I was offered five grand for a video but this was when I was like 19. I was like double it and I'll walk outside I'll give it to homeless person and they're like no you won't and it's like double it and it's like pacing around my neighbor for three hours convincing this guy like on the phone just double the money I promise the video will go viral and I'll give it homeless person I was like ten thousand dollars just looks better in a title it'll get more views I promise you your app will do better
A lot of times people oh boy it's like they think their videos are better than they are honestly and they tell Jimmy tell it I mean they do that and they have horrible friend groups because you really are like the type of YouTubers you hang around it's getting people with the right YouTuber friend group that aren't [ __ ] and will actually tell them when their content is bad and like actually roast it and and help them get better in a nice positive way basically what I did was I've somehow found these other like four
lunatics three of us were College dropouts one was a high school dropout and one I don't know he just like quit his job we're all super small YouTubers and we basically talked every day for a thousand days in a row and did nothing but just like hyper study like what makes a good video what makes a good thumbnail what what's good pacing like how to go viral we would just get on Skype every morning and like some days like I'd get on Skype at 7am and I'd be in the call until like 10 p.m and
then I go to bed I wake up and I do it again we do things like take a thousand thumbnails and see if like there's a correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail to have any views it got imagine a world where it's just you working solo and you work 12 hours a day every day for like a year and you're just grinding you make a mistake you learn from it you grind you makes make you learn from it and you do that for like a year and then imagine a different world where you have
four friends who are also equally grinding in something similar Brand number one makes a mistake on Friday he teaches the other four people friend number two makes a mistake the next week teaches everyone and then like you're all learning from each other's mistakes you're all constantly studying 24 7 and downloading each other like after a year you're like two years ahead of the guy who was just solo do you frequently go that far out of your way to capture the thumbnail I mean of course everyone should if people don't click they don't watch so you
you want to give them something to click something a lot of people forget is like unsuggested on phones thumbnails are really [ __ ] small so like people are editing thumbnails full blown on their computer and when you shrink it down you can't see we tried it all around the Above the Rest anyone can click babe but you do actually like deliver on it we say we put 100 million Orbeez in the backyard we put 100 million Orbeez in the backyard your title and thumbnail set expectations like what you're saying is like I like bananas
and what you need is bananas are the best goddamn food on the planet like that's the type of opinion you need like you need something like how to get a hundred million views on YouTube or not even that that's not strong enough you need something that makes people go what the [ __ ] what the [ __ ] did he say in that video what the [ __ ] I need to know at the very beginning of the video to minimize drop-offs you want to assure them that those expectations are being met if you're putting
a million Orbeez in a pool don't start the video with you shopping for you know your mom's birthday present at the beginning of the video just say this is is 100 million Orbeez We're Gonna Fill This pool and this entire backyard with them match the expectations and then you want to exceed them so you want to assure people that what they clicked on is what they're getting and then blow their mind and be like but you're also getting even more anytime you say the word algorithm just replace it with audience the algorithm didn't like that
video no the audience didn't like that video if I wasn't retaining a viewer just would it make sense for you to promote it why would you promote a 10 minute video that people watch on average a minute and a half I mean every video even the stupid ones I learned something you know that's something I'd try to make a very big point of is like no matter how bad we mess up like we sometimes have videos that have horrible retention it's just like as long as you learn from it it's not the end of the
world every YouTuber says it it's like no one will ever be able to replicate my style it's I gotta edit it but news flash someone can it's actually not as difficult as you think it was good that I got a really strong foundation on how YouTube works and how the style of videos I wanted and everything before I skilled up a team if that makes any sense I just want to make sure that's clear because I've seen people try to build the team without foundation and knowing how to do well I I know that if
we film this video it will do well just because I've spent a decade of my life hyper obsessing over YouTube and I have a good pulse on it but if you didn't have that then you wouldn't know like you wouldn't be able to spend four million dollars on a squid game because you might lose 2 million bucks and then you can't pay your people but of course yeah if I didn't have these people I couldn't do or half the stuff I do for the last like eight or nine years like every dollar I've made I
just spent it the next month in content and I just did that every single month and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and here we are since I was 13 there probably hasn't been a single hour that's gone by that I've been awake or I haven't thought about YouTube like I'm just focused on making the best videos possible period I don't care about making money I don't care about time I don't care about I just want to make the best videos on the planet literally all the algorithm does is reflect what the people want
280 and If you deny that you just make terrible videos and are trying to find a scapegoat we do our videos in other languages as well if you Google it it's like only whatever less than 10 of the world speaks English so 90 of the world can't even enjoy your content and when I realized that I was like wait a minute 90 of my the world can't even watch this stuff like we just started doing this like six months ago and it's crazy like how viral some of these videos are 51 million in Spanish the
guy who does my dubs is the same guy who dubs Spider-Man we managed to convince him so a lot of those comments are like why does he sound like Spider-Man or is Mr V Spider-Man to me what's important is Click through eight getting people click on your video and then average iteration average view percentage or just relative retention and you know having to watch it a lot of creators think click-through rate is just like the title and thumbnail and did they click it but a lot of it too is did they enjoy your last video
because if someone watches a video of yours and they loved it you can bet the next time you're recommended their chance of clicking is a lot higher you know sometimes we're filming for three or four days like 10 hours a day you know 30 40 hours of filming plus months of setup whereas multiple creators probably filmed for a couple hours and set up for a day outside of just filming I mean we brainstorm video ideas I mean relentlessly hours every day am I always doing all those things it just distinctively sets it so far apart
part that it's basically in my head it's like why would you not watch it viewers aren't stupid they can tell when you you know half ass I don't know if I'm allowed to curse a video or if you like really put an effort and like if they can tell you're putting in a lot of effort they're going to be more likely to click on future videos and that type that snowballs and because once you build that trust they get to a point where it doesn't matter what you upload they just know it's high effort and
they just know it's great and they're just conditioned just to watch because you have a good track record and so with filming it's just like trying to make sure we're doing everything we can no matter how expensive it is no matter how much time it takes to make the best video possible a lot of people if they give away 100 Grand they would make a huge deal about it but we're you know sometimes we're just like yeah here's 100 Grand like thanks for watching bye doing it that way makes it more fun and just more
interesting so I like to keep a little bit of it mysterious because I think that's what people enjoy a lot of people aren't willing to put in 10 hours days because they don't like what they're doing so it's finding what they enjoy because it is like a long grind like you're doing this for years not months so if you don't enjoy it then you're gonna burn out I just said the blessing of finding what I loved at a young age so like because to get to this level it takes you know a decade most people
don't find what they love until they're young 20s so they'd be where I'm at in their 30s I just walked out and found it when I was really young living your life chasing like a nicer nicer car in a bigger and bigger box to live it's kind of like a dumb way to go about life I actually funny enough I lived in like a super below average home and I kind of learned why famous people don't live in uh below average homes because someone broke in stole everything out so I had to I had to
get a little nicer house for security reasons but before I was robbed I'd be like my place is like a little duplex 700 a month you get a roommate's 360 split people think just because you go for views means you can't have fun but you can pool views and you can have fun which is what we purposely try to do if you're not doing something that's just inherently fun to you you're just quit just give up like you gotta at least semi enjoy what you're doing or you're gonna quit long before it gets to the
point where it brings them money or whatever else could be driving you so find what you love and then I would just hyper obsess make sure no one doing what you're doing is doing it better make sure the videos are as good as possible you can be motivated by more than one thing I'm motivated because I want to support my mom and my family I'm motivated because I want to employ my friends and help them I motivated because I want to help other people I'm motivated because I want to be a YouTuber I want to
be I mean I feel like that's another misconception you can have lots of things that drive you absolutely yeah absolutely so I mean like there's just tons of stuff that drive me and everything drives me to wanting to be a YouTuber so it kind of obsess over it for the people that are willing to be coachable I would say like just education like there is a lot of misinformation out there that like people like live and Breathe by like the weirdest stuff I gotta upload at midnight on Wednesdays or my videos don't do well it's
like just dumb stuff like that that just they don't realize how badly they're like handicapping themselves some minor tips I could give is like somehow you could have a payoff at the end then more people are going to watch the end just to see what happened whichever one of these 456 people survives the longest wins 456 Grand cut out all dull moments try not to over explain and things my camera just sits on me and I'm just talking for 20 seconds it doesn't hold retention as well as you know maybe me talking and other footage
popping up it's much easier to get 5 million views on one video than 50 000 views on 100 videos it takes way less effort to get 5 million views in one video back then which I think small YouTubers should do is I would reply to every single comment and so I think a few people caught on that they would I would always reply and so some people would just be like I wonder how long it'll take for him to reply so that was a lot of my comments when I was smaller but at least it
kept him coming back in your analytics and most you probably know this audience retention you can see where people click off just literally go through your last 50 videos write down where everyone clicked off and then just don't do those things again but wait a minute Mr Beast what if I don't know how to actually improve my everyday duration how do I know where to start what if I'm just a noob well in order to better retain your viewers it's first helpful to have a really deep understanding of how they experience YouTube to put yourself
in their shoes and in this video I explain five simple steps that will help you do just that check it out
