YouTube

“The founders of YouTube walked away with half a billion each when they sold to Google back in 2006.”

“I can tell you all the times and show you all the emails from really credible investors, like people that, these, they're investors that picked Google and PayPal and YouTube and Facebook and all of the kind of internet greats that came before us, and so sittin…”

“Not since the iPod movie had I seen a kind of reaction. It was everywhere, and the difference now is that social media was just really starting to pick up and I shared it as best I could, but it, Didn't need that. I don't know who picked it up, but it just exp…”

“My YouTube channel that took me, you know, six years, seven years at the time to get from zero subscribers to 400 Thousand subscribers. All of a sudden, every night I'd wake up and there'd be 10,020 thousand new subscribers.”

“I mean, it was effectively a YouTube vlog. It was a YouTube vlog before the words YouTube vlog existed. It was sort of accessing someone's life in a way that I don't think people had seen before.”

“I thought, you know, I need to really go hard on YouTube to get my audience engaged so when I tell them about this product that they'll, they'll be there for me. And I came up with this idea then to make a video every day, and every day share sort of a story f…”

“Out of that, I built sort of what was my first business post Neistat Brothers, post working with my brother. And what that business was making videos on YouTube that would garner enough attention and enough interest from the industry that would then offer me j…”

“These vloggers were looking for content, and this was once a month something that was content. So they were signing up themselves, paying for it. We really had no involvement.”

“That's kind of when I learned that YouTube is a search engine, and so people are searching for songs that they know. And if they then see a cool band who is singing that song, but maybe in a completely different way, with a completely different sound, and they…”

“The economics of that failed to evolve with the distribution technology. So like the distribution happened first, and the economic systems to support that didn't keep up. And so we were in this horrible phase where essentially artists are working for free.”

“When we started looking at sources of traffic to our website, we started seeing a ton of traffic come from YouTube in our early days, and it ended up that the Casper unboxing experience was something that people love to film on their phone and love to post onl…”

“I think that's the cool thing about the ad side, is you can start to predict and get a little bit of a, you know, predictable cash flow there, so it helped. I would say we probably thought about it more so as our YouTube money, meaning the ads, we can pay for …”

“Technically we had each made one cent, but I had the incredible foresight to say one day we will each be able to take this money that we made from people watching our videos and we will be able to go buy a sandwich with it.”

“Very quickly, after we load the video like Tyler said, you know, this video has been banned worldwide, was the error message we got back, and we learned that you can't just use someone else's music.”

“A YouTube video has to cost you zero dollars, and you have to be able to do it over an extremely long period of time.”

“I think if our history has shown us anything, underserved communities are communities that are going to be Excited about your videos, and they're going to come back again and again. Whether it was the lacrosse community or now the creator of community, it was …”

“Scaling yourself as a creator is one of the hardest things to do. Casey Neistat can't scale himself necessarily, right? If he doesn't want to upload, there's no Casey Neistat on YouTube that day. And the same pertains to us on the Colin and Samir channel.”

“The audience that we had built in La Crosse was not that interested in us talking about Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. And we were, where we thought we were starting from a position of, we've built an audience, we've done this for four and a half years on YouT…”

“We have a team of six people who work on the show. That would be hard to sustain a business just on what the platform pays you.”

“You know, a lot of times it's important to start with searchable topics within underserved communities so that you can aggregate that initial audience and then introduce your personality into that as well.”

“I think the really interesting thing about some of these creators that reach millions and millions and millions of people, their content transcends language.”

“In 2020, our channel did 5.6 million views and we made 16,000 dollars. In 2021, our channel did one hundred and seven million views and we made 109,000 dollars. And in 2022, so far we've made 50,000 dollars on seventy three million views.”

“With the TikTok for you style page, it prioritizes the videos and not the creators. So if you took the biggest creators off of TikTok, you can still enjoy TikTok, but people come to YouTube specifically for the creators because they want to watch them for long…”

“I spun up a YouTube channel. I thought about it as the NFL network for lacrosse, and by no means did I have the financing to do that, but I had a camera, I had a laptop, and I had a bunch of ideas.”

“My ad revenue from YouTube makes up just one percent of all the revenue that I make.”

“I went on there, and I gained a whole new following. I have, like, 2.8 million on there now, and when I joined TikTok and I was teaching Pilates and workouts, there were so many people being like, oh, a tricep dip? That's so cool. Like, it was new to them, and…”

“I mean, we never paid for, like, ads or anything. It was just, it was taking opportunities that came to us, whether it was to be on, like, a local talk show, talking about a DIY project, or just creating those videos that we were excited by, that we knew the a…”

“We had seen other people take a pause from YouTube for an extended period of time, and try and come back, and their online presence just wasn't the same. It's kind of like a train you need to catch on as it's going.”

“Every time I start to think there's not, there's a new creator or channel that pops up that started three months ago and somehow now has more views than we do. So I think there's always space for new voices, and I think that's really what it is, is finding you…”

“But I think that people are maybe physically hitting the subscribe button a little less than they were five years ago, but eyeballs on videos and the diversity of where we're now getting views from, I think is still growing, which is really great.”

“I think the thing that was really successful for us was showing that online, that this is our first time using this, and we're going to gonna show you how it's not so scary, and it really made it feel more accessible to people out there as well.”

“I think it, I want to say it got around a 100,000 views that year.”

“And then, you know, it became for a minute was the lion's share of our income, but then that was superseded by integrations.”

“And the algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, when you suddenly and massively just get an influx of views from an outside source, it's going to prioritize you in the algorithm.”

“You might also notice that I've never ever said like and subscribe, which is a very common YouTuber trope to say, to finish, begin and finish a video with, hey guys, like and subscribe. And I've never said that.”

“That's why I made it as patently obvious as I possibly could that I was an amateur, and that meant showing my mistakes, that meant, you know, having a laugh if I spilled something or burnt something, that meant being very, very honest with the audience, and I …”

“So the hard answer to your question is, I don't think you can do it the way I did, the way I started in 2009. I don't think you can do it that way anymore.”

“Often the subject of the video is the person. And so in order for it to be an interesting video, the person and the thing that they're doing has to constantly be interesting, and for me, I've been lucky enough that I do product videos, so a lot of other produc…”

“Not yet at that point, so I think I was more just like, oh, I can pay my rent and buy food and have money to reinvest in the business, so probably like 30, 40 grand, something like that.”

“Yeah, I think honestly you just look back at what you used to do and try to do that three percent better again and again and again and again, and that adds up to pretty big improvement over time.”

“All the sorts of built-in tools that YouTube's given creators over the years were all contributing to a pretty steady income to the point where, like, it was making full-time job money by the time I graduated.”

“There was no such thing as a YouTuber in 2009.”

“So we have the YouTube ads, but we also will sell our own ads. So you'll see something like a sponsor inside of a video, things like that. Those two things are, yeah, easily the biggest sources of revenue for the business.”

“The model of an MCN, or the model when you are on rented territory, for the lack of a better word, you're on YouTube, you're on Facebook, those algorithms change, those rules change. Also, your economics, talking about business model, because when we launched,…”

“Yeah, I think they gave us 450,000 dollars. Yep, that is right... So it's sort of an advance against advertising royalty. So they recouped via advertising revenue, but we got to own the IP.”

“Yeah, I mean, we were on the phone with you two telling them what sponsorship number we thought made sense, and. And they were telling us, no, we will not sponsor this janky convention.”

“And then by late 2008, we were at 70 or 80,000. Which was, you know, one of the bigger channels on YouTube.”

“YouTube was very much that way, where there, it was very experimental, and the thing that was driving people forward was impressing their peers, and connecting with people, and having a good time.”

“This isn't like TV. This is like the printing press.”

“Back then, the front page of YouTube was curated by a human”

“I mean, we, we'd made 200 videos before we had our 200th YouTube subscriber.”

“I built this to not rely on getting extra advertisements outside of the YouTube ad revenue. But I do think that I need to take them on once in a while to be able to keep everything moving and sustain everything.”

“I made a rule for us that we will never spend, we will never do more than one YouTube video in a day because I don't want the quality to suffer.”

“I think I am not alone in saying that a lot of YouTubers probably work way too much because it's just a space where it's so uber competitive now. And it's easier than ever every single day to post a video online, and it is a stressful, stressful, stressful job…”

“I work pretty much from, let's say, nine a.m. To nine or 10 p.m. Every single night consistently, and then I don't take the weekends off ever anymore, which is just, and I'm not saying that to brag, I'm actually saying it is a bad thing, And something that I w…”

“Me and my friends were one of the first to send a hamburger to see the curvature of Earth. Not really space, curvature of Earth. We called it space because it's more fun. And it, Did really well. It got a million views.”

“A lot of channels who showed their face and who were personalities had really high engagement. Like, the amount of comments they'd get, the amount of views per their subscriber ratio was really high, and I started to see this trend that being alive, like, livi…”

“At the time, people didn't really have a lot of tutorials, so I remember I'd have to, like, zoom in on screenshots of videos and, like, look at how people were building these structures and try to copy that to see, you know, if I can make a two-D pyramid or a …”

“Ended up bringing on board a co-founder who was a bit more technical, had been in product management. And then I also brought on a technical co-founder, somebody who had been actually a founder of PayPal, was the first engineer at YouTube. And so at first ther…”

“We probably ended up making, like, 25 grand off that video.”

“In that 2014, 20 15, 20 16, though, that three year period, Saw Good Mythical Morning eclipse everything that we had ever created.”

“We only did it because people started taking our videos from our website and uploading them to YouTube, and they were getting thousands of views versus hundreds of views, and we were like, oh, we should do this on purpose.”

“With the help of my dad, I, like, put together a little contract where it was, hey, you give us 2000 dollars up front to make this music video, and then we have a 20 dollar CPM.”

“We were like, 30 minutes of content times 12. We have to hire a team to help us do this. And we, like, worked the numbers, and it came to, like, 92,000 dollars. And then we just, like, well, I guess we should just round up to a 100,000 dollars. We just didn't …”

“And people were asking us at the time, in, in 2005, early 2006, people would say, why don't you guys have a YouTube? And we'd be like, because we have a website. You know, YouTube is for people who can't make their own server.”

“Well, and that calculation, which was kind of accidental, is honestly the reason that we're sitting here talking to you today, because it was the fact that we were making comedy that could be divorced from that Christian setting. And just some of those sketche…”

“That video has made me 67,000 dollars.”

“At this point, the YouTube channel is just there to advertise for Crunch Labs. I don't run it to make money, I basically, because I don't make money from sponsorships anymore, because I always just talk about Crunch Labs, because I realized, I see, it's a lot …”

“I still had a year left in my contract with Morph Suits, so I interviewed at Apple. They liked me, so they bought me out of the contract. But one of the stipulations was like, you can't make YouTube videos anymore.”

“I feel like it's a downfall when they try and Totally pivot the channel and have eight different people on camera. People don't like it. And it's not what they subscribed for, right? It's not what they came for.”

“And just from a financial standpoint, you can make more with your own business than you can just making YouTube videos and taking sponsorships from like NordVPN.”

“And this is a problem a lot of YouTubers do, where it's like, they see a little bit of success, so it's like, well, what's the playbook say? Ok, I need to hire a manager, and I need to hire five editors, and a video guy, and a script guy. And then you're left …”

“I don't do, most of my videos now are, they're almost never less than a 100,000. Sometimes there's as much as 400,000.”

“Yeah, and that deal, that one specifically, I think, was a brand deal for, like, 40,000 dollars, which to me was, like, really big money, like, to make that much money on a brand deal. So I started to make more money on YouTube than I was at Apple, for starter…”

“The analytics on average, it's like a 23 year old is like my median watcher.”

“Which is like, to this day, I still write all the videos and I spend probably 60 hours in the edits. And I'm never gonna give that up. Like, why would I? I'm happy to not make, make fewer videos and do what I love than to just be a guy who just, like, manages …”

“Now, fast forward a decade, and the algorithm is very heavy. There is millions of lines of code. They write so many lines of code into that thing every day. And now it is extremely sensitive. It has certain metrics that you have to hit, or it won't show your o…”

“And now I think the math that I did, if you, the cheapest I think you can do, cause you can pick region and you can pick but if you want, it's about a thousand bucks for a 100,000 views. So if you want your video to reach a million views, it's about 10,000 dol…”

“People who are successful are not doing it because they love the content, or they care about the content, or they want the content to make sense. They're doing it to gain the system.”

“I only booked that because the casting director's daughter was a fan of my YouTube content.”

“So in the beginning, I turned down over 90% of brand deals that were brought to me, and some of them very high paying, but it just wasn't worth it to me”

“They gave me an ultimatum and said, you have to choose, you know, you have to stop making YouTube videos or we're going to drop you.”

“And I would just say the biggest creators are paying for it. Yeah, they use terms like investing in their company or, you know, investing back in their company, but it's just buying views.”

“And again, it was just me, so it took me about, to do one video was about 70 to 80 hours a week.”

“It's all self-financed, all bootstrapped, and all made possible through Facebook and YouTube.”

“So for two years that happened from the middle of 2018 when we started on YouTube all the way to 20 20, they stayed at around a thousand views. So I completely disregarded YouTube. But on Facebook, we were experiencing rocket ship growth.”

“It's still 97% through ad revenue coming from Facebook and YouTube. And the remaining delta is us having brand sponsorships in certain videos.”

“So we went from hardly getting any views our first couple of years to 20, 21 finishing as the number two creator on the platform globally. And number one, in scripted.”

“I thought about it very deeply, and I came up with this, like, okay, why would you sell a company? I think there are three reasons, and none of these meet that criteria. Three reasons being, you don't want to do it anymore, and so you need someone to do it for…”

“Bo Miles, who's an amazing filmmaker on YouTube is going all over Australia where he lives and renting theaters and selling out 1400 person theaters and screening his YouTube videos and doing Q&As with his fans.”

“The largest Internet M&A before us was PayPal to eBay, right? One point by a billion. And So this was like two X. And then you had. This is amazing. YouTube. YouTube was also 1.6 billion or something like that. Yeah. Also the same year with Google. So this was…”

“Well, if you look today at TV viewing in the United States, as an example Disney's ahead of us. YouTube is, this is combining linear and on demand. YouTube's ahead of us. They're the largest. Disney's ahead of us. Even Paramount's ahead of us, because they all…”

“And I would say the big challenger is YouTube because they have doubled in the last four years. Their share of television viewing somewhat in the U S but dramatically around the world”

“It's actually critical to building a sustainable business, because down the road, you really want, you don't want a fifty-fifty, you want like 80% of your money coming in through the shop, because that's, you own that. You don't, YouTube owns the algorithm, ri…”

“YouTube most famously has Being the number one platform for video consumption of podcasts, and they had a data point of seven hundred million viewing hours per month going to video podcasts.”