The Exchanges

Q And what's the, what's the stick? It's like at a chicken shop.

A It's a date. Yeah. It's a date at a fried chicken place in London. And the chicken shop in London is like the last place you would go to have a date. So there's comedy in it. She's a comedian. Um, and through, yeah, through this, it's just had like, this has now spun her into essentially creating her own production company where Brands come to her and say, we love your shtick. We love your comedy. We love the way you've created this show. Um, like this show has no advertising in it, no advertisers, and we'll never have advertisers. And this thing does, you know, the Jack Harlow episode has fifteen million views. Um, this regularly does, you know, one to five million views in the first week, um, but no advertisers. And what it operates as is like, it's a production company. And Nike just came to her.

AI assessment note: “It's a date at a fried chicken place in London.”

Q So what were the things that were like, besides hard work and, and consistency and talent, what made you guys grow, and what made it work? How do you get to a million subscribers and Mr. Beast doing an interview with you guys?

A Um, my first answer is time and market. Um, I think like we've been in this market for 10 years and that has introduced us to a lot of people that have created opportunity for us as we started to grow, right? Like Jimmy shot us a message. Jimmy is Mr. Beast. Um, he, he shot us a message when we made a video a couple of years ago and he was like, that was a cool video. And we struck up a relationship and we started talking about YouTube because we were both really into it, um, and authentically into it. And that created a situation that, you know, when we got to a point where we had an interview show or talk show, we had a relationship with him such that we could fly out, get access in North Carolina to his new facility. And like, he was excited to, to be on our platform and we, we had that relationship. And I, I think even when I think about an inflection point for our business prior to that was when we, you know, really were, weren't, Catching that much traction from a sponsorship perspective, but we had made some connections to the point that, um, you know, Samsung was looking for creators to partner with on like year long ambassadorship deals. And our names were, were up there because of the relationships we had created in the market. So I would say the fact that we just stuck in it for 10 years has introduced us to people that created opportunity as I would say we are late …

AI assessment note: “my first answer is time and market.”

Q was going to say, I would have thought that you guys had one or two million ish downloads a month, uh, views a month. I'm looking at your stats on social blade. You were at like a million a month every month, 804 105 hundred. And then all of a sudden you got to like 27, 28, forty two million a month. What the hell happened? Is that from shorts?

A That's a lot from shorts, but shorts propelled the other content. Like basically the way we view shorts, like a lot of people had a lot of problem with like, oh, you can't monetize shorts. And I was like, but if I told you as a, as any business that I had a way that was lower lift to get you in front of way more people to get your brand experienced, Exposure to millions of people. Wouldn't you take it? Um, and that's what we did. Like right when shorts kind of emerged, we were like, okay, we can make a short in a day. Whereas it takes us a very, like a week to two weeks to make a full long form YouTube video. Um, we can make a short in a day. And so let's just try it. And as we started to try it, like we had shorts that pushed. Ten million views, twenty million views, seven million views, eight million views. And those people were subscribing. And then there was concern, like, are those people going to watch the other content? But because the shorts were, you know, directly connected to the longer form content, we were just aggregating more people who then watched our library of content. So it worked for us. Um, and that has fluctuated too. I think we're back to like right now, I think we're in like the nine, ten million views a month range on the channel. Um, and shorts are not like as big of a factor. We're not putting out as many shorts, but a lot more people are watching ou…

AI assessment note: “That's a lot from shorts, but shorts propelled the other content.”

Q And so that's a high stakes interview. You did Mr. Beast, you did Dream, you did a bunch of these things. First, do you prefer Like being the interviewee or in this case, you're kind of like more the guest on the, on the show. Do you prefer guest or host?

A I like to talk. So like, I like when we are the host and it is a conversation. I think that's the most fun for me. Like I do, I am a naturally curious person and you know, along with higher stakes, it's also like very, very interesting people that I'm inherently curious about. So that to me is really fun. I think where it's You know, where it gets challenging is if you don't have chemistry, but we actually now do pre-calls and kind of, not only chemistry reads, but we try and gauge what our chemistry is with the, with the guest, because we've been in situations where the chemistry is not good, and then you're like, okay, how do I, like, what do, where do we go from here? How does this work? Uh, and, and when you're the producer of the show, or it's your show, in the middle of it, you're like, okay, is this gonna perform?

AI assessment note: “I like when we are the host and it is a conversation.”

Q have a different path or trajectory than, than most. If you, if I was to say, all right, make a prediction, um, five years from now, What is like today if Mr. Beast is like, you know, the number one YouTube creator and like launching a couple of these businesses underneath like Feastables and whatnot, five years from now, do you think he's still the number one creator on YouTube?

A I think he's probably the number one online digital media company. I don't know that, you know, I, I don't know what creator is going to mean in that many years. Like, I think he has the best pulse on, on online storytelling right now. And I think, you know, we saw some people try this, like the BuzzFeeds, the, you know, like these, these massive media companies that emerge. I think he's more akin to a media company than he is a creator. Um, so I, I, that's what I think. I think he'll be the biggest media company. Um, the way he's building is like a true company. It's a great vibe there. If you've been there, you know, like it's, uh, they have good people involved. So I don't know. I don't, I don't know, you know, What the content looks like. I don't know what he as the creator looks like, but I think it will be a, a media company. Like, when we sat with him last, in our last interview, he has a ton of aspirations to make content for Netflix. He has a ton of aspirations to produce stuff, and, you know, I don't think he's that keen or, or intent on he has to be in everything, or he has to be the lead in everything.

AI assessment note: “I think he's probably the number one online digital media company.”