on YouTube the term reused content is kind of a dirty grouping of words channels who reuse content can struggle to get monetized on YouTube and generally speaking this practice is frowned upon the fact of the matter is though any Creator could be benefiting from reusing a bit of content and I'll explain what I mean the thing is there's a huge difference between the type of reused content that gets creators in trouble and the type that is widely accepted as a normal regular thing to do I'm talking of course about reusing your own cont content and
this is actually allowed YouTube's rules for reused content typically refer to content that wasn't yours to begin with what they don't want to see is people grabbing clips from somewhere else and then posting them on their own channels when it comes to reusing your own content though this is completely okay and today I'm going to encourage you to do just that it allows you to get more views with less work because you can take one piece of content and make it go a lot further if Done Right the most common way you've likely seen this
done is of course through YouTube shorts especially in 2024 if you making shorts that are similar to your long form videos this is a good way to have a nice well-rounded Channel because what shorts do is cater to an audience you weren't otherwise getting it's basically an entirely separate platform within YouTube itself YouTube itself encourages creators to make shorts and make them fairly consistently so the more shorts you can make the better but creating them from scratch on top of everything else you're likely dealing with is probably one of the reasons you may not like
shorts that's where reusing your own content comes into play because can you take a long form video that did well on your Channel and cut it down into one two three 10 digestible shorts depending on the kind of content you make absolutely and YouTube even has a feature now where you can link the relevant long form video in the short itself and while it doesn't do a ton for views on that long form video by our own testing it can lead to a bump in views for the long form video now shorts is not the
only way we're going to talk about today in terms of reusing content but it is a very relevant one I want to leave you with some examples let's take a look at this short by YouTuber Vine sauce they are a gaming Channel and a longtime streamer in the short Vin sauce is demonstrating an interesting trick that he discovered within a Legend of Zelda game that clip is actually taken directly from a live stream what this does is gives the audience a taste of what it might have been like to have been there for a live
stream maybe they subscribe maybe they wait for the next live stream to happen so they can see what other shenanigans that the streamer gets up to when they play Zelda what makes taking live stream clips and turning them into short so easy is that both on Twitch and YouTube there are tools that help you kind of Mark where cool things happen and viewers can use them for you as you're watching a live stream as a viewer there is usually a clip option underneath as long as it's turned on for the channel you can take a
clip you can trim it down to the best moment and then the streamer can go back in later and find clips of their stream and know exactly what moments the audience thinks would make for maybe a good short alternatively you can watch your live stream back on double speed and make the clips yourself and then go back in later and find those moments to turn into shorts the trick to what Vin sauce did and what all live streamers should be be doing is taking the best moments and making sure they can create a short whereby
the viewer didn't actually need to be in the live stream to understand what's happening too many times I've seen creators try to make shorts that are completely out of context with what's going on and you really needed to be there to understand in the moment why this was funny or interesting as people are scrolling on the shorts feed whatever happens in the first two seconds has to be intriguing to a viewer to get them to stop scrolling and in order to understand how to do this I encourage you to just watch some shorts and take
note of the things that make you stop scrolling and go ah okay these are all good hooks every time I stop it's because something interesting happened a question was asked so that shorts whether you're taking long form videos or live streams and clipping them up this is content that already existed and now you're just putting it in a new format on a new platform which could be very beneficial but what are some other ways you can effectively reuse content well one way and something I've been an advocate for for a while now are compilations and
even here on this channel we've been experimenting a little bit with those as well a lot of very popular creators will do an entire series whether it be on one subject and they can turn it into a big course or maybe they play a game from start to finish over the course of several 15minute videos and what they do is they take this content and put it into one massive video and upload that to go up all on its own and potentially bring in a very new big audience along the way our most recent examples
of this include videos that say the ultimate guide at the end it's essentially us taking videos about a certain subject and editing them together in a a way that makes for a really nice meaty guide on a topic now you might be thinking why would I re-upload videos that my audience already watched and just package them into one giant video that seems like a waste of their time I want you to consider that an ultimate guide similar to the one I just shared is not for the audience you already cultivated on YouTube these types of
guid are meant for a new audience people who have never seen your content before what they represent is a complete experience someone doesn't have to go looking for all the episodes C or all the parts of your course it's all right there if you're a monetized channel it's probably no secret to you that this is also a really great way to drive more Revenue as well because that video is going to get a lot of mid roll ads whether you put them there or not and if it's not monetization you're doing this for it could
simply be just for watch time and engagement alone if you have a 100 minute video and someone watches 10 minutes of it that's 10% of a 100-minute video that's a long time for a viewer to stick to one piece of content I don't want to encourage you to do low effort compilations and make that your only strategy but when appropriate this can be a really really good way to reach a new audience I'm going to give you another gaming example cuz this is just really popular in the gaming Niche we're taking a look at yog
cast they have a channel called yogs Clips but they did exactly what I just described and made one giant hourong video which was just a compilation of some of their most popular Clips the video is over an hour long but it has 127,000 views and it is an older video but if you go to their Channel and you click popular you will see that it is on the top row of their most popular content that they've ever done on this channel it works the other thing about Mega compilations that's so cool they are a really
good starting point for somebody new to your channel imagine you've done a series of daily Vlogs and you are 100 episodes in and you take that as like season 1 and you take all 100 episodes and make it into a mega long video people might go okay this might be a good place to start and then once they finish that compilation skip through it watch it on double speed whatever they want to do they can decide from there if they want to start watching the more regular daily content 100 daily Vlogs is a bit of
an extreme example but hopefully you kind of get where I'm coming from because would you jump into a day 50 of a series if you had no context to what was going on before especially if that series was concurrent and you needed to see the old videos to understand the most recent content compilations could be very helpful for that I hope I'm saying their name right but Cal mercus who has 11 million subscribers on YouTube did this a couple years back with a whole bunch of Tik toks and that video got 6.4 million views if
you scroll down to the pinned comment of that video they mention that they've been super sick lately and that their Audi has been wanting a new compilation so this kind of worked out as a way to get some new content out there at a time where it was hard to make some new content and I want to point that out because compilations are inherently easy to make and I'm not saying that with any disrespect if you're going looking on your channel for compilation opportunities a good place to start might be some of your best performing
short form content and like with previous examples this could be a great opportunity to monetize another video a nice long video on your channel and reach a whole new audience and I know those of you out there who are still working towards those 4,000 hours of watch time are probably trying to find ways to bolster those numbers the watch hours this can certainly do that now you might be wondering why spend the time taking all these videos and re-editing them taxing my computer to death to render out an hour-long video when I could just use
a YouTube playlist well I don't know if this will change but have you tried watching a playlist lately on youtube personal story time I tried to take a course on YouTube around python coding and what I found was I think Microsoft or Google put out a course and they had compiled it into a YouTube playlist and there were just several videos to kind of go through in this course so on day one of me sitting down to engage with this course I watched about three or four videos in the playlist they were relatively short and
I found myself at a stopping point and I thought okay cool I will come back to this and then I tried eventually another day to go back to it finding where I left off in this playlist was ridiculous once I finally found the playlist again you know those helpful little bars that tell if you watched a video previously or not yeah those weren't there something about playlists on YouTube is just inherently broken playlists for me anyway in my experience have been very very difficult to keep up with so when a Creator like Josh drife Hayes
plays through the entirety of morrowwind I really appreciate the 73h hour compilation video because at least that is going to save my spot in the video whereas a playlist by the time you get to like the middle of the series will be impossible to search through how am I supposed to remember I was on episode 25 I imagine a 73h hour video melted somebody's computer whether it was Josh's or his editor but that's not the point the point is the compilation has 200,000 views on a channel that has essentially just cemented itself as a replays
channel for twitch streams if you know anything about gaming you know that replay channels even for some of the largest creators don't do super well cuz it's content that you kind of had to be there for but something about it being put in one giant video makes it feel more approachable and not the 73h hour part but the fact that hey this is the entire complete experience even if you missed it while it was live you now have somewhere to go so you can watch the entire Journey from start to finish so we've discussed the
methods we've discussed the benefits but what are the downsides to reusing content when should you not do it well first and foremost you should keep your core audience in mind compilations can be great for bringing in a new audience but you still have people who already subscribed to you and already watch your content how would they feel if you literally just reposted stuff you took one stream you did and rehashed it a 100 times they're probably going to develop a habit whereby they skip your newest uploads because they just expect it to be reused content
after a while so you want to do this kind of sparingly in my opinion I think reused content for a lot of channels could make it part of their strategy it should be in one of your several content buckets yes YouTube is pushing these long videos but they're pushing them because people actually sit down and watch the video so the video still has to be good the creators I watch who are doing compilations frequently let's say they're going to take a bunch of live streams like Josh did and put them into one massive video sometimes
those streamers will go in and cut out a lot of stuff too which takes a lot of time but even if you just have some software helping you cut out the silent parts that could take what was a 2-hour live stream and cut it down to a half hour and then you can maybe get a bunch of half hour live streams into one giant video and again you've provided value because now the quality is higher people missed the parts of the stream that you were just kind of quietly playing the game because you cut those
out quality does matter and quality is something that can be created if you take the time to sit down and go okay how can I make this the best compilation ever why would someone watch this it's important to keep asking these questions the moral of the story is don't be afraid to reuse content as long as it's your own content and do so sparingly if you are starting a channel though if you find yourself in the beginning stages I am going to recommend that video I pointed to earlier about you know the beginner's guide it
is great for new YouTubers who are looking for the latest and greatest tips on starting out today check it out
