Rene’s Top Five on YouTube: July 25, 2024 edition

🩳 3x the info! As the most leaned-in subs of you may have noticed, I’ve been running an experiment this month posting three Shorts a day on the @youtubeliaison YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok accounts. One is a #CreatorAdvice Short, where we ask about ideas, thumbnails, community, and other hot topics from established creators to help out new and emerging ones. Often, when we see someone on top of a mountain, there’s no way to know how they got there, so this tries to help with that! (And, of course, there are always bigger mountains!) Two is a video version of the Creator Q&A I’ve been doing on social, replying to your questions on the algorithm, content strategy, and more. (I toggle between my YouTube employee and creator hats to hopefully provide the most helpful information and perspectives possible!) Three are highlight clips from the events I’ve been speaking at and podcasts and interviews I’ve been doing. Realizing not everyone has the time or ability to join in person or watch a whole entire long-form video, I’m hopeful these clips can help share shorter, more specific information with those who need it. If enough of you like and subscribe, we’ll keep the experiment going next month!

🙋 Q&A 1: “I know YouTube says most Shorts views come from the feed where there are no thumbnails, but I get most of my Shorts views from Search and I want custom thumbnails there!” I totally hear this. Shorts can and do appear in Search, on the Home and Channel pages, and in other places where you can browse them, like the Subs feed. Some creators would all-caps LOVE to custom thumb all the things (I want them on GIFs!), while others really like that Shorts are quicker and easier to post than long-form, and worry that thumbnails would become competitive and force everyone to devote time and money into them, slowing and weighing them down. As Shorts lead Todd Sherman shared in our last Creator Insider interview, it’s something YouTube is thinking deeply about and the team would love as much feedback on it as possible!

🙋 Q&A 2: “You say that if creators make an off-topic video, the algorithm will still try to find an audience for it, but you also say that the best way to grow is to keep making videos on the same topic, which is it?” Great question! The answer is nuanced — go figure! If your goal is to grow your channel as fast as possible, one of the best ways to do that is to make sure everyone who loved your last video gets another similar or follow-on video to love. That helps establish your expertise and brand-value for the topic and gives people the opportunity to binge, which is a strong signal they enjoy your content. You don’t want your videos to grow stale, so you’ll need to keep innovating around your topic, but if you want maximum growth, that’s a good strategy for it! If you want more variety and room to experiment, you can post whatever you like. Your current audience may not be into it so it might take longer to find audiences that are, and you may be competing with established and valued experts in those other topics, so it might be harder to find demand, but the reward is reaching a wider range of people and potentially discovering new and underserved topics to lean into on the same or other channels. In other words, you can take either approach, but aligning expectations early around your choice avoids frustration later!