to the whole movie industry. If you look at 2024 versus 2023, they've had a terrible start. They're hoping that—

Also—

The amount of people that are going to the movie theater to watch movies is just really bad. You also have the writers' strike, which probably affected everything as well, but they're hoping that Dune 2 helps solve that and starts boosting back the numbers. Either way, the way I look at it is it's like you have to go where the attention is. People don't care about going to the movie theater as much as they did before because you have all these platforms like Netflix and Disney.

In the comfort of your home.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And just go buy a 100-inch TV or go get the Vision Pro and you'll be like you have a TV screen the size of— How big is your TV? Uh, 100-inch.

Oh, wow. I was like, that was very specific.

It's exactly 100 inches. I tried buying actually a 120-inch, but, you know, my wife said, we have a tiny condo, you cannot fit more in.

Dude, Neil loves watching TV. But yeah, I mean, to your point, Wall Street Journal said this, ticket sales are down 15% despite more movies in theaters than last year. It's a lot.

It's— you have to go where the engagement is. People prefer platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime because it's more convenient. I don't want to go to the movie theater, even if it said $5 a month, unlimited movies. Man, I got to go walk to the movie. Just give it to me streaming. And we got a taste of that during COVID So now we just expect that. And if people don't give it to us, we're like, eh.

The problem is when you become like an AMC or something and you're publicly traded, you have— you're trying to protect what used to work and you're defending, right? You have this big boat, this big cruise that can't maneuver quickly.

Unless WallStreetBets promotes you like crazy on that Reddit thread, causes your stock price to go through the roof. AMC, GameStop. And you know what happened? A lot of the executives left.

Yep.

Do you know why they left?

Why?

Because you were able to sell stock and oh yeah, they cash out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're like, "We know this company isn't worth ten times what it was trading for, fifty times." But what we're going to do is just quit. So now we can just sell all our stock and cash on in while we can.

Incentives are a powerful driver. Yes.

I think that's where marketing is going. You got to go where the engagement is. It's not even about the platform. It's about the person who has the attention or the company has attention. Like YouTube has attention. So Amazon— not Amazon, Netflix was like, hey, the Oscars are around, everyone's talking about this, let's just upload it everywhere. I'm assuming if they upload on YouTube, they upload on other platforms as well around the whole world. And on the second point, it doesn't matter if people like Snapchat's dead or Instagram's dead or whatever it is. If there's some influencers on there and they have crazy engagement and people love them, companies are going to go partner with them and say, hey, you're good at dancing. We sell these other products like toilet paper and toothpaste. Create a funny dance video showcasing everyone toothpaste because everyone in your audience, even though they're watching you for dancing, they still use toothpaste. Just like MrBeast. MrBeast selling chocolates has nothing to do with his brand. He made it where you should buy the chocolate. But he knows a lot of people eat chocolate or hamburgers or whatever he's selling, and it has nothing to do with the specific video like the Squid Games, but people just buy it because people eat chocolate. It has mass appeal.

This message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders, and Leveling Up Founders is an invite-only event for founders. It happens once a year, usually during August, and past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez, Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on And on, and ultimately it comes down to the quality of the group of the people. We try to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com/founders to learn more about it, and then you can apply, and we'll see you on the other side. Levels.io. So this guy builds a lot. He built Nomad List. He built a lot of these different tools, and he built a almost like a therapist chat. And so it's cbt.chat, and basically. He's launching these chatbots to help you do therapy. So, you might say, hey, Eric, you know, or my name's Neil Patel, I have problems here and problems there. And, you know, oh, I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way right now. Like, have you thought about this? It's like a therapist, right?

Yeah.

It's like a ChatGPT prompt. But anyway, so 1,000 people sign up for this thing in Telegram and he's just launching his new startup through Telegram. That's it. And he's launching these bots. He has another one where I can take pictures of my meals and it tells me how many macros are in it and tells me what I'm eating too. And then it logs it, which is— it's actually pretty good. I'll send it to you later. Not that you'll use it.

Dude, you know what's funny? I was looking at Matt Paulson, is that his name?

Yeah.

And he did a before and after image of the guy that you talked about that's into health. The CEO—

Oh, Bryan Johnson.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he said— he showed a before and after picture and he said, unpopular opinion, he looks better before he did all this health and wellness.

Yeah, he got a lot of reach on that one.

Yeah, because Elon said 100%. Yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah, the 100% just boosts it.

Yeah.

But I think, look, there's interesting ways to get distribution, right? It could be YouTube, it could be Telegram, whatever it is, you just got to think about— and by the way, I don't think this is going to work out for him. He's actually said, like, he doesn't think— he thinks he's gonna have to shut this down. But I like— I applaud him for trying, you know.

By the way, speaking about platforms and distribution, have you seen— I think it was you who posted about it— MrBeast's Social Blade competitor? I forgot what it was called.

ViewStats.

ViewStats.

Yeah.

And what was interesting there is You can not just see the views for each channel, you can actually see the views depending on the A/B test someone's running on their thumbnails, which allows you to fine-tune your thumbnails and just create a better product.

And then what's funny is Neil saw this probably on my Instagram Reels where we were talking about it here, and now you're talking about it again, and then now you get the reel this time for the Shorts.

Wait, was it on your reel?

It was, yeah, it was on this. We're talking about it here.

I thought all of a sudden you're leveling up.

No, no, no.

It was this. My memory is fading.

Yeah. Um, but speaking of AI, there's this, this one I want to talk about. Um, there's this AI gift-giving thing. So this person Olivia Moore says, I built an AI tool for anyone who wants to be a better friend. So are you good at gift-giving? No, you suck.

Um, how do you know I suck? I'm amazing at gift-giving.

When's the last time you gave me something?

We're friends. Friends don't give gifts.

No, Syed buys me Awesome Motive chocolates every year for Christmas.

That's him branding his company. Tell him to take off the and tell him to buy you the chocolate.

See if he does that every year. It's good chocolate.

Will he do it without the branding?

No.

Exactly.

It's good chocolate though.

So anyway, but that's also marketing. But continue.

Point is we're both bad at gift giving, right?

I'm amazing at gift giving, by the way.

Your assistant is good at gift giving. Yeah.

So cliché.

With zero manual intervention, it will detect who has a birthday coming up, find a flower shop local to them, And order/deliver a gift right on time. Here's how. And this is a— it's, it's a Zap, Birthday Zap. It says, event start in Google Calendar. Find contacts. Step 2, find contacts in Google Contacts. Step 3, conversation in ChatGPT. I'm assuming that's the prompt. Step 4, send phone call in Bland AI. So it makes the phone calls at a flower shop, right? Number 5, get transcript in Bland AI. Number 6, summarize text in ChatGPT. 7, send email in Gmail. So you don't even know how to, you don't even need to know how to code to do this. You can use Zapier.

Dude, I just look at this as one thing. All this gift giving is just going to cost someone more money. I don't know why you would want to end up doing this. Save your money. Economy is bad. What you should do instead of all this AI gift giving, and I found it to work better in marketing, although you can automate it with a robot sadly, is handwritten notes. And if you mail them out to customers and clients, I believe that means more. I've gotten way more positive feedback from that than actually buying people stuff. And I take the time to write the card. I don't like this robot doing it because I feel it defeats the purpose, even though it is still quote unquote handwritten.

I, you know, if anything, I do keep the handwritten cards because they feel like effort has gone into them. But anyway, let's just stick on— by the way, we're talking about— forget about marketing for a sec. We're talking about being a better friend. That's the prompt over here. Okay, so being a better friend. I would like to send flowers and a handwritten gift card, but I would like the AI to pick up the patterns on how I write to then write the gift cards for me. There you go. And nobody's gonna know. So—

They're gonna know.

No, how are they gonna know? It's my handwriting.

No, that's what they say on the Instagram reel. They're gonna know. And then they say, no one's gonna know.

My handwriting's really ugly anyway. Your handwriting's nice.

No, my handwriting's not nice, but I still write cards. I write them to my daughter like 3, 4 times a week.

Oh, wow.

And then every time I travel, I get postcards from different places and then I write letters to her.

You don't write any to your son?

No.

That's messed up. You're trying to beat him down already.

My daughter requests it. Like if I go to a dinner meeting, she asks me to leave her a handwritten note. My son would just say, give me ice cream, give me cookies.

I like it. He's transactional.

He's very transactional.

I like it. You know, here's a good one to end on. The question here, the prompt here is, do community acquisitions work? Right? And oh, so I was doing a webinar last week. And I was doing this with Nathan Latka, Founder Path, right? And he had a lot of people on, he had the Retention CEO on. And I stayed on the webinar because it was good. I actually stayed through. I was like, usually I'll just leave after I talk.

But you had to have your face on camera, correct?

Yes, I was— no, no, no. But I took it off after a while. I'm like, come on, you're not gonna kick me out. So I took it off anyway. So He was talking about— so this slide over here, it says careful. And you know how Outreach, the sales platform, they bought Sales Hacker, remember that?

Yeah.

Okay. You know how Stripe bought IndieHackers?

Yeah.

And then Barstool was acquired but then sold back pennies on the dollar, right? So he's just saying be careful.

Yeah, but I think Barstool has a unique deal where the company that bought it and sold it back, they are going to get a big chunk.

There's upside if he gets—

If he starts monetizing.

Yeah.

It's something around if he starts making money, they make their fair share.

So let's just stick with Outreach and Sales Hacker and Stripe and Indie Hacker. So those 2 didn't work out. The question is, is why? Because people are like, oh, let's go buy the media, right? Like HubSpot bought Hustle. Who knows if that's going to work out or not? Zapier bought Makerpad. That's— Makerpad's like a note-taking tool, isn't it? But anyway, point is, we don't know how— like, 2 haven't worked out already.

Well, check this out. How many people still subscribe to The Hustle?

I don't— I've I don't think—

how much have you heard about The Hustle after the acquisition?

Not much. You only heard about— hear about My First Million. That's probably their— their— and that's not even owned by them, I don't think.

I don't know. Either way, I don't look at it as a bad move by HubSpot. It's like a $30-ish billion company. These are all small tests.

It's a fart in the wind.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It doesn't matter that much.

Yeah. But point is, like, you know, for those of you that where it's not a fart in the wind where it matters, you should probably take a harder look because I don't think you can just offload a community to somebody else.

No, you can't just offload community to someone else. It loses its—

Luster.

Yeah, it's like, it's the same thing as outsourcing your LinkedIn writing and having someone else write as you. It just doesn't work the same.

Yep. And then you just have to pay the $10,000, you know? But yeah.

Dude, I can't believe that agency charging $10,000 for someone to hear your stories. And then they tell you like, yeah, that's a good story. You should go write content on it. My kid can— my 4-year-old can also hear your stories if you want to pay her half the price, $5,000.

Yeah. Well, but I understand why they charge so much for it because it's only 2 people, but it's still a lot for that. Anyway, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and go apply if you're an agency owner, marketingschool.io/agency. If you want to grow your agency faster, you want to hang out with Neil and I in person, or you can hang out in the online community, but go check it out. It's gonna be good, and goodbye. Goodbye.