Why YouTube is the Best Social Media Platform

So in this video, I'm going to show you why YouTube is your unfair advantage if you want to be successful online and give you real data showing you a side-by-side comparison if you were to invest your time and energy in trying to build a brand online so you could scale your business or launch that offer that you're thinking about. Now, before we get into all the material that I've gathered here today, this is material that I just got done speaking on stage and then right after spoke again at another mastermind. So in this video, you're going to know why you need to build a personal brand more importantly, how to build it and where to build it, because not all platforms are created equal. You see, I have been in the social media space for over 7 years. I have currently over 5 million subscribers under management, and I generate over a billion views every single year through my content creation agency. And everything I'm gonna be sharing with you today is explaining why YouTube is your unfair advantage for the future. In fact, I just gave this talk to over 500 people, and then right after gave it to a mastermind with about 100 people. And then the end of July I'll give it to another group of people with 300 attendees. So everything here is through my experience on the field managing very successful entrepreneurs' accounts, and there are clear distinguishing factors between the successful entrepreneurs and the struggling ones. I've worked with all of them. Without further ado, let's get straight into the material so this way you know why YouTube is your unfair advantage and why you need to double down on your YouTube. If you haven't started one, this is your message to go ahead and start one. So in order to assess whether YouTube is the route for you or not, let's compare it just to the other platforms that are very dominant right now in the space. So the first thing that we need to look at is how much time is spent on these platforms per day. So if we look at Instagram, it's 33 minutes on average. TikTok is 34 minutes and YouTube is 49 minutes. Now I know you're probably saying, Matt, that's not that much of a difference, but when you think about the intent when using these platforms, how is that 33 minutes spent? Well, I'll tell you, The 33 minutes spent is through sheer interruption. The intention on the platform is interruption. You open the app and it just feeds you person after person after person after person. So 33 minutes is allocated across, I don't know, maybe 50 or 100 accounts that you engage with at that exact moment. Now, YouTube, at the 49 minutes spent daily, that could be only one video. There's 49-minute videos that are crushing right now, or it could be two 20-minute videos. Regardless, the 49 minutes is allocated to a smaller number number of people, which means that you're getting more watch time with the viewers, which ultimately is the goal, right? You want people to spend more time with you so they trust you and they can buy whatever it is that you're planning on offering. Next, we need to look at the mobile traffic, right? Because all of us who have an offer and want to launch an offer need to know what drives the most mobile traffic. Because typically the way businesses are built in the modern day is all online, and the way that it happens is you create content and it pushes through into a funnel. Most people use their mobile phones. What platforms push the most mobile traffic Well, if you look at Instagram, it pushes 6% of all internet mobile traffic daily. YouTube, on the other hand, pushes 25%. This is why I have creators inside of my agency right now that sell out their webinar every single weekend and generate multiple six figures in one webinar. It's because it's so easy to drive the traffic once you build the audience. Next, let's look at active creators, because this is really what it boils down to. In fact, at my talk, I asked the audience, I said, hey, raise your hand if you have an Instagram account. Everyone raised their hand. Then I said, Raise your hand if you have a YouTube account. Everyone then again raised their hand. Then I said, raise your hand if you posted on Instagram in the last 7 days. About 70% of the people that had an Instagram account had their hand up. Then I said the same question, but for YouTube. If you have a YouTube account, raise your hand if you posted in the last 7 days. I kid you not, out of a room of hundreds of people, about one-tenth, I would say, of the people who had YouTube accounts made content on there. It just goes to show you, why would you put your time and effort into platforms that are going to yield you a much more competitive landscape? Like, it just doesn't make sense as professionals, as people that want to launch our business and scale our business. Wouldn't you rather go somewhere where there's less creators? And the crazy thing about it is that when it comes to user counts, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube all have relatively the same amount of user accounts. But when you look at the creator accounts, YouTube has like 1/4 of what Instagram and TikTok have. So me as a business owner, I I 100% want to only allocate my time to the less saturated platform that also yields the most amount of time with my viewers. It's kind of a no-brainer, but let's move on. Let's talk about the shelf life because this is super important. When you look at TikTok and Instagram, the shelf life is going to measure how long that content can be viable and drive leads, DMs, engagement, whatever it is that you're looking for for your own personal needs. TikTok is a 48-hour sprint. Instagram, 1 week. Now I know there is caveats. You will have some weird videos. Like I have a video right now that has 1.1 million views on Instagram, and it's for my car channel. It's definitely earned me views well beyond a week. So yes, there's caveats, but when you look at YouTube, there is always an instance in where there is multiple evergreen videos that last years and years. I have this one client that I worked with a couple years ago who was a guitarist, and she taught people how to do simple strings to teach certain melodies, right? And it all pushed to her course on how to use the guitar to do this certain melody, whatever. Moral of the story is that video right now in 2026, still to this day when it was made during 2020, generates 6 figures in annual recurring revenue. I'm not going to say the number, but just that single video alone, it's 6 years still generating 6 figures per year. I don't know one Instagram creator that had made a video 6 years ago that generates them in annual recurring revenue 6 figures. Now I can keep talking about this and going through the list of clients that we've worked with that have evergreen videos that generate real revenue into their business. But for the sake of really driving this point home on why YouTube is better than the rest, let's continue. Now, this one here goes back to what I was talking about earlier. What's the intent on these platforms, right? Most people who open up their Instagram or TikTok open it because they're looking for entertainment. No one's opening it going, I want to find educational things to buy things. Like, sure, some people do, and some people end up buying things. I know I've bought things but most of the time when I open the app, it's because I'm on the toilet and I'm looking for entertainment, or I'm super bored and I'm looking for entertainment. That's majority of the intentions whenever you open up Instagram. Now, when you open up YouTube, most people are going there to be educated on a subject that they're highly fascinated with. And typically, when someone's highly fascinated with something, they're willing to invest in knowing more. That's why YouTube's so important. 80% of people that use YouTube have said, and this is YouTube's data, they use YouTube videos to make purchasing decisions. The next thing is, how much can we get emotional involvement from our viewers? Well, when we look at the emotional connection, how is it resonating with the interactions on the platform? Typically, people who grab their phone and go on Instagram are doing this. It's a very passive consumption of media, which doesn't really build an emotional connection. Because again, back to my first point, that 33 minutes spent on the platform is allocated through so many people. You're not building emotional connection. YouTube, on the other hand, you have a few creators that you go through like different journeys and marathons with. Like, I have a couple people right now that I continuously watch. In a few months, it's probably gonna be two other different people. I'll wean off of those. But as I'm watching these people, I'm getting way more invested emotionally in their things that they're teaching me, and I'm becoming hypercharged as a viewer to where like If they said something, I'm ready to make a purchase. YouTube has said that viewers have a 7 times more deep connection to YouTubers than celebrities. We all know how crazy people can be with celebrities. We've all seen them crying, going crazy, making scenes, yada yada yada over celebrities. Now imagine that for YouTubers. I believe YouTubers are the new modern-day celebrities, 100%. The only people that stand next to that is streamers. Streamers and YouTubers are the modern-day celebrities. Anything under that is like going a little bit lower, like B-tier, C-tier. But right now, S-tier streamers, and right next to it is YouTubers, no questions asked. Now, another thing I like to always talk about is what is the income of the users on the platforms, or the average income, right? So there was this poll that audited $100,000 household incomes, and what was shocking is that 89% of people that generate $100,000 in household income or greater were on YouTube. YouTube, 89% of them. You go to TikTok, it's 26%. So why as business professionals would we want to put our energy, efforts, and time into things where most people don't have the money to afford the things that we're offering? Now, this does not go to say, as we go through this, delete TikTok or Instagram or all these other things. They all serve a purpose. The way that I see it is like this: YouTube is an anchor for people who are deep thinkers and want to swim deep. What's at the bottom of an ocean? Treasures. So people who like to swim deep can find the treasures that you have to to offer. YouTube is that anchor where you put all of your treasures, all of your offers, everything that people can interact with you on a much deeper level. But what's attached to an anchor? Well, up at the top you have the surface of the ocean, and up there you have different buoys which draw in attention. I consider TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and so forth the buoys of attention because it's easier to get it there. YouTube is the slowest burning, most unmotivating journey but once it turns on, it is the most motivating and it is the most rewarding, hands down. Everyone that scales a YouTube channel will never have to worry about money ever again as long as they manage it correctly and they have good offers on the things that they're talking about. Building a community becomes accidental. Another thing that I'd like to highlight is we're moving from an era of a click-based experience online to a non-click-based experience, right? If we go on Google, what happens when you type something in? The first thing that pops up is an AI overview. People are not scrolling and clicking anymore, which is causing SEO click-through rates to completely collapse. But what is happening is videos are getting cited. And the cool thing is YouTube is cited 200 times more than any other streaming platform. Now here is the massive opportunity sitting right in front of your face. The videos that are cited, the channels that are cited, come from Not being famous, not having the most content, none of that really matters. AI has not gauged who's famous and who to show what to, but what it has gauged is questions answered in videos. Some of these stats here will show you the opportunity in front of your face. 40% of cited videos have under 1,000 views, 39% have fewer than 15 likes, and there's only a 41 video upload count to the median channel, meaning they've only uploaded 41 times, and there is zero correlation between views, subs, and likes in order to get cited. What I mean by get cited is the new form of SEO. It's the GEO. It's typing in something to Gemini Perplexity or Google or whatever, and it gives a video. That's what I mean by getting cited. And right now, YouTube is your unfair advantage for that window. Don't know how long it's going to be open. Maybe it's only going to offer the citing for people that want to pay to get cited, or people that have big channels. I don't know where it's going, but right now the window's open. Fly through it. An easier way to get cited as well— this is very informative— is that there's for changes. Another easy way to get cited that most people don't know is that you need to do a long-form video that's about 10 minutes long, because Shorts only get cited about 5.7% of the time. The next thing you could do to optimize your videos is timestamp your chapters. Only 31% of videos have that, so that is your edge against your competition. The next thing is you need descriptive titles. The reason being is because it matches how people ask questions, not how they search. So make sure that your descriptive titles say the thing very clearly. Back in the day, I used to try to optimize titles to sound sophisticated and intricate, and it's actually hindered click-through rates. That's another topic. My point being, make sure that your titles are very descriptive in how someone would ask the question. We're trying to be cited online through AI. The next is use detailed descriptions. Very important. The more metadata words that you could put into the video outside of the what you're speaking, that it's pulling from your transcript outside of your title, outside of your thumbnail is your description. So make sure you fill it up with your keywords, because the more you do that, the more likely you'll be cited. Now, through working with some of the biggest channels online, I've worked with Robert Kiyosaki, I've worked with Carlton Dennis, I've worked with Ken McElroy, worked with Mark Moss, Heresy Financial, and the list goes on. Like I said, we have millions of subscribers currently active right now. There's key denominators in which I want to tell you about between the struggling people and the winning people. The struggling people focused on content creation. That doesn't make sense, Matt. What do you mean? Content creation is the point of it. No, it's not. People who create content just for the sake of creating content because everyone tells them that they have to do it and they know that someone else is doing it, so they're just doing it just to keep up with the times is very different than the winners because the winners focus on character development. When you focus on character development, not only do you make content because you feel compelled to, you make content because you want to become a better human. You want to be able to articulate your ideas better. You want to be able to speak fluently and you want to be able to be a thought pioneer. That is vastly different than the person that's creating content for the sake of creating content. The other thing is the strugglers did content passively. They miss days, they miss uploads, they let the birthday, they let the vacation, they let the things in life get in the way of their content uploading schedule. You cannot have that. That is like rule number one. And I almost sound like a hypocrite, but then again, I'm not a big YouTuber. I'm not trying to be a massive YouTuber at the moment. I'm running massive YouTube channels. What I found with the massive YouTube channels, these guys do content religiously. They don't miss a beat. Doesn't matter if their kid was sick, if they have a vacation, honeymoon, a wedding, none of that, because they batch shoot. They'll film 5 videos in advance for the emergency that they're going on vacation for a long time, or the emergency that they got sick. That's the difference. The next thing is that the strugglers would focus on paid media. They would run ads. The problem with ads is it doesn't really build your presence. Once the dollars are gone, so is the content, meaning it's gonna be hard for you to really build anything. You know, in the Bible it says build your foundation on concrete. The winners focused on organic. They didn't miss a beat. They showed up every single day, whether that be selfie style, whether it be something simple like me filming on my MacBook. Doesn't matter. Sure, I have all the gear, like I have the Shure mics, I have the RODECasters, like I have $20,000+ in this room just in camera equipment, but But Ron Organic works. I'm not going to set all this up just to make a video and make that an excuse. Oh, it's too much to set up. Now, if you have a camera, turn it on, even if it's your phone, film, get it out. The reality is that if you're just starting out, there's good news and bad news. The good news is no one's going to see you so you can practice in the dark. Bad news, no one's going to see you, but eventually they will. Next, the strugglers focused on short-form and reels that caused the most burnout. People who spend loads of time on scripts trying to formulate short-form content are literally spinning their wheels. The reason being is because short-form has a short shelf life and you can't go the other way around. What do I mean by the other way around? Well, if you shoot long-form first, if you shoot YouTube first, you can go backwards. You can get short-form from that. You can't get long-form from short-form. So why would I spend my time shooting short-form when it can only serve one purpose? I'd rather shoot long-form that could fill multiple purposes. And that's what the winners do. The next, the strugglers focused on perfection. I have a content agency. I have been smacked with 500 revisions on things that don't move the needle, on things that will not have any impact on the content's performance. The losers focused on perfection. Oh, this color, all this, zoom it like, uh, no, none of that matters. What matters is that you're persistent. Upload. You don't like that one? Fine, that's great. Make another one. It's going out tomorrow. That's the mentality you need to have when you're entering this game. And lastly, you need to focus on impact, not income. I promise you, if you have a big impact, your income will mirror that. There's no decoupling from the two. The strugglers always focused on how fast can I ROI this content? How much money is this content gonna make me? And this is the exact reason why they stop. And they never see how much money that content can make them or how many opportunities of doors can be busted wide open because they're focused on the income. Now, the people that are focused on the impact don't care how well the content does. They care that they're showing up, up until it does good. They don't care the numbers. They will show up 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years. Right now, the average account that we work with has done over 1,100 uploads and has been in the game— YouTube game, that is— for 5 years. All of them that hit that threshold have 7 to 8 figure businesses, all predicated on the backbone of their YouTube channels. Don't really need to say more on that. That is real data from my agency. Now, before I leave you guys, if you heard anything, it's that you need to hear this: starting YouTube will be your unfair advantage if you treat it like that. YouTube can radically change your life. I've seen it happen to numerous people, so much so that I wish I wasn't running their channels. I wish that I was running my own. I just know how much work comes with it, which is why I haven't gone all in. And then also my business is predicated on other people, so it's hard for me to step away from that. My message to you is that YouTube will feel flat for a long time, up until it doesn't. And one video can change your channel. Two videos can start a business. Three videos can change your life. Four videos can change others' lives. Five videos can change the trajectory of where you're headed. And what I mean by that is five viral videos, five really good videos, five top performers. Because 80% of the time on YouTube, they're all going to suck. This video might have zero views, so be it, but I will keep uploading until I get that one. Then I get that two, then I get that three, four, and five. Once I get five, that can carry the channel's growth. Right now we have a client who just crossed 3,000 subscribers, and all of the subscribers came from two long-form videos. It changed the whole trajectory of his channel. Not only that, he gets monthly signups into his community impactful amounts, like tens of thousands of dollars from these two videos. Sure, it's not life-changing, but money is relative. To me, tens of thousands of dollars is not really going to change my life too much. Sure, it will make an impact. Hundreds of thousands of dollars can change someone's life dramatically, and that's what 5 to 10 videos at most could do for you. Remember the Pareto rule: 80% of your results come from 20% of your inputs, and that 100% is accurate when you apply it to YouTube. All of your uploads are going to suck besides 20% of them. That 20% is going to carry the 8% of the longevity of that channel, ultimately feeding back into your business if it is a business that you want to run. If it's an entertainment channel, then maybe you should spend your time elsewhere or learn streaming or try to compete with MrBeast. But this message is for those looking to scale their business on YouTube. If you enjoyed this and you found value, please subscribe to the channel. And like always, my friends, Thanks for watching.