The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 77 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Sam Parr: Breaking Up Facebook and Google Would Make Their Founders Richer
“If Facebook and Instagram had to compete with each other it would actually make Zuckerberg richer. Same with YouTube and Google. If they had to compete, it would probably make them better. And thus the owners a little bit more rich.”
MrBeast fired six CEOs, including a Disney executive who didn't understand YouTube
“I've hired and fired like six CEOs. I thought we hired the Disney guy. Surely he'll know things. No, he doesn't know shit about YouTube. That's not going to work.”
Manson: Creator Economy Economics and Distribution Will Beat Traditional Media in 10 Years
“The economics of the creator economy are fundamentally better. The distribution is miles better. You have, like, complete ownership. There's complete creative freedom. Like, I just don't see how this doesn't end up ahead in 10 years.”
TikTok Is Built for Content Discovery, Not Creator-Fan Relationships
“So it's actually not a great place for creators. It's a great place for content. It's not a great place for creators to build relationships with their fans. That's why most TikTok creators move to YouTube to build that.”
Vimeo Was Vastly Superior to YouTube but Lost on Storytelling
“There were other video platforms that were, I would argue, way better than YouTube, and I mean, Vimeo is a perfect example. Vimeo was a thousand times of a better product, and a prettier, easier to, all these things, and YouTube just told a great story, and Go…”
Puri: MrBeast Succeeds by Making Mass-Market 'McDonald's' Content
“Mr. Beast has made it his success because he's decided to be McDonald's on the internet, right? He is Creating the videos that are mass market that are going to get the most number of views, even if they're not the most life changing, introspective, emotional,…”
YouTube founders sold to Google to avoid copyright infringement bankruptcy
“YouTube was also flooded with pirate content. Because of that, they were getting sued like crazy, and because they were worried that they would go out of business, they sold to Google for, like, a billion and a half dollars.”
MrBeast programmatically cycles through hundreds of thumbnails when a video drops
“They will test like hundreds of thumbnails like rap in rapid succession during the when they first release a video, they will cycle through hundreds of thumbnails programmatically To try to find the winning one during that.”
MrBeast switches video thumbnails from his face to concept imagery after 24 hours
“Our loyal fans, our hardcore viewers come first. They're going to want to see Jimmy's face. But after that, after, you know, basically the 24 hour period, it's going to be more fans that are from the platform, just people browsing YouTube. They don't know Jimm…”
IShowSpeed's team made $1M claiming viral re-uploads and clip compilations
“I have a friend that I work with who manages speeds. I, you know, speed the kit. He manages his IP. I don't know what to call it. Like whenever there's a video of speed go viral on YouTube or TikTok, whatever, they will claim it. And then they make revenue off…”
Shaan Puri: Facebook talent was far superior to Twitch, YouTube, and Discord
“The difference of talent quality between we interviewed with we talked to YouTube, we talked to Twitch, where we ended up going to Facebook, to discord, to a bunch of other players. And Facebook was so much more, so much better, so much more impressive.”
Sponsoring creators under 10K subscribers is prime underpriced growth arbitrage
“Like if I was trying to grow a newsletter I probably would go try to sponsor like super micro people on Tik Tok and YouTube. Like these guys that are guys and girls that are like sub 10,000 subs. Like if your channel has like 966 subscribers, like you'd be a p…”
Puri: Daily YouTube creator treadmill is not worth the personal cost
“Like, this is such a hard thing to do to get on that treadmill and say, I'm going to produce awesome content five days a week, nonstop. And if I ever stop, The algorithm punishes me and my subscribers leave my channel and my Patreon people stop giving me money…”
Smith: Tech giants build kid apps for decades-long user retention
“Why do you think YouTube and Instagram want to create versions for kids? I mean, it's so that they can acquire users easily and then kind of stick with those users for the next five, 10, 2050 years.”
Puri: Platform-creator value split will move toward 50/50
“And that seems to be flipping where, where either new platforms are going to come out where the creators own it, or the value is going to accrue off platform in a bigger way than it did originally when it was like, I think the value accrued like 99, one 99% to…”
Shaan Puri: YouTube announced 1 billion monthly podcast viewers
“YouTube came out recently and announced that a billion people a month watch podcast content on YouTube.”
Puri: Content creator incentives compromise advice from online health influencers
“This is my fear of all, all YouTube doctors, by the way. And I like your man. I like it to you. I like all the, I like them, but also they're content creators now first. And so you, again, you have to apply the discount factor, which is that Their job is every…”
Posner: Artists must win Spotify before radio, reversing historical trends
“You win Spotify and get on the radio, or you win YouTube and you get on the radio. Then it was the opposite.”
Puri: Creators should make 100 videos, improving one element each time
“Go make a hundred videos and every video on the hundred, I want you to think of one thing you're going to do better than the last video. Maybe it's your hook. Maybe it's your title. Maybe it's your thumbnail. Maybe it's the storytelling. Maybe it's the editing…”
Puri: My First Million compromised its brand by overly optimizing thumbnails
“I think that we have made a mistake in, in part of our world, which is, I don't think, I think we kept the content pretty pure and sacred to what we want, but I think the packaging we've sort of tried to sell out and calculate and try to like maximize clicks a…”
Gary Vee will repost 100 top YouTube videos to Twitter
“I think literally have a meeting today where I'm going to post my hundred most successful YouTube videos on Twitter here over the course of the next couple months. Try to stagger it a little bit, because it's just very clear that Twitter is going to push it, r…”
Hoyos: Maximize YouTube reach by intriguing kids while remaining mature for adults.
“The guiding principle is making content that's intriguing for kids. Cause at the end of the day, like that's the biggest audience on YouTube while making it mature enough for adults to also watch.”
Jenny Hoyos: Audiences are numb to high-dollar YouTube stunt stakes
“People are so used to like these high stakes. Like, seeing 10,000 dollars in a title anymore, people don't even know what that even means, because they're seeing people like Mr. Beast spend a million dollars. So it's like, you know, people are just so numb to …”
Hoyos: Unresolved ending questions drive YouTube viewer curiosity
“At the end of the day, like, content creation on YouTube, what piques people's curiosity is a problem that needs to be resolved at the end of the video, or a question that's going to get answered at the end of the video”
MrBeast only pursues video ideas that can appeal to one billion people
“He will only pick ideas that can literally appeal to like one billion people. And that's just different than what most people do on the platform. Most people don't like our channel, for example, the stuff we talk about, it's not meant to do that. It's meant to…”
Cody Ko: YouTube Thumbnails Must Stand Out, Not Just Use High Contrast
“People think that a good thumbnail is, like, contrast and colors, and it's like, a lot of times, that ends up blending in. Right. You just want to look different.”
Manson: Psychological YouTube videos should open mid-challenge, not with format explanation
“I think what we've learned from this one is that The new approach needs to be, we just need to start like mid challenge... In hindsight, it's like, we should have just opened up with that, and then explain the format later.”
Manson: Cash incentive intro hook underperformed on YouTube
“The funny thing is, is that it actually, this intro did not perform very well.”
Brianna Price: TikTok acquires new listeners while YouTube monetizes existing audience
“On TikTok, our goal is to reach new listeners, and YouTube is more to nurture the listeners we already have and to nurture the platform because it does pay well. So more views on YouTube is more money in our pocket from the AdSense and stuff like that. But yea…”
Brianna Price: Connor Price was YouTube's most subscribed artist in November
“YouTube emailed us, and they're like, you were the most subscribed to artist in November. Of all artists on YouTube.”
Connor Price gained 800,000 YouTube subscribers in one month via Shorts
“I got 800,000 subscribers in one month, just from posting every day for a full month, all my popular videos, including the globe stuff.”
DeMuro: Car review channels command high ad rates from in-market shoppers
“My audience doing car reviews is really high dollar content because you're in market car shoppers. And that is a very desirable demographic for advertisers.”
Puri: Average TikTok is funnier than top 2006 viral videos
“Like, the average TikTok is funnier than the best videos back in, like, 2006.”
Enjeti: Instagram delivers much higher quality audience engagement than Twitter
“My business is almost entirely dependent on YouTube. And I can, frankly, I care more about Instagram than I do about Twitter. I think I have much higher quality engagement. Just from what I've seen, my ability to sell either my subscription tickets any of thos…”
Enjeti: MrBeast has standard YouTube analytics but interprets data better
“He has the exact same YouTube dashboard that I have, that all of us have, that you have access to. He just figured out how to read it better than anybody else.”
Holiday: Business books confer more elite recognition than huge YouTube followings
“The interesting thing about books is that they sort of punch above their weight culturally. It's like the opera or something. Right. And so like you could be very famous on YouTube and your average billionaire might not know who you are, but if you write like …”
Ben Wilson: YouTube videos must be gripping second-by-second
“Cause podcasts like you listen to as you're washing the dishes, like it doesn't matter that it's not gripping every second of the audio, but for YouTube, like it does need to be gripping every second, like really needs to pull people second by second.”
Puri: Creators get faster growth by piggybacking on platforms' prioritized features
“If you're a creator, you say, oh, their priority is pushing like, you know, oh, Instagram's priority was pushing stories and then reels that I'm going to make great reels and stories because that's what they're pushing right now. That's what the algorithm want…”
Puri: TikTok is the top growth priority and threat for incumbent platforms
“The biggest threat to my company is TikTok. Every day, like, you know, somebody, there's like every, every quarterly offsite, we're hearing about the latest TikTok numbers. Wow. Their growth is crazy. Wow. They're blowing us away. Wow. The stars are going ther…”
Covering Underserved Creator Markets Built Colin and Samir's Authority
“I would add to that. It's time in underserved market. Because, you know, the reason that Jimmy or Mr. Beast even reached out to us is because no one was really talking about creators or about the YouTube space for a long period of time, and we continued to tal…”
Video Podcasts Incur Marginal Distribution Costs Rather Than Production Costs
“There is not marginal production cost. There is marginal distribution cost. You're going to have to spend time thinking about how to distribute this show on YouTube and how that differs from audio.”
YouTube Shorts Function Best as Accelerants for Long-Form Video Libraries
“You're building a library of content that, you know, our Mr. Beast interview, for example, you mentioned it, it's pushing eleven million views right now, but in the first month it did a million views. So, you know, you look at now it'll, it'll be a year in Sep…”
An Influx of Negative Comments Indicates a Video Has Gone Mainstream
“Whenever any of our videos hit that mass scale, that's when the comments sort of turn, and it's just, it's kind of a good sign in a way, it's just what happens.”
Automated AdSense Payouts Blind YouTube Creators to True Business Fundamentals
“There's a really unique version of advertising when it comes to YouTube in that we are uploading and the platform will actually pay us without us having to interface with clients, without us having to build a media kit, without us having to pitch anyone, which…”
An unnamed cosmetics brand scaled to $80M using only YouTube influencers
“I know I know like for one company, they scale to like, eighty million in sales a few years ago. I'm not gonna mention the name of it, but they scale up to like, eighty million in sales just on the back of YouTube influencers.”
A $100,000 giveaway YouTube series could recoup costs in ad revenue
“I think what could be, what you should do is just get a 100,000 dollars and do a YouTube series on this. You, I think you can make your money back and add revenue.”