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 44 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Novak: LA jury finds Meta and YouTube liable for algorithmic addiction
“Yesterday, a Los Angeles jury, both meta and YouTube liable Wah, wah. For a twenty-year-old woman's mental health crisis in a bellwether trial that treated platforms as, quote, defective products, and potentially marks the end to the absolute immunity nature o…”
Hays: MrBeast should not have pulled AI thumbnail tool
“The obvious reason that he should have kept the AI thumbnail tool is you're by, if you can roll out AI in this way, you can save millions of creators that create YouTube videos a lot of money because many of them are not going to be able to afford to commissio…”
Valenzuela: Gen-4 Enables Anyone to Match $100M Studio Production Quality
“Now you, anyone, basically anyone out there who has a YouTube channel right now can create a type of content that looks like someone made it in a studio with 50, a hundred million dollars.”
Mignano doubts RSS remains a viable long-term format for podcasting
“I just don't, I don't know if the format is, is viable longterm as a solution, I think.”
Mignano: Audio-only podcasters have no future as algorithms favor video
“I don't think so, because again, we're talking about Spotify and YouTube being the predominant platforms right now, and we know that those algos, they need the video. They crave the video.”
Hayes: Price creator sponsorships on lowest-performing videos, not monthly views
“I bought tens of millions of dollars of YouTube creator ads through branded native, my first company creators would always tell me I get five million views a month. And I would tell them, I do not care. Because I'm going to buy an ad on one of those videos. So…”
Coogan: YouTube did not shadowban Joe Rogan's interview with Donald Trump
“I don't think it's shadow banned at all. ... I think it's widely available. I don't think you can get thirty four million views on a shadow band thing. I think it did, I think it was getting pushed in the algorithm and stuff. I think it's, I think YouTube is v…”
Novak: Over 10,000 injury cases pending against social media platforms
“There are over 10,000 individual personal, personal injury cases, almost 800 school district claims, and 40 state level cases pending nationwide that are similar to KGM Versus Meta and YouTube.”
Hays: Platforms intentionally ignore unauthorized AI content to boost engagement
“I don't think they're cooperating that hard. There's so much content of a bunch of individuals on YouTube, on Meta that is using their name and likeness and putting them in situations that they would never, ever, ever agree to. And you can argue that it's not …”
DeMuro: Car reviews remain evergreen for five years despite missing launch access
“Even if I'm not up on release day with the car, because the automaker didn't invite me to the press launch, doesn't really matter. I can go get it from a dealer when it comes to dealers, 60 days later, and the video is going to be evergreen for five years, the…”
Chaudry: Thumbnail designers are YouTube's most powerful viewership gatekeepers
“Thumbnail designers, as a cottage industry of YouTube, are some of, like, the most powerful people on the platform. They literally are the gatekeepers between creators and, like, millions of views.”
Moore: OpenAI scrapes YouTube to train its artificial intelligence models
“I mean, we've seen companies like open AI will scrape YouTube as well to train their models.”
Srinivas: Google's siloed product teams fail to share lessons
“I think Google is actually the closest to ByteDance of America. If you think about it, they have so many different apps in one umbrella, but they don't share lessons. Like the YouTube team is so different from the Gmail team, sort of from the Chrome team, and …”
Srinivas: Perplexity will allow user thread publishing on Discover feed
“We have this thing called Discover and we're trying to increase the volume of content on Discover, and once we do that in an automatic way with curation to users interest. Like we're going to let some of the users pub try to like publish it to discover on thei…”
Hays: Joe Rogan's influence dropped dramatically during Spotify exclusivity
“You remember Joe Rogan's influence fell off a cliff for a few years when he was off YouTube and you basically didn't hear about him.”
Coogan: Algorithmic Moderation Pushed Conservative Podcast Growth to RSS Over YouTube
“I think that a lot of the conservatives kind of kept growing very fast on RSS, whereas they were, they weren't able to grow as fast on YouTube.”
Coogan: YouTube's algorithm favors long-form podcasts by maximizing expected watch time
“Part of the reason Joe Rogan blew up so huge on YouTube originally was because he chose the three hour format. So the algorithm, like the YouTube algorithm is a expected value machine. So it takes the average view duration, which is how long on average someone…”
Coogan: The foldable iPhone Duo aspect ratio degrades widescreen video playback
“The aspect ratio is kind of weird for modern content because we have films, which are widescreen and YouTube videos, which are 16 by nine, and those will show black bars at the top and the bottom, or you could zoom in and then you're cropping the sides.
Not a …”
LA jury awards $6 million in Meta and Google youth addiction case
“On March, 25th, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google slash YouTube negligent for designing platforms harmful to young people. A woman who said she became addicted to social media as a child was awarded 6000004.2 million against Meta and 1.8 million against…”
Coogan: The New York Times successfully cracked YouTube with podcast packaging
“I think the New York Times has done a fantastic job here. You have the Ezra Klein Show and Ross Douthat, who are sort of like the left and right perspectives, and their shows have become really successful on YouTube, a lot due to the packaging.”
Vaynerchuk: TikTok Shop's US surge will force YouTube into live commerce
“TikTok shop and whatnot are doing real numbers in, in the U S and that is clearly going to be popping off any second with what they're going to do, which will lead YouTube to do what they're going to do.”
Cosgrove: Static images can no longer go viral on Instagram and YouTube
“On, on X, it's still very easy for an image to go viral, but if you think about, you know, Instagram, YouTube, like a standalone image just can no longer actually Get that. Escape velocity.”
Espiritu: Cross-platform audience funneling usually fails
“As you expand every platform, you think like, okay, well I can get someone from this one to that one. It tends not to work. You tend to have to just play each platform for what it is.”
Espiritu: Making YouTube videos had higher ROI than filming Magnolia TV show
“If I take those 45 days and just calculate, let's say I was making call even just 15 more videos, it would have been not only more money straight up, but more sort of brand value to the business to just make the YouTube videos.”
Coogan: Social platforms will automate video clipping, ending human arbitrage
“Like this eventually will get competed down. A lot of this will be taken by platforms, Opus Clip, or maybe even just YouTube will do it. Instagram will do it. You'll just stream to Instagram or Facebook and it will make the clips itself.”
Hudson: Ad blocker Pi acquired most of its users via YouTube ads
“Most of our acquisition has been through regular YouTube ads of all places.”
Mignano: Spotify's next step is adding non-podcast video content
“You have to imagine the next step is you start to see other types of video content on the platform. And even if they can start chipping away a few market share percentage points here and there, YouTube's catalog, that's a big deal for Spotify.”
Coogan: A reasonable YouTube monetization rule of thumb is $1 per subscriber
“The rule of thumb is usually a dollar per subscriber on YouTube is like reasonable, reasonable monetization.”
Making the Definitive Best Video on a Big Topic Drives Consistent Virality
“That's what I noticed on YouTube was like at a certain point, it's like pick a big topic. And make the best video about that topic. And it would always go viral.”
Coogan: Dozens will build million-dollar businesses from AI content
“There are legitimately Dozens of people that are going to build million dollar businesses off of AI related content. Whether it's YouTube videos or how-tos or courses or podcasts”
Coogan: Effective YouTube business content requires Shark Tank cash giveaways
“And I've always told them like the format is Shark Tank. Like you need to do an episode where you're giving away money at the end of the episode every single time. It's very expensive because you actually have to be giving money away. But that's the way the Mr…”
YouTubers Criticizing BlackRock's Ownership Misunderstand How Funds and ETFs Function
“There's like a cottage industry of YouTubers that just put out endless, like, hit pieces on BlackRock being like, did you know that they own everything, and they don't understand how, like, Fund to Funds or ETFs work.”
Hays: YouTube viewership is now predominantly on TV screens
“YouTube viewership is now, I think, predominantly on the TV.”
Hays: Roughly 50% of YouTube viewership takes place on TVs
“The people don't realize that, that most, I think it's like 50% of YouTube viewership is on TVs.”
Espiritu: Epic Gardening grew from 180k to over 1M YouTube subscribers in 2020
“2020 of course was the year. I think we started that year at a 180 K on YouTube. I ended that year at over a million plus another channel, almost at a hundred K.”
Coogan: YouTube generated over $60 billion last year, beating Netflix
“Staying in the content world, Kalshi shared that just in YouTube generated over sixty billion last year, more than Netflix, and Polymath says YouTube is beating Netflix with this really sneaky content strategy in which their creators make stuff people want to …”
Hudson breaks down unit economics driving VPN sponsorships on YouTube
“The reason for it is one, it's pretty high recurring revenue, high LTV product. So like you can afford to do marketing spend for a product like that. The second piece is the YouTube audience is like two third international. And so it's an efficient way to reac…”
Half of the Huberman Lab audience watches video instead of listening
“I would say half of our audience is either watching our content on YouTube or on X and, you know, another half is, is is listening.”
Putting sweepstakes vehicles in YouTube creator videos boosts performance 3x
“Hey, if we can get the car in a YouTube creators video, things just perform like three times as well, which is like no real surprise.”
Frank: YouTube pushes young children into terrible short-form content
“I think YouTube, YouTube is quite bad, and it seems to push them into the YouTube shorts, which are just terrible, and even my, like, five-year-old recognizes, like, this is bad. I shouldn't be watching this.”
Coogan: Rogan can post full episodes on YouTube, unlike Call Her Daddy
“Rogan is now a couple years out from his Spotify deal. He's allowed to post the full episode on YouTube as well as on Spotify. Call Her Daddy's still in that tweener phase where they have to gate it, and so what went out on YouTube from Call Her Daddy was just…”
Coogan highlights Keras powering ML at YouTube, Netflix, and Waymo
“I mean, he built Keras. Powers ML solutions that countless companies touch. It powers your recommendations on YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, the fraud filtering of your credit card transactions, Waymo cars that drive you around San Francisco.”
Lexus Partners With YouTube Creators Colin and Samir for Deep Integration
“Lexus is now the official car of Colin and Samir. What does that actually mean? They made four ads for them that roll across, the roll out across YouTube. They're sponsoring four videos on their channel.”
NASA sold roughly $10 million in merch during Artemis II stream
“I think we were doing the back of the envelope just from the main call to action at the bottom of the YouTube stream. They were selling a patch for, I don't know, tens of dollars, and they'd sold, like, hundreds of thousands of them, so as we were watching, th…”