Views per Hour, Not Views per Video
A lot of people creating content are always trying to maximize views per video, or even views per account. What I'm trying to maximize for is views per hour of my time. That means I continually want to get more views in the amount of time I have to work. Based on 15 years of experience and tens of thousands of videos uploaded, my goal is to crank out the content that gets the most views in the least amount of time — which means ruthlessly cutting anything I'm doing that's inefficient and figuring out exactly how to create my content as fast as possible in a way that will generate views. I track all of that in the spreadsheet I shared recently, and I've literally filmed 24 videos today.
Now, a lot of those are shorts, because shorts help me get discovered. But it's long form views that tend to turn people into superfans, and it's superfans that really allow you to do YouTube full time — especially fellow YouTubers and content creators. That way you can have a two-way relationship where I know your name and your story, and you can share and message me anytime there. If you want to maximize your ability to earn real money with YouTube, ideally you put content out in formats that both facilitate discovery and then deepen relationships.
Here's my daily output: six long form videos a day, one on each of my channels. Then I try to do two shorts a day on each channel also. And I try to do all of that in three to five hours of time, seven days a week — some days I may work more, and others I might take a day off.
Obsessing Over Every Detail of the Process
The goal at every point in my process is to figure out where I am wasting time. I get into the nitty gritty details. When I'm filming, I need to be standing up at my standing desk, so I need to have energy for my filming, which means I need to manage my eating around my filming. If I eat a whole bunch, I'm not going to be energetic enough to film anything other than some really relaxed vibe, and sometimes after I eat I need to rest. So I have to plan my activities around that: what can I do for my YouTube when I'm sitting on the couch and need to rest for a little while?
I've filmed most of these last 24 videos — including about six of them long format, 62 minutes of content — back to back in one straight session. I think I went in the kitchen for a quick five or ten minutes, ate a little bit, and then came back. I dropped my kids off at one, so I've been working for about four hours straight just filming videos.
What I've looked at is: what is my main bottleneck for filming videos? Titles and thumbnails. So I can do titles and thumbnails while I'm sitting on my ass on the couch. I can use ChatGPT to generate thumbnails and pair each one with a title, so that when I go to film, I step up to the computer and open my folder called Ready to Film, which has all my thumbnails and titles paired right there. I just step up, load one into OBS, and start talking. That folder had 50-some items in it before, and now it's down to 35 because I went and filmed all those videos. I'm obsessed over every little detail of my process so I can take the ideas in my head and get them out and published as fast as possible.
Quality Is Debatable, Quantity Is Not
This is where most YouTubers, most content creators, fail: you just don't publish enough content. Quality is debatable. Quantity is not debatable. If you're going to be a content creator, you're going to be doing quantity one way or another. MrBeast puts out a ton of videos even though they're incredibly high production — he's got shorts, he's got several different channels, and he's always interviewing on other people's channels. Even though his videos take a ton of work, he still publishes a good number of videos. On the alternative end, some of the most watched channels in the world — channels with more views than MrBeast — use a straight-up quantity approach. They publish 10,000, 20,000 videos, and even though some of their new videos only get a few thousand views, they just endlessly, constantly grind out views.
That said, I think you generally don't want to do more than one long format and two shorts on a single channel in a single day — or if you do one long format, maybe a livestream and a couple of shorts. At least if you're a solo creator like me, you don't want to go for more than a couple of shorts, which have a bit different algorithm, and one or two longs on a channel every day, because that starts to diminish your returns. Which is why I have six different channels.
Why I Run Six Channels
I have vlogs on one channel and two crypto channels — and even for crypto, I don't want to put all my crypto content on one channel. One channel is just about the cryptos I like, and the other channel is about all the cryptos I don't like. That splits the audiences, and then I can publish more. That's what Gary Vee was saying in one of his recent videos: he has so many different accounts because having a certain type of predictable, repeatable content tends to work very well. You take a specific kind of content and put it on that account. That's why I've got six different YouTube channels, shorts and longs.
Don't Edit Your Videos
If you'd like to do better with your content creation, the number one thing to look at is: can you speed up your process? If you're editing videos, you're going too slow. A faster process is to not have to edit any of your videos. As soon as I finish filming a video, I upload it. One of the biggest mistakes amateur content creators make is spending way too much time doing stuff that doesn't matter that much. If you've got a few thousand views, does it make sense to take a little — or a lot — of your precious time and spend it trying to edit stuff you don't even know really needs to be edited or not? No, that doesn't make sense.
Now, if you're wondering, "How am I going to just get up there and talk like you?" — practice. What helps me is that I practice like I'm talking on a video throughout the rest of my life. That means I'm able to show up and just naturally talk. But it's also a skill: I've practiced talking for videos off the top of my head for so long that I can talk in a way that doesn't really need edits. In fact, in a lot of ways it's better unedited, because I'm more off the cuff, joking, going on random side tangents.
And these days, proof of human is very important. With people generating all kinds of faceless or even human-appearing content with AI, it strips off a lot of the fun, the human. People are watching and demanding — and YouTube seems to be promoting — content that's more proof of human. Therefore, having videos that are unedited is great today. If you can optimize your entire workflow so you can upload more, faster, then to me the number one metric is how many views you are getting for each hour you work.
Paywalled Attention and Real Human Feedback
Those views often come from people who have no incentive to see you. They can even be bots in the comments — I've seen lots of bots in the comments — and there are all kinds of trolls and haters trying to get attention through negative attention-seeking behavior. That's why I've looked at my time and decided: if I'm going to put time into responding to comments and reading messages, I need to make it a paywall so that only people who are actually supporting my work are getting my attention. And that's where I get my feedback. I have my views — I see how many views my videos get — but you really need human feedback with your views also. Sometimes you can create junk content that will get a lot of views but won't do any good or make anybody's life better. I get to see what I'm creating that's really helping people, and that guides my creation.
Then I have upsells to one-on-one calls, personalized videos, sponsorships, et cetera. This gives me consistent monetization across all my channels — one community for all six of my channels. And then my channels' job is to just bring in views that get ad revenue and bring people to the family. So it's a process of how I continue to use the time I have more and more effectively.
AI Thumbnails and a Life Built for Filming
With AI, it's super easy to just grind out AI thumbnail backgrounds. Now, if I was just doing one vlog video a day, I might not bother with an AI background — I use a background for my vlogs that's just a picture. But I have six different channels, six different subjects, and my dating videos need to look different than my crypto videos. If I'm doing YouTube videos, those need to have backgrounds that match what people are expecting. So I use AI, and I itemize and take inventory of every little moment I'm putting into content creation.
I also try to make the rest of my life super efficient to help me show up ready to go and create content. That means I'm exercising so that I have energy. I'm getting my sleep so that my brain is working properly. Today I was a little bit distracted by a woman not responding to my message asking her if she wants to change from tennis to doing something else — and I just worked through that. And I have my house set up, everything set up, to film videos. If you're going to be a professional content creator, your whole life ideally needs to be dedicated to mastering the craft. If you want to go deeper on how I approach all of this, I've got much more in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
So if you want to talk about that, one of the things that really helps is to talk with somebody who lives in this world, thinks about it constantly, and has been in it 15 years. Join the family. Let's talk. Show me what you're doing. I'll take a look and give you my feedback.
And a big part of mastering the craft is this one question: where are you putting your time?