I Tried vidIQ YouTube Coaching and It Was a Waste of Money
I tried vidIQ YouTube coaching. In my experience, it was an absolute waste of money, and I hope I can help you avoid wasting your time and money with vidIQ coaching as well, especially since they charge $2,388 a year, and it's just corporate coaching. To be clear, this is not a criticism of the coach I worked with himself. It is a criticism of the corporate model, the impersonal nature of it, and the very strict limitations they impose to make sure they can have as much profit as possible. This frustrated me so much that I made my own coaching program. Mine costs much less than theirs, because if you pay thousands of dollars a year or hundreds of dollars a month for corporate coaching, the coach themselves is likely getting about a third of that money. I can charge half of what they're charging or less and I get all of it myself, so it's a better deal for everyone.
The biggest problem I had with vidIQ YouTube coaching — and I'm not going to show any of their property here since this post is so critical, so there's no vector for them to attack on it — is that I paid for a coach, and it was super generic. I also have six YouTube channels, and he would only look at one single channel. If I wanted coaching on another channel, I had to pay separately for another channel. You had to sign up for a recurring plan, and they make you pay an extra $100 a month if you actually want to have a call. If you want a real call with your coach, it is $299 a month billed monthly, whereas mine is far less if you want to have a call with me every month. With vidIQ, there's no option to just test out the coach and see if you like it before you have to commit to paying $299 a month to have a real call with them.
Copy-Paste Coaching and Zero Transparency
I was shocked at how impersonal everything was. My coach was telling me, "I hope your work on your thumbnails and titles is going well." It felt like he copied and pasted that to all of his clients, because it was clear from when I talked to him that I don't actually work much on my titles and thumbnails. I literally just come up with them off the top of my head. In my experience, if you're an average YouTuber — and I'm certainly above an average professional YouTuber — how much your titles and thumbnails matter is way over-exaggerated, unless you're doing the most clickbait crap you can imagine, which general education videos are not going to fit into. I've tested all kinds of different ways. And after I'd told my coach that I basically just crank out videos and try to help people, I'd see his message and think, you just pasted this to all of your clients. From his point of view, I realized he's probably got a hundred clients he's trying to serve, show up for, and get reviewed for with vidIQ. He's in an environment where the odds are stacked against him, and it's probably stressful. So I'm not criticizing him.
But there was also no transparency behind him. My coach would not tell me his actual YouTube channel. I couldn't see for myself if this guy was leading by example, or if he literally knew nothing about YouTube and was just getting $20 an hour to tell me generic advice. That's a huge problem. At least they have pictures of the coaches. But when I clicked on "choose your coach" on their website today, just to see the functionality, the page literally didn't load, which is not a good sign. Plus, you have to connect your account directly with YouTube on vidIQ, which introduces some third-party risk — I've seen people online saying they lost their accounts by connecting to websites. Now, vidIQ is probably secure and that's probably not an issue, but still, you have to trust vidIQ with your whole YouTube account. When you work with me, you can just screen share and show me your YouTube on Zoom and show me whatever you want to.
What's nice with my coaching is you can DM me anytime, and I will actually watch your videos. I don't think my vidIQ YouTube coach ever actually watched any of my videos. Based on what he was getting paid, I doubt he could afford the time to sit there and watch one of my videos — and how are you going to coach me if you don't watch one of my videos? It just ends up being super generic, a corporate profit-turning system. I'm sure the people at the head of vidIQ have the intention of making the best coaching they can, but it's hard to do that when your bottom line is profit and making money for yourself, and then just trying to plug everybody else into that. My bottom line with what I do is trying to give you the absolute most value I can and have the deepest, most authentic connection with you possible. That's just hard to do in a corporate environment.
What My Coaching Looks Like Instead
Meanwhile, when I looked for YouTube coaches myself, it was hard to actually find one I would want to work with, because people are either so expensive, so unavailable, or have all these scammy programs. I've coached a number of other people on YouTube through my program over the years. My program is a monthly Skool community where you get one 25-minute live call with me every month, you can DM me, send me screenshots, and send me your videos, and I will at least watch some of them. I'm not watching a hundred hours of videos a month, but I just watched a video from a guy who's in the program, Scouse Will. He sent me his video, and I watched the whole 20-minute video today on double speed — full transparency, I watch most videos on double speed. I was so hopeful about vidIQ coaching, and I was so disappointed by the actual experience.
Then they have this chat coaching option, which to me is utterly worthless. This might as well be AI coaching. They charge you $99 a month if you do the annual billing, or it's $199 a month for chat coaching. I already pay $200 a month for ChatGPT. I haven't tried their chat option, so I can only guess, but I can provide a likely scenario: chat-based coaching from ChatGPT would, in most cases, do just as good of a job — plus it does all kinds of other things. Having someone give you feedback on a thumbnail and title is, in my opinion, so worthless. Now, the one thing I'll say is you do get the vidIQ tool included with the cost of your coaching, but that's only about $20 a month or a hundred bucks a year — it's not worth it by itself. And yes, sure, having someone look at your channel has some value, but are you seriously going to pay $199 a month to have one person look at your channel without even getting a call with them? With me, you can screen share your channel, you can tell me everything, and I will actually get to know you.
When I have people like Scouse Will that I coach — and Joe Paris, I coached him, and some others who want to remain anonymous because of their brand — I've coached a number of people on YouTube who built huge channels and made a lot of money online. And the cool thing is you can look at my channels and see how I started six new channels from scratch this year after I deleted everything last year. What's unique about me is I've been on YouTube so long, I've been through about everything. I burned out so bad that I deleted all my videos last year — tens of millions of views on YouTube, hundreds of millions of impressions, gone, deleted, along with thousands a month in passive income — because I was so burned out. Then I started six new channels this year, and I get millions of impressions every month for free. I'm even playing around again with Google Ads, just to experiment on my gaming vlogs and see how much quantity of views I can put on those and whether that does anything. I'm always testing stuff. I'm uploading five and a half YouTube videos a day on average. So talking to me is nice because I'm in the middle of doing this.
I Make My Living Doing This, Not Talking About It
I had a feeling during my vidIQ coaching that the coach I was talking to was not that good at YouTube — which is probably why they're not making a full-time living off their own YouTube channels, and why they're working for vidIQ. I have made a full-time living online myself since 2012, not working for anybody else. When you talk to me, I'm doing this stuff myself. I'm experimenting, I'm testing, and I'm in here right now. And I know how to use AI. A woman I just started dating is also a content creator, and she told me she's got so many videos to edit. She just sent me a message, and I told her, look, come over to my house — nothing else expected — see my YouTube studio, and give me your videos. I'm going to put them into a folder, Claude is going to go through and edit all your videos for you, and we'll go eat dinner, we'll go to the beach and have fun. You come back, and all your videos will be done. That's how I roll. I do insane workflows. I just tested throwing in a 54-minute video and had AI trim it down to 30 minutes. I use AI to build games. I use AI to do deep research for videos. I'm crushing it on my Crypto Reviews channel right now because I use ChatGPT Pro to do huge, crazy deep research, then I just present that and it gets views — it's bringing thousands of new people into my videos and tens of thousands of impressions a day, because I know how to use AI and work it into my YouTube flow. But I don't do any faceless channels. All my channels are very human, very me.
So when you compare what I offer to what vidIQ coaching offers — if you can find another YouTuber who offers what I do, please tell me. And the beauty is you can literally do coaching with me without ever signing up for a recurring payment like vidIQ requires. They have to get you on that recurring payment, and I know a lot of you hate recurring payments. You can just book one-off calls with me whenever you want to talk to me. You don't get DM support that way, which means you can't DM me a video to watch between calls, but some of the people whose channels I helped build would just show up once a week or even once a month, and I would give them feedback on their channel live. If you want two or three calls at once, you can book a longer call.
My vidIQ coach was impersonal and wouldn't tell me their YouTube channel. With me, you can hop on a call and we can record a video together — I'll coach your channel and post it to whichever of my channels it fits in. If you want to talk dating, for example, we can film a video together talking about dating. I'm available for collaborations. If you want a call every month, you can sign up for the annual membership and get 12 one-on-one calls with me, an entire year of being able to message me, post in the community, and connect with other YouTubers — though I recommend you start with a one-on-one call. Or you can just jump straight into the membership. You can also see how I actually coach in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
My Honest Challenge to vidIQ
I'm grateful that I've built the coaching I wanted, and I wanted to offer this feedback for vidIQ because this was my honest experience. That said, I tried vidIQ myself, and I'm not saying you shouldn't try it or see how it is for yourself. I'm saying that, in my experience, I offer something vastly superior to what they offer — except I don't have the analytics and the vidIQ tools that they have. But you could grab those for about ten bucks a month and then work with me if you wanted. And this is a call to action from me to vidIQ: up your coaching game. If you're going to charge that much, people should be having a better experience with your coaching. No shade on any of the coaches themselves — give your coaches a chance to really help people as best they can, instead of limiting them so much.