Today I asked @CaseyNeistat probably the most important question I could think of for #YouTube Creators today... here is Casey’s advice for aspiring or current #YouTubers...

(Thanks Casey! 😎)

You have ONLY 99 DAYS left to get monetized on YouTube with 4000 watch hours.

Then it goes to 8000 hours.

If you’re already partnered, you’re fine.

This title change added 1.24M views to a 3-month-old video.

Before: “Meccha Chameleon In Real Life!”
After: “I Painted Objects To Camouflage Them”

Why did it work?

Every time you upload, YouTube shows your video to your core audience first.

These are the people who already iche.

To people in the gaming community, Meccha Chameleon is so well known that it takes them just one glance to understand the video's premise.

But if the video keeps performing, YouTube pushes it further out to people who may not fit your niche perfectly.

Someone who only occasionally watches gaming videos may not know what Meccha Chameleon is.

“I Painted Objects To Camouflage Them” fixes that.

→ Anyone can understand it in 2 seconds
→ It says exactly what happens in the video
→ It matches the thumbnail

Specific titles win clicks from your core audience and niche.

General titles win everyone else.

So if an older video of yours is still being pushed to new people, check whether your title makes enough sense to get them to click.

Personal Brand = Organic Content + Reputation + Authenticity

A CMS was never a magical shield against demonetization. It doesn't exempt you from youtube s policies. It's just an extra layer of support and security, not a guarantee that your channel is safe.

I had the exact same issue with one of my other channels last week (not AI stories h a "well known" CMS, the channel got demonetized. (I appealed and got monetization back.)

I've worked with 3–4 CMSs so far, and honestly, most of them are useless and don't make much of a difference, especially when you're already making safe, low-risk content. The main reason I use a CMS is for the available payment methods.

The only one I've had an exceptional experience with is @wannercashcow, ngl. I'm not his student, and this isn't a promotion. His team actually takes care of my channels, keeps me updated on youtube policies and changes, and warns me about potential issues.

I've been with them for over 6 months and haven't had a single issue.

A CMS is never a magical miracle, if you're making risky content or pumping out AI stories on scale, just take that bag and run

YouTube Automation is likely over with the upcoming policy changes and will be collateral damage in the war with AI Slop.

YouTube leadership is fully aware of YTA…

Don’t want to weigh in on the more drama related portion of the H3 Podcast situation, but the economics are worth covering as a cautionary tale for other content creators:

The audience was heavily parasocial and invested in Ethan and Hila specifically.

The crew was a distant second.

When YouTube or streaming couples split, brand destruction is real if they built the product entirely as a couple and neither was independently successful with their own fanbase first.

There are few exceptions to this you can probably think of in term of OG YouTube, but MOST of those had individual fanbases first.

The H3 Podcast audience shifted to roughly 60% female. Frenemies pushed the demographic shift higher. And they originally had a 90% male audience.

This is a huge pivot in audience makeup.

That base is more invested in the hosts personal lives than in the supporting cast. Almost completely parasocial.

There is no realistic path to long-term recovery at prior scale if or when the show returns from hiatus.

While a show like this is not uploading, memberships shrink. Period.

Drama just accelerates the decline.

Expect more than 60% membership churn over the next 6–12 months. (My conservative estimate).

Sponsorships have the same pressure.

Existing deals may still need to be fulfilled, but new ones become harder to close and prior rates are unlikely to hold. A 40%+ drop in that line is a reasonable, and frankly the bare minimum, it could be higher.

Teddy Fresh and Teddy Glow leveraged free distribution and parasocial elevation through the podcast.

That support shrinks with the audience and the content pause.

The brand has some independent retail presence, so it is not going to anywhere near zero, but it takes a serious hit.

Every major revenue stream is compromised: memberships, AdSense, sponsors, and product lines.

Nothing was insulated.

The crew is talented and has clear chemistry.

That is obvious to anyone.
It is not enough to sustain the economics of the actual business and cover the overhead.

Too much payroll, and too many fixed costs.

They cannot fully separate from the brand Ethan and Hila built without also losing the recognition and upside that comes with it. The brand is the brand.

A clean rebrand discards that equity with no clear replacement audience.

There is no meaningful DTC or B2B business that stands completely outside the entertainment and parasocial engine.

Overall I am estimating 65–85% reduction in the combined revenue pipeline over the next 12–18 months is a CONSERVATIVE range.

The main surviving asset is likely Teddy Fresh, with its best case path being a full divorce from the H3 brand or an acquisition and exit.

Several structural lessons beyond the obvious moral ones:

• Parasocial audiences are boom-or-bust.

• Revenue diversification is not meaningful if every stream shares a single structural fail condition.

• Public-facing staff of creators need their own exit strategy and income diversification. Do not rely on the brand to survive.

• DTC spin-offs can benefit from creator distribution, but that same distribution is also a liability.

• Drama-adjacent content means less grace if you become the subject of controversy, and there is a limited number of times it is recoverable.

• Constant audience code-switching can have unintended consequences for brand longevity.

• Personal boundaries protect you, your team, and your business.

Parasocial Brands are basically a glass canon (IMHO).

Don't sleep on @YouTube's "Ask Studio" AI feature inside of YouTube Studio.

I asked it to look at the highest performing content across my channel in the last 90 days, find what it thought were the reasons that content performed well and give me 5 strong content ideas for a t.

Ask Studio gave me options I thought were terrible.

I winced pretty hard at this one: "Create Viral Motion Graphic Titles & Sound Design - DaVinci Resolve"

I asked it to explain why it thought that might be a good target.
Ask Studio said it thought my audience would respond to a video showing how to create on-screen text elements in combination with sound effects.
I liked the idea but I thought the title sounded completely wonky.

After having a reasonably deep conversation with Ask Studio (where I may have used some cuss words), I thought, "What the hell, I'll give it a shot".

I scripted out what I thought was the best way to execute on that idea and dropped that video while I was in N.Y.C. at the Made on YouTube event last month.

I actually showed the initial results to the YouTube team while I was there.

So far this year, it's been the strongest long-form video for it's time frame on my channel for an abstract metric you don't hear discussed too much, "Sustained Daily Views".
It's driven about 85,000 views (mostly from Browse) in the first 30 days and continues to consistently drive about 2,200 views per day.

This is a video that will likely bring hundreds of thousands of views to my channel over a short period of time and perform well in the long run as evergreen content.

Talk to YouTube Studio.
It's getting pretty good at responding. ☮️

If you actually believed this, you'd be typing it on a typewriter.

Instead, you're using technology that would have seemed like science fiction 50 years ago to complain that nothing has improved.

Medicine, communication, transportation, agriculture, computing, life expectancy, and access to information have all advanced enormously.

But apparently none of that counts because someone got rich providing things people wanted.

Imagine being so consumed by envy that you can't even recognize progress you're benefiting from.

APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE TO ANY TENANTS READING THIS, BUT I’M NOT STAYING QUIET.

I’ve housed you for four years at $1,750 a month. You’ve never been late. You’ve never trashed it. You’ve been a solid tenant. Then I sent the renewal: rent’s going up $275.

YES.

You’ve paid me almost $84,000 over four years. That money covered the mortgage (which I’m still on the hook for if anything goes wrong), property taxes that keep rising, insurance premiums that have jumped hard, maintenance and repairs that cost more every year, and all the other costs of keeping the place habitable and legal.

The equity and any portfolio growth come from the capital I put in, the risk I took, and the fact that I own the asset, not from the rent check itself.

You’re the one writing the check every month for the right to live there. At the end of it, you own nothing because you didn’t buy it, finance it, or take on the ownership risks. I did. If the roof fails, the HVAC dies, a pipe bursts, taxes go up again, insurance spikes, or you leave and it sits vacant, that’s on me.

A $275 increase isn’t “because the market lets me.” It’s because the costs of providing the housing have gone up, insurance, taxes, labor, materials, compliance.

Recent data shows typical homeowners paying ~$1,380 a month just in maintenance, taxes, and insurance on top of the mortgage, with insurance up sharply over the last several years.

Apartment owners have been keeping only about 11 cents of every rent dollar after debt service, operations, taxes, and the rest.

Expenses have often risen faster than rents.

Stop treating landlords like a free housing subscription that never has rising costs. The rent pays for the use of the property and the service of ownership. The equity belongs to the person who bought it and bears the risk.

If you want a version where some of the money eventually becomes yours, buy your own home.

noah centineo says it matters not what critics say but what the fans say with what they saw in the movie

GO WATCH IN THEATERS NOW #streetfighter

I would like to remind people that there is a clear reason why you should not trust critic scores, critic reviews, are anything that uses any kind of algorithmic metric.

guys are we not gonna get a sequel?😥 please please people watch STREET FIGHTER it is actually fun

if you dropped the plan to watch it bc you heard others/critics saying its bad DONT LISTEN go watch in theaters

Everyone: what are you doing making #StreetFighter flop so hard at the box office!? You’re letting the critics fool you! Shame on you whoever let this movie to bomb. It’s a great movie! It deserved better. 😭😭😭

#StreetFighterMovie #StreetFighter6

RT @itsplanetjen: FYI 💡 I've seen people suggest YouTube creators encourage their followers to run VODs and playlists "in the background" t…

Will Tennyson almost quit YouTube.

A few years ago, he shot 17 videos in the space of 3 weeks.

Every single one of them flopped. His usual 500-600K views dropped to just 150K.

He went so far as to tell his YouTuber friends he was done.

But then he realized his problem.

His g, broad ideas anyone would click on.

The batch he had just filmed was mostly vlogs, which you'd only watch if you already knew who he was.

So he went back to what worked for his channel and came back with a big, mass-appeal idea.

He also slowed down his schedule so each idea could get more thought.

As soon as he made that switch, the views came back. And they just kept climbing from there.

Today he has nearly 5.5M subscribers.

Moral of the story: If this can happen to a big channel with a full team behind it, it can happen to you too.

When it does, your best bet will always be going back to the winners you already posted.

Entrepreneurship is trading years of your life to find out which of your ideas were good.

CapCut is integrating with ChatGPT, and I don’t think people realize how much this could change content creation.

One of the biggest things holding creators back has always been editing. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and not everyone knows how to turn an idea into a finished video.

Now imagine being able to literally talk through your creative vision with AI and have it edit that video for you.

If you’re not taking your upload schedule seriously, you’re going to get left behind.

We’re entering a world where even the most inexperienced creators will have access to tools that previously took years to master.

Authenticity still matters. Good content still matters. But creators who learn to use these tools and consistently show up are going to have a massive advantage.

I need an entire Street Fighter anime in the style of the animated screams from the new movie!

They are worth the price of admission by themselves

Street Fighter movie is better than people give it credit for

You’ll find it’s nearly impossible to deal with anyone who can’t negotiate the difference between “cruelty”, and simple arithmetic …