Why Shorts Can Crush Your YouTube Longform Performance

Here's how Shorts can crush your YouTube long-form performance. So there's a there's a guy over here. His name's Jack Settleman, sports creator. He abandoned a YouTube account that had nearly 600,000 subscribers, and he started over from scratch. So now he's got a new channel. It has 20,000 subscribers, but it's all long-form videos only. And so it's a fraction of the old one, right? But his videos are getting way more views from tens of thousands to more than 100,000 on the rivalry between India and Pakistan and cricket, right? He used to have like a bunch of short-form stuff talking about attending, or like mascot getting like beer poured on them or whatever. But the main thing now is just like, dude, there's a lot of people saying that Shorts actually harm your channel. And I was talking to a YouTube guy the other day, Josh. Josh is amazing. So Josh works with George Gammon, he works with Ken McElroy. He's like, dude, your YouTube channel's pathetic. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, dude, you do all this short-form stuff, you do like these long-form like interviews with people where you talk about like dating or whatever. And I'm like, tell me more, right? And he's giving it to me hard. And this guy's like 21 years old. And he's like, no, man, like, dude, you do so much interesting stuff in business. I was like, okay, tell me how you do it with your clients. He's like, first of all, the short form kills the channels. I don't care about short form at all. He's like super intense about YouTube. He's like, you should be getting at least 2 to 3 million views per month on long form. I'm like, tell me more, right? And then he's like, look, All I do with my clients is I sit with them and I understand, I listen to their soundbites. So you and I were doing, let's say you're on calls for 5 days. Imagine if you have someone just listening to you the whole time, there's going to be at least 1 or 2 interesting things you say in a day, probably more, right? Those are your seed pieces of content, but you and I never think about that stuff, right? So what he does is he'll come up with a title, he'll come up with the packaging for the thumbnail. And then from there, um, the guy will put out the, the creator will put out the video without even thinking about it. So you and I might just step into it and start recording. And those videos do perform way better. I was like, can you do that for me? He's like, yeah. So we're going to start doing that. And, um, but I do feel like the short forms haven't really helped my channel much. And, um, I think they do hurt the channel. So it's just interesting that this guy started from scratch and he used to make $8 a month on, uh, per month from ad revenue on Shorts with 600,000 subscribers. Now he makes $765 per month.

So with the people that he's working with, are they getting 2 million views a month?

Yeah.

They are in the long-form business content. Yeah, really 2 million views. Like, what's some— what's one of the user's name? We could just look it up on social media.

Go to George Gammon. George Gammon.

Uh, let's see, investing through real estate.

So you do that one. I'm going to do his other channel.

Let's see if this guy is real or full of it. Well, you want the last 30 days video views?

No, no, I'm looking at it now.

177. You want to know why I brought this up?

No, but you have to look at his other channel. He's combining, but the other channels, it's down. Okay. Here's what you see.

This one has 523,000 subscribers.

560K on Rebel Capitalist, right? But you see it's down a million in the last 28 days. So it was at 1.5 before, and these are all long form.

So what's a Rebel Capitalist?

That's also his channel. So he helps with both the channels. Rebel Capitalist, he actually spends more time on it.

Rebel Capitalist. What is it on? Putin accuses. Dude, he's going after mainstream stuff: housing crash, Putin, you know, evil politicians. This is like a lot of it is clickbait.

Now, now let's go with this guy over here. So this is Ken McElroy. So Ken McElroy, are you searching it?

Ken.

By the way, George listens to this podcast. No, he spoke at the Beverly Hills event. He was he was the first guy.

He's amazing, Roy. I'm not saying he's bad. I'm talking about the guy who.

So here, Ken McElroy, one million in the last thirty days, but it's down four hundred k.

So and then if you look at the last couple. M C E L R O Y.

M C E L R O Y.

Let's see what his video content is all about. How raised forty three million dollars in six days.

He's got a fund. Yeah.

Your 9-year plan to retire with real estate. I'm buying $90 million. I'm curious to see how much revenue this kind of stuff produces. I would consider some of this— I'm not saying this is bad content. This looks like great content. But I would consider this more clickbaity. And let's say if he's raising money and he has a fund, I don't see this content getting him like a Blackstone giving him $100 million.

Let me give you some numbers. So, the way he measures the success of this channel, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share this, but let's just say originally— let me just do the math on this. Okay, so basically he's looking for accredited investors— sorry, not accredited investors. He wants a qualified investor, right? Qualified investor application. That's what he's optimizing for. It's increased by 24x.

Wow.

Off his YouTube. And so I'm like, oh, that's actually pretty impressive.

Good for him.

Because it's only been like a couple months, right? So I'll let you know how this experiment goes.

It can work for consumer-based stuff or going after like what he's saying, not accredited investors, but just mass-scale people who could potentially invest. If you're looking for—

Not a Blackstone.

Yeah, Blackstone or big B2B deals or anything like that. I just don't see these channels getting 2 million views. One, I don't think the content that appeals to those people is going to drive 2 million views. And B, getting 2 million views is not You're not going to get one of those guys to give you a $100 million check.

I think the reason he did, and this will be the final thing, but the reason Ken did this conference with Robert Kiyosaki, he had RFK come speak as well. The reason he did that is because everyone there is like a real estate investor and I'm pretty sure he's trying to get checks to come in, right? And I think that's what he's doing. He wouldn't do this. He wouldn't spend the time on this if he's not getting benefit from it. And then what Josh told me was that the channel wasn't doing that well before he kind of came back in. So we'll see what happens. It's still early days. Hopefully it works out. I do have the same skepticism that you have. Like, try it for my channel, but it can't be sensational stuff. It's got to— I do like where he's thinking. He's like, dude, just talk about your business stuff. I'm like, okay, if you focus on that angle, I'm down with that.

So talking about your business stuff won't drive too many leads of qualified corporations.

We'll see. We'll see what happens. But like, for us, it's talking about the latest like marketing experiments because it makes you look smart with marketing. You know what I mean? So it's got to focus around that.

So yeah, cool. I'm curious to see how it goes.

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need. And the group responds, great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency. And we'll see you inside.

I actually have something here and you're familiar with this topic. Everyone here is probably familiar with bolt.com, the e-commerce company that helps boost conversion rates. And, you know, I wrote something here in our spreadsheet in which people always say there's no such thing as bad press and I believe they're wrong. And Bolt is a great example of this. Did you see what happened recently with them?

So let me, let me give, So, when I moved to Miami, 2021, so this guy lived in Miami, Ryan Breslow, and I was like, because he was like hot shit, right? He was always tweeting. He was always getting so much reach per tweet. He's like, this is how we run our company. It's like everything seems so innovative, right? I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. You know how like you need to, in a startup, you need to basically like, you need to pay out money if you want your shares, like if you leave the company, right? He's like, oh, we'll pay for it, right? And people are like, how are you going to pay for that, right? It's a lot of money. But anyway, This company was high flying. They raised a bunch of money and they were kind of like a darling. So go ahead, I'm setting up the story for you.

Yeah, so Bolt raised a lot of money. I don't know how much they raised. Was it over a billion or no?

No, I think it was a couple hundred million.

Bolt.com raises, let's see, total. Bolt has already raised nearly $1 billion from investors. So they raised a little bit less than that. He's currently trying to raise, or the company's trying to raise $450 million.

And he wants to come back.

He wants to come back. And he sent out an email saying a lot of investors are on board. And some of those investors that he said were on board claimed they did not sign off. So those investors, as well as a few other big ones like BlackRock and Hedosophia and United Ventures, and the list goes on and on, Have filed a restraining order in an attempt to halt Bolt's Series F, and they got lawyers involved. Like, you look at this, you're a customer of this company, you're like, man, this is just too messy. I should start searching for alternatives.

Yep. And maybe there's something to be said when you have a very charismatic CEO that's out there, like, active on Twitter all the time. But then Elon kind of disproves that. So because he's on Twitter all the time, you know what I mean? But it hurts.

I believe it's hurt Elon more than helped him.

Yeah. Yeah. So this guy was on Twitter all the time and it seemed like he was doing multiple things as well. He had like multiple different businesses and, you know, I don't know if that's going to work out for them. I think Bolt is basically not going to work out. We'll see.

I don't think Bolt as a company is doing anywhere near as well as it used to be doing.

No, I know their revenues were It was like a payments company, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I know they like— it was like hot for a little bit and then it just shot straight down. That's what I remember.

Yeah, because a lot of other people can just release the same features to make your checkout flow easy and then Bolt is not as needed.

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. We'll 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. Dude, you know what? I want to talk about— so, I did this segment with Syed a couple earlier this year. And this segment, so I use Overlap to pull this segment from the interview that we did and it pulled this good segment. So, here's why business acquisitions crush paid media. And it makes sense at the end of the day. It's like, okay, Syed's got a couple of WordPress businesses. And his whole thing is like, look, in my space, maybe I can buy a company for 2, 3x on revenue. The math works out better than PPC because you just map everything out. The CAC ends up being cheaper than paid media. You get clients, right? Maybe you can acquire like an email list, you can acquire a bunch of traffic, things like that. It's almost like a 1 1 3 situation because ultimately there are 3 ways to grow a business, right? You can acquire new customers, you can Expand customers, or you could reduce churn. When you buy a company, you could potentially do all 3 of these things.

Yeah, but I look at buying a company as not, you either buy a company or run paid media. Ideally, you should run paid media as long as it's profitable, which I know you agree with. And why not buy businesses when the business can afford it or your own balance sheet can afford it?

Yeah, I think it's a, this is a good hook to get people in just to think about it a little differently because I think, Learning about business acquisitions, even if you're in SEO, I think it's helpful to learn these things, learn how to buy websites, learn how much value— it's not just an SEO thing, it's like what business value is a website going to add. So, you know, take that for what it is.

You know, almost every single business we've bought, when we first reach out to them, we're typically not able to do a deal. 6 months to a year later, we end up reconvening and a deal comes up.

Or they come back or you guys go back?

A mixture of both. We've had both scenarios.

Yeah.

Sometimes we become more flexible on the price and they become a little bit more flexible, or in most cases it's a combination of both. And then when we're going through paperwork and all the contracts and all the diligence, a lot of times the number that they wanted is not what they end up getting and it's lower because there's a lot of stuff that's off. Like people would be like, I did $1 million or $5 million in profit this year. Well, when we got your account or your books audited, your $5 million turned into $4.3 million.

So you do retrade the deals pretty frequently?

Almost every deal has retraded a little bit in price.

Okay.

And not because we are—

not because you're sharks.

No. And it has nothing to do with us reneging. But if you didn't hit your numbers and we're buying a business, let's say you do $5 million in profit and we're promising you $30 million. Well, If we always get books audited, and your audited books show you did $4 million, why would we pay you $30 million when you're doing $4 million instead of $5 million? The price should come down because you did less than you claimed when we gave you the offer. And we typically in our contracts write on a multiple of EBITDA. So the numbers change. And it's not like we're renegotiating. It's more so the contract just adjusts based on what their numbers really are. Yeah, that makes sense.

So I mean, if you guys want to learn this stuff, there's a book called Buy Then Build. There's also Agile M&A. And there's a lot of great podcasts out there. There's one called Acquiring Minds. You can listen to that one as well. All right, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency. It is now application only. So you can't even pay to get in if you wanted to get in now. You have to apply. And so that is it for today. But other than that, we'll see you tomorrow.