 But hey, we got another topic. YouTube has changed and it's changing constantly. There's been some major changes that all artists need to keep in account. And one of our Brandman Network members actually brought this up in the community. If y'all don't know about Brandman Network, it's our private community for artists, music managers, some dope professionals. Really a lot of dope people in there. And we talk, we have some conversations. A lot of one-on-ones. It's free, completely free, completely free, but you still have to get accepted. Like everybody can't just hop in it. So Brandman Network.com, go ahead and click the invite if you wanna give it a try, but check this out. Nina Osta said, has anyone else noticed that YouTube is recommending more videos with low view counts? In the last couple of months, I've gotten way more videos that have views in the hundreds that I usually do. And it was dope. Like Rohan said, he saw the same thing. Mandy, I start saying myself, I was like, yo, actually I have seen it, but it didn't click until I saw somebody mention. I was like, damn, I have been seeing a whole bunch of views in the hundreds, right? So there's some things that this relates to, right? And that's what I wanna talk about. But before I do that, I'm gonna pull up this YouTube page and you can already see, if I go down far enough, there's gonna be, look at this, 636 views. All right, let's see if we can find another one real quick. Five days, five days, that's 3.3K, that's not the lowest, 29 views. I don't care, but he had to upload that. Yup, exactly, exactly. And I'm not used to being early to a lot of stuff. So when I started noticing that and they said that, I'm like, okay, and it's not just happening for me, it's definitely a thing. And why is this happening? Well, I'll say this, it's clear that YouTube is leaning into becoming an even greater discovery platform than it already is. And a lot of this is driven by shorts. That's my theory. And the ongoing beef with TikTok. And the ongoing beef with TikTok, of course, of course. Because when, and this is a positive thing for all of us to be able to take advantage of, all right? Because YouTube had got to the point where it was only based off of the behavior of what you previously were looking at, which is great, that's highly interest-based, that's what makes TikTok potent, that's what makes YouTube very potent both versus Instagram, all right? It's not just your social sphere, it's the interest-based sphere. But with that being said, if you are blatantly based off of my last videos, which most people were, then I'm missing my subscribers, all right? So the people I'm subscribed to, I'm not seeing much. Or if people are subscribed to me, they're forgetting about me. And that's doing a disservice. So I'm not discovering content that I have a likelihood to be interested in. But then on the other side, you also can get caught in your loop. And if you see this, obviously I've been watching shit on our channel, right? But you see more from this channel for you, you see that tag? So they're gonna start recommending things that they just think you might like out of your sphere, right? So it's like, ah, he hasn't been to the, he's been behaving like he's interested in these topics. So I'm gonna show him more stuff on this topic. But if I saw that he had the behavior that I liked on a channel in general, I'm just gonna offer a full playlist mixed from that channel. And that's just pushing people down a rabbit hole. That's all they're trying to say. Like, hey, man, we think you're gonna like this rabbit hole based on some of the stuff that you've done. So you can get somebody to watch probably like three, four of your videos consistently. I don't know if there's a watch time, how the algorithm is building this particular recommendation out. But it's pushing towards discovery, not just of individual videos, but a full playlist of channels that you like. So this stuff is gonna, like this is gonna keep happening. No, even actually, no, I might not have the screen share for people who, y'all didn't see that last post. So let me go back and show this. So if you see the mix that I keep highlighting, and it says Raymond Network, more from this channel for you, that's something that they're gonna be doing and be doing more consistently. If you go to our channel page, it's for their music. They've made these separations, right? And why are they done these separations? Cause for one, shorts and videos are getting mixed up and that shit was just a horrible experience for the users. We all hated that. Like, dang, I can't even find a regular video I wanna watch, cause y'all got all these shorts in the way. But now with shorts being in its own tab and they have their own analytics completely, which we haven't used shorts heavily, coming soon, folks, coming very soon. Now that they have those separates and the stats being taken separately, we have a foundation on YouTube now to do exactly what Leigh Orr Cohen was talking about. Have these shorts help people discover the long form content. But you have to have it in these separate spaces for that to happen. Because before what was happening was the shorts, even on the data side, was getting included in the channel watch time. So if I drop a video for 20 minutes on average and you're watching 10 minutes of that on average, that means my channel's watch time is 10 minutes. But I started posting all these shorts cause I'm trying to give views and blow up. Then all of a sudden my watch time dramatically drops. And that was what was happening. It was discouraging users from doing that. But now they got it separate. So people can consume your shorts, your watch time stays the same. So everything can continues to grow in its own category. But it doesn't guarantee that either. I've seen a few channels where they only do shorts. No, they not only do shorts. They do a hell of a lot of shorts cause they're trying to grow and get looks. But their regular content isn't good enough. So they'll have a whole bunch of content with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of views. But then their regular long form content has like around 300 views. And it's all like that. There's no content with a thousand views but the content was horrible, to be honest. Cause it was almost like, oh yeah, we just made our shorts video longer to try to rework it. So don't try to hack it that way. That's not gonna work. I think people think you can just like, they did have a lot of subscribers, a couple of them. Like so you can use shorts to try to just grow that way from a subscriber standpoint, but you're not gonna get the full benefits of YouTube if you don't use the actual videos. At least that's, I don't see that happening right now. Yeah, they're always part of the long form. They're always part of the box. Why do you think that is? More ad space. Yeah. If like it's as simple as that. Yeah. Hey man, we're gonna put an ad and a half in your 30 second short, but we can put, now you tell them how to view, you watch earlier they had like four ads in the first like 20 minutes of it, you know what I'm saying? Yes. So it's like, you can't do that on a short. Right. Yeah. That's real. Yeah, but I do like it. It makes me think of the view boom you get when you first start making TikToks. You know, people always talk about how like their first handful of TikToks, you know what I'm saying? Get like a couple hundred, a couple thousand views. And you can tell there's TikTok incentivizing people to stay right and keep making content. In my head, this is YouTube's way of saying like, hey, small creator, all is not lost. You could still get some attention on here because anybody that's ever posted a YouTube video knows. There's nothing more discouraging than shooting that video and then come back a week later and then she got like nine views on it. Yeah. It hurts, bro. You know, because the time commitment for YouTube is so much greater than the time commitment for other platforms. Right. For the possibility of very little to no return on it and you know what I'm saying? In the view standpoint. So I feel like you said, and Daniel I had an order for us to seriously compete with TikTok. We can't only be, I guess, attractive to them in a matter of discovery and money, right, which is one of their two biggest playing cards. We have to also be friendly to the small creator. Yeah. You know, because TikTok is very friendly to the small creator. Like you could be a nobody today, post for the first time tomorrow and a couple of weeks have an audience where I don't have people viewing your content. And so that is always, at least in my head, what was gonna make TikTok be more attractive than YouTube is like, the amount of work I have to put into my YouTube channel to get a hundredth of the amount of engagement and views compared to TikTok is crazy. You know what I'm saying? Like really any other social platform. But now it's like YouTube was like, hey little guy, you know what I'm saying? You don't have to really compete with Mr. Beast. We're gonna give you some, some fee spaces like we give him, right? Like you don't have to now know how to hack the algorithm and create an amazing thumbnail. All those things matter, right? For the watch time to continue going up and to get people to kind of stick around. But you at least get a couple of views on it. You know what I'm saying? Without any of that stuff, which hopefully motivates you to want to get better at that stuff and keep sticking around. So that was kind of the first thing I saw. Cause like all the channels I've seen that have this going on, like they look like they're not completely new but a lot of them haven't been around for long. Like I was watching, well man, me noticed that there was like this gaming channel I found a couple of days ago. I mean, that guy like 300 subscribers and you know what I'm saying? Like I'm like, why is he on my feet? You know what I'm saying? Did you like his content? I did like it, you know, it was cool. See? It was on brand. That's dope. That right there is the encouraging thing for artists who are trying to build. This is the time to give YouTube another shot, right? Like you Corey said, it sucks to go through all that work, post and barely get any views. And that's how it was for a good minute. Right now that window's open, but we don't know if it's gonna last forever. So take advantage while that time is here because I mean, seeing so many people with a couple of hundred views, I was definitely, I don't know, it did shock me for a second. Cause I would first I would literally just say why is it showing up? That's how much you know, YouTube wasn't so much of a discovery platform for people that were new for such a long time that we didn't even say, oh, I'm early to this, or oh, what is this? We literally said, why is it showing up? Like it doesn't have enough views to show up at this time. Almost like you offended, right? That's a, that's a different type of mindset. So they're changing that mindset in the consumer for a while. And if you can tap into that while it is a thing and people are getting used to like just checking things out, did you subscribe to the dude or like at least hit the like button or I hit the like button. I didn't subscribe. It's like a lot for me to subscribe. I need at least three videos. It takes a lot for anybody to subscribe to. That's a whole another point, right? But that's love right there. Like you got somebody only, you said 300 subscribers? No, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like maybe 300 subscribers. Like Jacory, right? Who's out here moving in social, bonafide social media influencer and shit. Got clout and weight out here. Finding his stuff randomly with only 300 and then hitting the like button, right? You never know who's watching. Am I his Oprah? He is Oprah. Well, how'd you miss it? You got to give him some money though. You got to give him a show. But put him on the channel. We interview him. He is Oprah. He is not even close though. He's not even close. We going to get into the gaming space at some point, right? Well, I don't know. I don't know. Like maybe we need to talk about the niche. What kind of content was it? No, it's gaming content. What kind of games? You know what I mean? What kind of games do you pop up when you're in a weird site? I don't know, bro. You know what I'm saying? I don't know if I'm ready to expose my gaming taste. You know what I'm saying? I ain't ready to be judged by the audience. I got you. You know what I'm saying? No, it wasn't, bro. It was some chill shit. It was some chill popular shit. It was probably not some shit people would think I'd be playing. OK. Yeah. OK. Fair enough. Well, one more thing when it comes to this YouTube. The niches are important today. It's become a lot more like TikTok, right? And we probably should have mentioned this out the gate when we saw these new views. But in terms of the discoverability, yes, we're talking about more like TikTok, but I'm talking about algorithmically how you're feeding your audience. You want to stay in a niche. You can't go as wide as you used to on YouTube. These variety channels, when you want to talk about anything, oh, I want to play tic-tac-toe. And I want to prank my friend. And then I want to make music. And then I want to do something, some commentary and reaction videos on the BET or so whatever. That doesn't mix on YouTube anymore. And the same way people say, when you're on TikTok, you kind of want to stay in a pocket. Yeah. All right. When you start off, especially, you need to stay in a pocket. So yeah, you might have your music and another thing, but you want to stay pretty linear because what's happening, and we even watched this with our data on our end for how our videos perform, when you, the first people they're feeding to is your own audience, or people in similar space that are like the people who watch your last videos. So if we drop a video on Travis Scott, like we have, but then we drop a video on BTS, the group people. See, our following might not even know who BTS is. Some people, right? I'm going to give them that. Some people, I said some people. OK, yeah. We literally watched them not perform. A lot of the people who watch us are more likely to click on a Travis Scott video. And even though we have plenty of knowledge and plenty of game that can be extracted from the BTS group, people see that they're not going to click. And that's cool, right? But that's how even within the same similar niche you would think, music advice or music marketing and all that stuff, you'll still not have the same level of activity. So it's something to be thought about. You have to make sure you keep serving your audience, because if your audience doesn't click, it's not going to show to everybody else. And it's taking longer for videos to move and go viral. We will see a video perform well within our audience and then slow down, click through rate drops. And then all of a sudden, click through rate actually will go up a little bit sometimes and then start catching waves. It's like, oh, did it get pushed in a playlist? Or did it start getting recommended next to a certain video? And YouTube is like, whoa, I love how it's interacting with this video. So we're going to keep showing it next to this video. All these things are happening on the back end in that algorithm. So again, stay in your niche. And then also if you stay in niche, even though it moves slowly sometimes, as long as your click through rate is right, your numbers are looking good in general, it'll probably show it to everybody else. But if your main audience is already watching, doesn't find interest in what you're doing, the chance of it going further than that, it's almost zero at this point. Yeah, I'm thinking like, I wonder how this going to impact artists who like to do more, let's say like, discovery-oriented content outside of their music content, right? Cause I think it's- Like covers or something? Not covers, just the music. But let's say like vlogging or something, right? Cause I look at artists in music, or in music with like the artist is the niche, right? The bigger they get, the more like they become the niche. And they can get away with it. But I'm thinking about those early artists who were building who were like, hey, my music is cool. I'm going to go do, I'm going to go prank my manager so I can get a quick 100K views, right? It's like, that shit probably ain't going to hit the same. Unless it's just hilarious, like speed or somebody- Or the shit that didn't work when you were doing your music. So if my music wasn't going crazy yet, the algorithm didn't fully say, oh yeah, put him over here. But then my prank stuff going off, taking off, then becomes a problem. Cause now they're like, put him over there. And now I dropped my music and they put my music over there and they're like, yo, what is this, dawg? It's saying what I want from you. And it's not good, you know what I'm saying? Like please stop. Like that whole thing, you will have to please stop, right? Please stop the comments. So it's one of those things where, you know how an artist will be afraid of having a hit that doesn't sound like the type of artist they want to be. And it's like, dang, that song blew up. I wish that song never blew up cause I really want to be on my artsy shit. That's what that is. It's like, dang, that prank video took off. And now I'm stuck in that space when before that was overblown. Because like, no, people aren't necessarily gonna fully judge you in that way. And like, it's not like I can't take a prank video and good music. It's the algorithm is so specific that it's gonna put you in that pocket where it's going to hyper specialize who it shows you to. And there's no chance of who it should, if there's no chance of who sees it being based off of the music itself, right? I always like to use the cats and dogs example, right? It's like, if something pops up in the cat cart, in the cat category, now they're gonna show my dog content to the cat people. Versus saying, this video is about dogs, let's try to show it to dog people. It's not gonna do that at all. And of course you could have overlap, but you're not getting a full merit because there are a lot of people who are like, nah, I just want this. And I just watched these pranks. I don't even like that style of music, all right? Which is the bigger issue. It's like, now you got all these people who know you and love you. We had one girl that was trying to work with us. She had a boyfriend that had a sad instance happen to him in his life, a tragic event. She did a fundraiser and that fundraiser on TikTok, right? Brought in people of all shapes and sizes and ages and genders and whatever background, right? That's great. Probably went up a couple of 100,000 followers, raised a lot of money, got hella engagement, but then she drops her music. No, this old white man is not gonna listen to your young white girl teenage issue music. You get what I'm saying? All right, this old black lady is probably can't relate to it, the same, right? This kid don't even know what the fuck went on. This kid, exactly, just lost it herself. Out here clicking like just cause and swiping. So the algorithm sensitivity in these platforms is a pro and con cause it's what allows you to go viral so fast, but it also is what comes back to bite you if you go viral so fast in the wrong way, you know? Yeah, and you said something too that I didn't, I hadn't thought about it. I should have peeped it a couple of days ago, but I hadn't thought about it. But the variety channels are gonna doff on YouTube. And what makes me think of that is there's a YouTuber that really early on in my marketing career pay to do like reactions for people on YouTube, like the clients and stuff. And he emailed me a couple of days ago and was like, he's running a deal, which honestly should have been the first red flag, but you know, whatever. He's running a special, something crazy, we're like $10 a post or something. I'm like, let me go look at it and cause we got somebody we wanna work with now. And it's just like dead and something looking at it. And it's like, the last video is like a music reaction video, the game before, the video before was like a vlog, the video before was like a gaming video. The other before that he's reacting to like movie trailers, right? The video before that he's reacting to like TV show clips and I'm like, bro, like, you know, 2018, 2019, he was deep in the music space. And my guess is that I do remember there was a point where maybe 2020, 2020 or like reaction channels really blew up, you know, like, well, not even just music reaction, but like just other niche reaction channels that I really started taking off, I would say around then. My guess is he saw that, was like, oh, I don't have to just react to this new call that black video. I can react to the new Black Panther trailer coming out and you know, ride that in the algorithm. And you know, now he's probably stuck in the loop where it's like, oh, this is all I know how to do cause it worked for me. But like he said, now YouTube is like, nah, you gotta go back to being niche, you know what I'm saying? At least until you're, cause it's like I said earlier, like artists, the bigger you become, like you become the niche, you know what I'm saying? So, and I think YouTube is really all social platforms are interesting where they pick up on it. Like you have enough social influence to where they don't, it kind of matter what the fuck you post, you know what I'm saying? It's gonna do well, right? But that comes with the grinding in whatever your previous niche was or whatever your initial niche is, right? And so I'm just thinking like, yeah, you're right, bro, like I'm thinking about like all the variety of YouTubers I used to pay attention to, other than maybe MrBeast, you know what I'm saying? But going back, he has to know the variety so he can do whatever he wanna do. You know what I'm saying? It's like, all the variety of YouTubers I used to pay attention to, I don't even really see them getting recommended to me anymore, it's not pushing me. Like I have to like actively think about them, which I'm not actively thinking about a lot of them, you know what I'm saying? And go look for them, which I'm also not looking for a lot of them, you know what I'm saying? And yeah, but it's like literally clicked as soon as you said that's like, damn bro, the variety of YouTuber brother, I'm just gonna do whatever because this is what I kind of feel like, YouTuber brother, they got a long road ahead of them. And the tough part is it's not just I'm gonna do whatever because that's what I feel like. At a time, people were just doing whatever because they thought it would give them a higher chance of going viral, right? People were doing that at TikTok at one time. Whatever trend is happening, just do it. That was the advice, right? So you can give views, not knowing that they were going down a dead end, right? Because now you're trapping yourself if you take off in this space algorithmically, all right? Now you can't do whatever you really wanna do. Oh, what did you say Sharante did? What kind of channel was it? Oh, but he, what did he do? He stuck his finger in wax and it's just like hardened on his finger and that's just got like a million views on TikTok. Crazy, but random, most random video ever. But he was attracting like, I don't know, I guess waxing through his, I don't know what kind of weird shit people do. Yeah, it was a Spanish around the clock. Something, bro, because that shit was like, we wish I was all this shit hit 2,000 views. That's cool. You know, a day late advantage of 100K. Like a week late advantage of a million views, bro. Like, what the fuck? Like, why are all these people coming here? And I think he's there as the follows. I think that guy has a count to maybe like 10,000, maybe 12,000 or something. But he switched it to like a business account and like, yeah, the engagement isn't the same way because everybody's like, no, I think I want those. I want those finger in the wax videos, bro. Like, I don't care about nothing else if I stick your finger back in that wax. Yo, that's tough, man. Oh, man. That's tough. Now, imagine that, bro. That's like an extremity of someone taking off in the wrong way and they're like, no, but I'm so talented. And they're like, no, bro. Put your finger in that wax, though. But I got great music. I have so many things to talk about. I play instruments. I'm sweating. No, no, put that finger in that wax. I'm sorry, I'm saying that shit to people, bro. Hey, bro, you just need to put the finger in the wax, bro. You're making it too complicated, bro. Just put your finger in the wax. Hey, facts, bro. A new saying for real. But that's literally a real live example of how this shit is working now. And that's mind blowing for a lot of people because that trend chasing error in that way is over. But like you said, you get to the point where you are the next you are big enough, you still can expand, but now you have to be specific, then expand. And how do you know if you're on that level yet? I guess you gotta drop a video, find out, right? Yeah, bro.