The New Rules Of YouTube In 2026 W/ Paddy Galloway

Summary

Sweat Equity: The New Rules Of YouTube In 2026 w/ Paddy Galloway

Podcast: Sweat Equity
Host: Marketing Examined
Guests: Alex Garcia, Brian Blum, and Paddy Galloway
Date: February 18, 2026

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Episode Overview

The episode dives deep into the present and future of YouTube strategy through the lens of Paddy Galloway—a consultant to MrBeast and leading YouTube strategist responsible for over 50 billion organic long-form views. It’s a masterclass on YouTube packaging, thumbnails, retention, and content ideation. Galloway dissects the mistakes most brands and creators make, shares behind-the-scenes learnings from working with brands like Red Bull, and offers frameworks for research, thumbnail testing, and expanding audience reach (TAM).

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Crucial Role of Thumbnails and Packaging

• Thumbnails are 50% of Success
  "I often actually say that it's 50% of the game... you make title thumbnails that people click and videos that people watch."
  — Paddy Galloway [00:57], [02:00]

• Multiple Thumbnails on Launch
  Galloway creates at least 3 thumbnails per launch, sometimes up to 50, and insists on A/B testing:
  “Even when I'm signing a deal with a brand or a creator client, I'm like, if we can't do this for every video, we're not signed to do it... This is a non-negotiable.” [20:32]

• Concept of Paused in Action
  Thumbnails should feel like an action is about to be unpaused, driving the viewer’s curiosity to click. [02:00]
  "It's like a story that has to go clicking. You have to click it..." [02:16]

• Visual Simplicity & Saturation
  "75% of users use YouTube on dark mode. And when you're scrolling through and you see a bright thumbnail, it's just naturally eye catching." [02:55]

• The Glance Test
  Thumbnails must be clear in a split-second; obsessing over detail is a common pitfall.
  "Is that interesting?" [03:11]

Notable Quote

"I want to put a thumbnail in front of someone that if they were on their last minute of scrolling their phone before bed and they saw that thumbnail, they couldn't sleep unless they clicked on it." — [MrBeast via Paddy Galloway, 02:16]

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2. Principles for Clickable Thumbnails in Educational Content

• Staging & Authenticity Not Necessarily Linked
  It's unnecessary for the thumbnail to represent something happening exactly in the video (e.g., staged whiteboard not in the actual footage). [04:19]
• Show Process for Educational Niches
  Emphasize process or clear, technical elements to signal value (e.g., lists, steps). [07:17]
• Text on Thumbnails: Brevity and Clarity
  Limit to 4–5 words, preferably short punchy statements with emotional or curiosity angles (e.g., "Get Rich Playbook", "You've Been Lied To"). [08:39]
• Contradiction and Curiosity Gap
  Use strong, curiosity-driven copy ("You've Been Lied To") to drive clicks. [09:01], [09:29]

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3. Frameworks for Titles and Packaging

• Contradiction as Hook
  "I found the cheapest 911 GT3s in the world, but nobody will buy us." — instantly creates a ‘why?’ in viewers’ minds. [12:36]
• Pattern Recognition Across Niches
  Galloway stresses looking at outlier content (3-4x performance) in adjacent niches to generate breakthrough ideas. [13:27]
• Iterative Improvement & The 3% Rule
  Inspired by Virgil Abloh: take something from another category, spin it 3%, and make it novel for your niche. [16:59]

Notable Quote

"You could make the thumbnail you really want. That's going to make you look great and everything. And we'll get 100,000 views. Or we can make the thumbnail that I want to do. And I think we can get 5 million." — Paddy Galloway [23:47]

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4. Execution, Testing, and the Algorithm Multiplier

• Power of Small Changes
  A 20–30% improvement in thumbnail can 30x–40x video performance, due to how the algorithm works as a 'multiplier.' [15:44]
• Never Give Up on a Video
  YouTube keeps testing your content—swap titles/thumbnails post-launch to unlock more value. "No man left behind." [20:12]
• Importance of A/B Testing
  Every video gets at least three thumbnails, with up to 50–60 variants for high-stakes content. [20:32–21:05]

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5. Ideation Process and Rigorous Selection

• YouTube Idea Flow Funnel
  Gather 30–50+ ideas from internal (what works for your audience/brand), external (other niches' outliers), and pure innovation (blue ocean ideas unique to your resources). [38:55]
• Steve Jobs’ 100-10-1 Rule Adapted
  Out of every 100 ideas generated, only one is likely to be made—and that's intentional rigor. [43:34]
• Four Filters for Idea Selection
  • Can it be easily packaged?
  • Aspirational view target (e.g., 1M views)
  • Does it fit your audience?
  • Is it novel/compelling?

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6. Audience and TAM Expansion

• The 80% Overlap Rule
  Each video should be of interest to 80% of the audience of your prior videos:
  “Can at least 80 of those people also be interested in this next video?” [27:26]
• Broader Packaging without Losing Core Value
  Instead of narrowing to “CPG brands,” use broader terms like “brands” to expand your total addressable market without alienating existing core viewers. [28:23]

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7. Shorts vs. Long Form: Strategy & Segmentation

• Viewers Are Separate
  Shorts build a different audience than long-form. Subscribers gained from shorts often don’t translate to long-form views; what matters is viewing history. [50:13]
• Don’t Separate by Channel
  Short- and long-form can live on the same channel. Separate channels only for fundamentally different long-form content (e.g., main channel vs. a podcast). [51:41]
• Algorithmic Differences
  Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok all have unique engagement drivers—there isn’t always a correlation in performance across platforms. [48:13]

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8. Retention, Structure, and Foreshadowing

• Three Steps for Intros

  1. Deliver on the click: confirm the thumbnail/title promise in the first 5–10 seconds ([53:30])
  2. Create intrigue: “in this video, we learned something that is going to completely change how we think about YouTube going forward…” ([55:12])
  3. Seamless flow: no disjointed signposts (“let’s get into it” is a dead sentence), favor smooth transitions. [57:27]

• Use of Foreshadowing
  Overtly tease what’s coming next (“A little bit later, I’m going to ask you about this, but first...”). [61:47]

• Chapters: Only for Certain Content
  Use chapters for podcasts, tutorials, or listicles; not for narratives or stories. [64:43]

• YouTube’s True North is Viewer Satisfaction
  Watch time, completion, and retention matter, but satisfaction—ensuring viewers are happy and more likely to stay on YouTube—is most critical. [65:01]

Notable Quote

"YouTube care about satisfaction, then you should care about average duration. But so often people will put watching for a long time ahead of satisfaction and in doing so, they'll make a video that is like stringing someone along, not redelivering anything." — Paddy Galloway [66:10]

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9. Brand YouTube Strategy

• Don’t Treat YouTube Like Vimeo
  Uploading corporate or training videos just as “information” harms brand perception. Either invest in premium content or don’t have a channel. [36:06]
• Grow through Stories, Not Just Info
  Brands like Red Bull see YouTube not as ads but as foundational to their brand, built around stories and people—athletes, ambassadors, unique access. [35:51][38:01]
• Leverage Competitive Advantage
  "What is a brand’s competitive advantage? What do you uniquely have access to?" (e.g., Red Bull: athletes, F1 cars, stunts). [42:18]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• The Unpause Principle:
  “A concept I really like to think about with thumbnails is this idea of paused in action. So it almost feels like you’re clicking something to play the image.” — Paddy Galloway [01:35]
• On Thumbnail Authenticity:
  “Sometimes people get really precious about that. They’re like, if it’s not in the video, I can’t show it in the thumbnail... By the time someone’s watching and it’s valuable, they don’t even know what the formula was, right?” — Paddy Galloway [04:36]
• On TAM Expansion:
  “There’s a rule I like to think about called... the 80% YouTube strategy rule. Your videos should have 80% overlap with your other videos, need 80% overlap each time.” — Paddy Galloway [27:26]
• Algorithm’s Multiplier:
  “We as humans, we think about things so binary of, like, if I make it a bit better, it will get a bit better. And everything’s like, linear, you know, Whereas with algorithms... the difference between content that gets a thousand views and a million sometimes isn’t as drastic as you think. Just strategically, it’s twisting it a little bit.” — Paddy Galloway [16:52]
• Confidence in Thumbnails:
  "I've never entered a niche and thought that I couldn't figure out a way to make this niche go viral." — Paddy Galloway [25:52]
• Brand Perception:
  "On their YouTube channel they had like these awful corporate training videos... And it would also be nice if some people discover these and think, you know, wow, that's such a cool company. No one's going to watch that... If anything, a lot of people are going to see that and go like, wow, they're lame." — [36:06]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:57] — Importance of packaging and thumbnails
• [02:16] — MrBeast’s thumbnail test: irresistible click
• [08:39] — On text in thumbnails
• [13:27] — Pattern recognition and cross-niche inspiration
• [15:44] — The multiplier effect of small improvements
• [20:12] — Thumbnail testing and not giving up on videos
• [27:26] — The 80% overlap rule for audience retention
• [38:55] — Galloway’s ideation funnel
• [43:34] — Steve Jobs' 100-10-1 filtering process
• [50:13] — Differentiating Shorts and Long Form content strategies
• [53:30] — Three steps to a strong YouTube intro
• [57:27] — The "seamless flow" philosophy
• [61:47] — Foreshadowing for retention (soon X, first Y)
• [64:43] — Chapters and their use on YouTube
• [65:01] — YouTube’s prioritization of viewer satisfaction

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In Summary

This episode is a goldmine for creators, marketers, and brands looking to understand what it takes to thrive on YouTube in 2026. Paddy Galloway emphasizes that success is less about a single “viral” formula and more about systems: rigorous ideation, outlier analysis, relentless thumbnail testing, smart packaging, short-to-long-form strategy separation, and psychological mastery of viewer curiosity. His frameworks aim to break "creators' and brands' mental limits" and reorient them to see YouTube as a dynamic, high-stakes, and endlessly creative platform—where tiny iterations often have exponential outcomes.

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Find Paddy (Paddy Galloway):

• Twitter: @PaddyG96
• LinkedIn: Paddy Galloway
• Outlier Strategy (Accelerator): Cohort-based, 8-week intensive (info in episode)

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For those serious about YouTube, this episode isn’t just advice—it’s an immediate blueprint for unlocking the multiplier effect inside the world’s biggest video platform.

Transcript

[Patty Galloway]

I think I can make any channel on YouTube go viral. I've worked on 50 billion organic views on YouTube, long form.

[Brian]

This is Patty Galloway, Mr. Beast's secret YouTube consultant, driving over 10 billion views a year. But the craziest thing is, in one hour, he completely reframed my thinking and my playbook for YouTube and for this.

[Patty Galloway]

Podcast, I always create at least three thumbnails on launch. Sometimes with some clients, that's as much as 20 or 30 thumbnails. I often actually say that it's 50% of the game.

[Brian]

So in this episode, you're going to learn how he thinks about thumbnails, how to package them for clickability, how to structure your YouTube videos, how to think about foreshadowing and introducing progress, all of these things. But in the first minute of the episode, I had to get him to reveal all of his thumbnail secrets. So I want to show you three thumbnails and out the gate. I want you to explain to us, to the audience, what makes these thumbnails great. And if you could just swipe to the. To the left, there's three thumbnails.

[Patty Galloway]

So this one. Yeah, this is a. This is a pretty special video. We did this with Red Bull a couple years ago, and I think it's. It's interesting because when I think about packaging, I find that a lot of people outside of the YouTube industry just don't understand how big of a differentiator it is. I often actually say that it's 50% of the game, and that shocks people because you think, you know, YouTube is a video platform, right? People think you make videos that people watch. But I think about it, you make title thumbnails that people click and videos that people watch. You know, it's 50, 50. So I mean, a film like this is. It's really simple, but you got the F1 car and the. The drone side by side. And this, like, even the little details of, like, the leading lines you see stretching off into the distance, directing your focus to the track that's in front of them. A concept I really like to think about with thumbnails is this idea of paused in action. So it almost feels like you're clicking something to play the image.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

And I even think about that, even for, like, a podcast, you know, if I look at the best podcast thumbnails that I see, it's like someone with their hand out with text, and they're in the middle of speech. It's kind of like the highest, like, outliers.

[Brian]

It's like a flat bubble and so then the clicking, it is like. It's almost like the finished thought is gonna. Is gonna come.

[Patty Galloway]

Exactly. It's like a story that has to go clicking. You have to click it. And I remember one of the best pieces of advice I ever got on thumbnails was from Mr. Beast, and he was like, I want to put a thumbnail in front of someone that if they were on their last, like minute of scrolling their phone before bed and they saw that thumbnail, they couldn't sleep unless they clicked on it. That's what I always liked with the extremity of how important it is. See, I think a film like this is pause in action. You have to click it to, to play it. It has like some enhanced colors. It still borders on realistic, but it definitely is pretty.

[Co-host]

That was going to be a question of mine was how much did the saturation and the colors come into play.

[Patty Galloway]

I mean, the way I think about it is about 75% of users use YouTube on dark mode. And when you're scrolling through and you see a bright thumbnail, it's just naturally eye catching. Of course, another concept I always like to think about is this idea of like the glance test.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

It's another mistake people make, especially when they hear me say things like this about how important a title thumbnail is, is they'll end up obsessing over it so much and just like working on all these details. And they have it on their like 5k monitor and they're like spending hours looking at it. But the average user on YouTube is going to see it in like a split second. It's going to be just like a doom. Oh, is that interesting? So when a thumbnail is bright, has like good saturation, it's very simple. Like such a simple image, like, where it's just. You just see what's happening. You can see it's a race. You can see it's a drag race. Even the factors from behind it, it feels extra. Like you're almost like setting them off by clicking it.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

So, yeah, I think, I think those are some of the things that made that such a special format.

[Brian]

What about then move it into something educational? Like if you scroll to the left, I think the other way, you know, you can do the, the. It sets up very easy to have, are much easier to have, you know, Formula one car versus a drone. But then when you're recording just like a talking head video, it's harder to think about, like the creative elements that can make a very clickable thumbnail. When you Think about that. And then you look at this thumbnail. What makes this one great? If you could show it as well.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah. Just to see it there on camera. So, yeah, I think some of the same things again, it's like, it still feels like you have to click to almost unpause this moment of this guy holding up this board in front of you. Like, a fun fact about this video is there's no board. There's no whiteboard. Yeah, that's not in the video. Yeah.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

And, like, sometimes people get really, like, precious about that. They're like, if it's not in the video, I can't show it in the thumbnail. I'm like, bro, by the time someone's clicked this video and they're watching it and it's valuable, they don't even know what the formula was. Right.

[Brian]

Didn't you work with. With Noah Kagan?

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Right. And I think you talk about that in a video where you were like, it was something where he was knocking on people's doors, and you guys used someone that wasn't even in the video as the thumbnail or something along those lines. And it's like, people nobody commented in. That video has probably nearly a million views.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, that's a great example of. You know, I love Noah and his team, but they came back from that shoot, they made a great video, and I was like, let's see the thumbnail source. And they're, like, reading. And I was like, so I think the actual story was Noah just went to his neighbor that lived on the street and was like, would you mind, like, posing in this thing? She's like, I don't want to be in the video, but I'll pose. And he was sort of worried about, like, oh, she's not in the video. Can she be in the thumbnail? And I was like, literally, no one will notice. And I already had 5 million, 6 million views. I think one of the highest view business videos of all time in terms of long form. And I scrolled through the comments, and I think there was, like, one commenter who was like, was she in the video? You know, no one cares.

[Co-host]

Right? I mean, yeah, that's like its own form of engagement farming.

[Patty Galloway]

Exactly.

[Brian]

But even then, the thumbnail was, like, knocking on the door, someone opening.

[Patty Galloway]

Right.

[Brian]

Which is, again, one of those others, like, moments that you feel like you need to unpause.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, exactly. And if you look at it, like, I think that concept, it's so simple. But people would. Sometimes people think something's simple, but the execution is what makes the difference. So with that concept, I think a lot of people would have gone like both people looking at the camera, like smiling or, you know, like. Yeah, I think that's like how most people sort of naturally think they have to like overly pose for a film now. Right. They have to be like, oh, like, you know, perfect. Yeah.

[Co-host]

It's the token super surprised face. Very expressive.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, yeah. But by, you know, just sort of directing their body language towards each other and having, you know, even that, that thumbnail, like if you look at them, because we repeated that thumbnail so many times. Noah's always like this in the thumbnail when he's asking the question. You know, he's like, I don't talk like, I'm like. But just do it for the thumbnail. Because it just looks like he's like throwing this question at her. Yeah. And then the person in the thumbnail is always looking like this. And like, if she looks really happy, like, there's less jeopardy. I want, I want them to look like they're going to reject she controversy question. Yeah, exactly. What?

[Co-host]

Talk a little bit about like the visual elements that you like include in a thumbnail. Because this one has a whiteboard, a playbook, those obviously go together. The Get Rich playbook is pretty clear in terms of. That's a expectation for what I'm going to get from the video. But how do you kind of first, first principles identify the visual element you want to include?

[Patty Galloway]

So I think, especially with education, I like showing process.

[Co-host]

Okay.

[Patty Galloway]

It depends what people are coming for. Like, I think a lot of people that would click on this video, the title of this video for clarity was, I've made millions of people rich. Here's my entire playbook. And I think when you see that title and you, you think about this financial advice video process and seeing like actual technical detail stuff, like it's, oh, look at this stuff. And again, this wasn't really covered in the video. There was steps, but like, it wasn't like we were like, oh, 1, 2, 3, spend percent of it. This is more just like create this, this feeling. It's like a movie poster. How like, you know, Spider man and you know, the Green Goblin might not be posed in the exact way they are in the movie poster. It's like, yeah, it's just replicated.

[Co-host]

That scene never happens. But it was eye catching.

[Patty Galloway]

Yes. Yeah, exactly. So I think about that a lot. I think about text. You know, I remember having an argument with someone a while ago. They were like, if you have to use Text in your thumbnail. It's. Your thumbnail's not good enough. And I just couldn't disagree more. Like, I think using a few words, usually I'll limit it to, like, four or five words max in your thumbnail. Like, I see so many people use, like, 10 words, and it's like, again, bro, like, you've got a second of attention, if not less. Can you read everything in your thumb, including the facial expression, including the. The pointing, you know, and then you have 10 words. It's like, that's too much. Right.

[Brian]

And with those four to five words, is there a framework to use on, like, hey, like, say this kind of statement or introduce contrast or. How do you think about that?

[Patty Galloway]

I think about, like, short words. So in terms of character count, like, I don't want really long. Like, Playbook is, like, on the verge of being too long.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

Like, it's still fine, but I like short, punchy things. Get Rich Playbook. You know, like, clear. Even. Even this creator, I don't think he would say that.

[Co-host]

Right.

[Patty Galloway]

I'm not gonna say Get Rich Playbook, but, like, in the thumbnail text, it's just like, Get Rich Playbook. Right?

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

One of my favorite pieces of thumbnail text ever was one that I saw on this. This channel that was doing a video on the dodo extinction. Yeah. And it was a picture of the dodo, and it said, you've been lied to. I just love that text. So then with this creator, actually, I. We made a video where he's like, why I don't own a house as a multimillionaire. And then we were brainstorming the text, and I was like, you've been lied to. It's so good. Like, it's just punchy, short words. Under, like, five. Five total words.

[Co-host]

Right.

[Patty Galloway]

Well.

[Co-host]

And it's kind of condensing a core idea of what someone's going to get in the video. Right. But also, at the same time, I think, you know, a curiosity gap is something that a lot of people talk about in YouTube. You have to establish a curiosity gap where when I see the thumbnail, like Mr. B said, if I'm on my last minute of scrolling, I now have to go understand what's behind it. You've been lied to as a perfect example, because I think every man is, like, you know, just desperate to uncover the truth.

[Brian]

But it's funny, because that video played in my head so much when I was buying a house is he talks about, like, renting is the better option than buying a house. And I was buying a house. I'm like, bro, I know they're saying this is not a. I'm getting lied to right now. Like I'm in the moment of getting lied to. What do you think about though when something like a podcast, right? And typically, or you know, a lot of people talk about like podcasts never get the same reach as maybe a 12, 15 minute YouTube video. And. But Brian and I cover a lot of things that are playbooks or case studies or like breakdowns for something like that. Are you recommending us put in, hey, show the process. Like if you're going to do a whiteboard, if you're going to do whatever, show the process within that thumbnail as well. Like if we're breaking down, you know, some brands, art direction showcase, like maybe mood boards and then how you would think about sequencing images, etc.

[Patty Galloway]

I think with podcasts there's some like different rules I would think about. I still think it's something you could test know. I think my first minute have done things like that where they'll use like, you know, similar like a whiteboard or something that's on even though it's not featured in video. I think to me it's again, it's like if it represents what the video is covering. Like, I think the great thing about this is like the title is I made millions of people rich. Here's my playbook. The thumbnail says get rich Playbook. And then the star of the video, he's just saying like click confirmation. I've made millions of people rich. Like, yeah, here's, here's exactly the steps I take. And we even like create. We don't create this, but we through like visuals, we create like similar things. It's like a white background with like some numbers and a listicle and it, it feels like somewhat connected. So I think the podcast, if you're able to create that either in motion graphics after the fact or even just like a little like cut out or something, I think then you can like go as far as you want with the actual thumbnail. I think I think about a lot as well for podcasts and just YouTube title thumbnails in general and the art of packaging in general is one of the things that I find creates that feeling of I have to click. This is contradiction, right? Or it's like challenging the conventional thought. So I do this exercise with, with students in my accelerator that I run to help like smaller creators where I say like, let's take a, let's take a title that says Something like the cheapest 911 GT3Rs in the world. Right. It's like, that's an OK title. Right? The cheapest. Okay, but like, how do we, how do we improve that? Well, we could say, I found the cheapest 911 GT3s in the world. And it's like, okay, well now I found. Makes it feel a bit more like an adventure, like a story. But how could you add a contradict contradiction?

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

So it could be like, I found the cheapest 911 GT3s in the world, but nobody will buy us. And suddenly you're like, well, if you found the cheapest one, if you found this like really cheap thing, it's like, why would someone not buy it? Like, what's the story there? You know, you take it to another level. It's like, I found the best apartment in Austin, but nobody will move in. Like, as a title, I'm immediately like.

[Brian]

You're like, why? You ask yourself why so fast?

[Co-host]

Which I think is one of the coolest things about the frameworks that you talk about, which is pattern recognition.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

And being able to take that simple idea, which is contradiction, and then apply it to different niches.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

You know, because, I mean, you just mentioned it that you've been lied to was a dodo video.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

And you just applied it to a personal finance niche. So maybe talk a little bit about that research process and like how you find the pattern first and then apply it to the new thing.

[Patty Galloway]

Exactly. So what I think about is I basically think and dream and outliers. So like my company's called Outlier Strategy. Right. Like, that's all we think about. So what we'll do is we'll use different tools. There's tools like view stats1of10.com and we will basically identify what we. We typically define outlier as a 3x or 4x the average view count of the channel. So we'll use those tools to find videos across multiple niches that are 3 or 4x the average. And the way I like to think about this is like, so often people get caught up in this mindset of like, I am a finance channel, so I can only look at finance channels. Or I'm a fitness channel, so I can only finish channels. One of the biggest inspiration points for this channel, Ramit Sethi, when we worked with him, was actually like fitness and diet channels. And it's like, how could that apply to finance? He's a finance channel. And it's like, well, it's similar. Like it's like you're teaching someone how to do something that requires this self improvement. So I think about like adjacent niches a lot. Like, you know, if I'm a fishing channel, what's adjacent to fishing? Well, to me it's like golf. You know, it's enjoyed by a similar demographic. It's very gear heavy. Like, you know, you buy golf clubs, you buy fishing rods. You know, there's a lot of skill involved. So you can sort of use those examples as ways to, you know, adapt over from niches.

[Brian]

You talked about this, I think in a Twitter thread where somebody that went through the, the accelerator where a lot of their videos were getting stuck at like 1.5 thousand views, maybe up upwards towards 11,000 views and then out the gate he had some outliers. And all that you guys did or changed was the format. You looked at a format that worked for him. It was like the astrology one, I think the format, it was like 1 hour, 10 hour, 100 hours, something along those lines. And then his then was basically like taking a photo. It was like, I think taking a photo of like maybe the Milky Way. And it was like an hour exposure, 10 hour exposure and maybe a day exposure. Yeah. And that is almost what you're referencing here, where you can look at a completely different category. I don't, I don't remember the category that you referenced in the.

[Patty Galloway]

I think it was haircut. It was like a, a 10 second versus 10 minute versus something like that 10 hour haircut or something from a.

[Brian]

Barber channel, which is a sick, like sick idea.

[Co-host]

10 hour haircut.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, like what's that going to look like?

[Co-host]

Yeah, dude, I don't even.

[Brian]

And then you brought it over. But dude, out the gate it's like the video got one point something. I mean it probably has more now but like one point something million views.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, it did 300, 300 times his average view count this time. And it's like that's like the crazy thing I think about just YouTube in general is I think about the algorithm as like this multiplier. Yeah, the almighty multiplier that people still underestimate, which is like you could make a video that's like 20, 30, 40 better than your previous videos, but just in the right ways. Like a thumbnail. Like I always talk about this example we did with someone else where it was like he had a thumbnail for a video. It was doing like a thousand views a day. And we like brainstormed a better thumbnail for him. And I think if you, if you Ask people on the street which is the better thumbnail. Most people would pick the one we brainstorm, but it'd be like, h, it's a little bit better, you know, maybe 20% better, 30% better. But the video went through a th000 views a day to 40,000 views a day. And it's like, that's the multiplier effect. It's like, I think we still sometimes have to. We as humans, we think about things so binary of, like, if I make it a bit better, it will get a bit better. And everything's like, linear, you know, Whereas with algorithms, it's like, you've probably seen this yourself. Like, the difference between a piece of content that maybe gets a thousand views in like a million sometimes isn't as drastic as you think. It's like, just strategically, it's twisting it a little bit.

[Co-host]

Right. It's like you see something that's proven and then you slap your own unique ideology onto it. And kind of the unique background and lessons.

[Brian]

We always talk about, like, 3% iterations. Like, and this is coined by Virgil Abloh, the designer, where he talks about, you can make something completely novel. If you take something from another category, you spin it 3% to a point that it's unique to you, all of a sudden, it's a novel to the world. I feel like you. You do that a lot with. You can look at something in, you know, whatever niche, whatever category you spin it, and it's completely new to this category as well. But, yeah, it's. It's crazy to see because it is so natural to look at it from the perspective of, you know, maybe I'm getting 100 views a day, and then I get up to 200, I'm just going to keep climbing until you had that rocket, like, launch moment where you're like, oh, I am getting a thousand views a day.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Brian]

You know, 2000 views shows you the value of.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

What that actually does over time. One compounding 100%. I have a question for you. So in a sea of the same with the YouTube algorithm, which is kind of what we're talking about, where it's, okay, I'm going to take this proven concept and then twist it 3%, where do the original ideas come from? Who is the original outlier producer? Do you have a process for that? Like, is there kind of a moonshot division over at outliers where you're like, yo, we're just going to try some.

[Patty Galloway]

Crazy shit here, Or I think about, like a quota.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

So, like, if you, if you're a channel, this is what happens. A lot of channels, they get in this, like, pure, like, repetition of like, what's working, what's working, what's working. I like to have a quota of, like, we're going to try. Maybe we're going to have like 33% of our videos are inspired by external sources. Like, what's working other places? Maybe like 33% coin 3% or from our channel, what's working here? And maybe the rest is like, let's try something original. Let's, you know, brainstorm. So I like this idea of a quota of like maybe 1 in 3, 1 in 4, 1 in 5 videos. We're just going to try something unique and original that we don't know how it's going to perform. Right. I remember talking to a client. This is the thing that's funny. Like, quite often, like people, we benefit so much from the unlimited ceiling of the algorithm, but we, like, don't, we don't want the downside, which is the fact that there is like a lot of predictability in the ops. So, like, some people are so in this mindset of like, I need to get this exact view count every time. I can't take risks. And I remember saying to a client that was doing maybe 200,000 views a video, I was like, I want more 50s and 500s. And he's like, what do you mean? I'm like, I want some videos that hit 50,000, then some that hit 500,000. I don't want it to just hit 200,000 every time. And he's like, why would you want a 50,000 view video? I'm like, I don't want one. But sometimes by trying something, you're going to be, you know, you're going to take an L. A lot of times.

[Brian]

They'Re 50,000 before the 500,000.

[Co-host]

First of all, that's a goated client.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

Because they, like, understand, you know, the game very well. Yeah, it's, it's really interesting because short form is a little bit different. You know, with short form, look, you're putting out volume. But the stakes of, you know, a video flopping with your spoken hook not being good, like when you script it and then the spoken hook is not good. Like, you posted the video, you would have to, like, repost it a long time later. And maybe that's also a psychological thing. You don't actually have to do that. But like with YouTube, you can literally change the title and thumbnail every two weeks. You know, like you post the video and then you just change the packaging a little bit and continue to test. So if it does flop, it's like you have the opportunity to fix that later down the road as well.

[Patty Galloway]

It's like no man left behind. It's. I don't, I don't give up on a video like YouTube. Don't give up on a video. Like they'll. If you look in the back end, you'll be able to see they're still giving you impressions. Like they're still giving this a shot. They're still showing it to people.

[Co-host]

Yeah, yeah. Because they want to satisfy everyone's content diet.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

You know, their incentives are aligned with yours. They want your content to perform, so they're going to keep giving you a bats.

[Patty Galloway]

So I'll. Yeah, I'll. Before anything, I always create at least three thumbnails on launch. I'll use AB testing natively on YouTube to like test the three different thumbnails or that. To me, that's a non negotiable. Like, even when I'm like signing a deal with a brand or a creator client, I'm like, if we can't do this for every video, like we're not signed to do it. Like, this is a non negotiable. We have to make at least three per video. Sometimes with some clients that's as much as 20 or 30 thumbnails, you know, just for one video. And then what I'll do is I'll run that.

[Co-host]

20 or 30 thumbnails for one video?

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, I've done more than that. I've done 50.

[Co-host]

That's insane.

[Patty Galloway]

50 different variations and not just like the same thing with 50 different pieces of text.

[Co-host]

Like you complete, unique, unique ideas and angles.

[Patty Galloway]

Because when you're investing maybe you know, 50, 100k into a video, it's like, got to work. You got to work it.

[Brian]

Got to work. There's one more thumbnail in there. If you could scroll and break down that last. The last one.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, yeah. This is a, this was a banger.

[Brian]

And now that you say the un, like the unpausing. I can't unsee it.

[Co-host]

I agree.

[Brian]

You get what I'm saying? Like, it's completely shifted my frame of thinking relevant to a thumbnail.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah. There. And it's just made me think. There's this, this example of a video. I'm not sure if you guys have seen it, but it's like the title is an old man's advice. And it's this guy with like this. He looks Like Santa Claus. He's got this, like, big white beard. He's, you know, in his, like, 70s or 80s, and he's just got this, like, blurry thumbnail. And everyone always sends it to me. They're like, you. You say packaging is so important. Look at this guy. Like, he clearly didn't even think about it, you know? And I'm like, this guy's a genius. This is a great thumbnail. Whether he meant it or not doesn't matter. It's like, if you look at that thumbnail, it's this old guy. His mouth is open, he's talking. He's, like, looking at the camera. The background is, like, really dark, and he's got this white beard that's popping so well. And he's just like. With his. With his hand just in the middle of thought. And then I'm like, imagine he had made that film, though. But it was like, him smiling like this, and then, like, pieces of advice from me or something beside him. It's like no one's clicking that. It's like the fact you have to.

[Brian]

You know, you're going to. You're going to click it, learn.

[Co-host]

It almost feels like when you hold down an iPhone live photo to see the scene, you know, that that's like the psychological thing underpinning, that's a good framework. Talking about is with this one in particular, I want to click to animate that exact scene and be like, what the hell's going on here?

[Patty Galloway]

Like, you're going to see all these players lined up. Yeah. You're gonna see, like, the guy in the front is another creator. Flight is his name. And then, you know, the guy at the back is Jaren Jackson.

[Co-host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

One of the best defensive players in the league. So you're just like, what's going on? I need to click this. I need to watch this. And it's like it's. Again, it's following some of the same principles. Like, it's very simple. As much as there's lots of people in it, it's still simple to process. You can see that in a second.

[Co-host]

One versus many as well. Kind of sets some stakes.

[Patty Galloway]

Exactly.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

And just even the little details of, like, it's funny. I think I remember it might not have been this thumbnail, but it's been thumbnails in the past where, like, let's say the third person in the line is, like, really tall. Some of them, I'll make them shorter just so there's like this kind of.

[Co-host]

Like, buildup, like a mini Jerry Jackson. Yeah, put like, Wen Minyan there. He's the shortest guy.

[Patty Galloway]

So I remember, like, I gave a note like that before, and they were like, I feel like the guy might be kind of pissed that you're making him like 5, 10 instead of 6 4. I'm like, it works better.

[Co-host]

Performance solves all.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, exactly. Sometimes that's. That's the thing I say is, like, do we want to make everyone happy or do we want to get 10 million views? Like, and sometimes people will say that to me where, like, they're in the thumbnail or it's their idea, their video. And I'm like, you could make the thumbnail you really want. That's going to make you look great and everything. And we'll get 100,000 views. Or we can make the thumbnail that I want to do. And I think we can get 5 million. Yeah, it's like, you know, that kind of cures all problems.

[Brian]

Of course, I want to take that same information and almost ask you, like, live, how do you think then we should package this? Like, if we're. Because that is our biggest focus this year is packaging is our thumbnails and things within the episode as well. But I think our packaging has been like a 3 out of 10. And it's worked well enough to get to where we're at, but we can be so much bigger. Can you live brainstorm how you think we should do packaging for an episode like this where we, you know, we're thinking about, like, how to break YouTube in 2026, etc. Ideas like that.

[Patty Galloway]

So I. I would think about, like, well, who's the guest? So in this case, the guest is me, right? What. What are, like, unique things about my story? Or like, I always thinking, like, big numbers. Like, is there big numbers we can talk about? So, like, for. For me, it's like we work across 10 billion organic views a year. You know, I've worked on 50 billion organic views on YouTube long form, and it's like 10 billion. 10 billion views a year. 50 billion. Like, those are some things I'd start thinking about in my head of, like, could that be the angle? Then I might go, okay, that. That's like the big number rule. And then I might think, like, contradictions. Like, is there anything that I'm saying here that might contradict conventional thought? You know, it might be, I might say something like, subscribers are useless because they kind of are. They don't matter. They're vanity metric and YouTube don't really put much emphasis on it. So it's like that's a kind of contradiction. It's like most people think subscribers are really important. I'm going to tell you, they're not. You know, that's something.

[Co-host]

And then it's like every channel still being like. Like, and subscribe.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

You know, but like you said, vanity metric.

[Patty Galloway]

Exactly. And then bold claims. You know, I think I can make any channel on YouTube go viral. Like, that's.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

You know, there's obviously constraints with some, but, like, I. I've never entered a niche and thought that I couldn't figure out a way to make this niche go viral. Like, people will say that doesn't happen in my niche. You know, I heard. I heard that in the YouTube education niche, you know, when I started that, the average view count of a YouTube education channel was about 15,000 to 20,000 views. Yeah. And then I started my channel and we. On my channel, I was averaging like over a million views an episode. And it's like I just took the niche and was like, how can I go bigger here?

[Co-host]

So I think. I think that's a great segue. Well, not segue. I want to stay in the. In the workshop here, selfishly. But, like, you talk a lot about tam, you know, and packaging, where it's like you want to package the video for as wide of an audience as humanly possible. And something that we probably fall into the trap of, that I would guess a lot of people who attempt YouTube fall into the trap of is we do have a pretty narrow icp, ideal customer for our content. It's like a brand operator who is actively trying to grow through either meta or, like, organic content. But generally speaking, it's people who have physical products and want to grow their business with some sort of smart marketing tactic. And something I've kind of been chatting with Alex about is like, how do we expand our tam, you know, and, like, go from. Because, I mean, Remit Sethi is a great example where it's like, okay, well, if you talk about just homeownership, then, like, me as a renter, I'm not super interested. But if you talk about overall personal finance, it's a bigger tam.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

So, like, I guess what would be a way to kind of expand the TAM of someone who feels like they're too narrow?

[Patty Galloway]

So I think one of the biggest problems with channels, I feel they're too narrow or kind of being too narrow is this. It's always not about the actual potential audience. It's about the topics you're covering. So what happens is People will end up doing videos that are, like, very specific to certain things. Just kind of like what you were alluding to. It's like, imagine I make a channel, and it's like, this video is specifically for women. This video is specifically for men. This video is specifically for people in relationships. This is specifically for people who've just got broken up with. It's like each one of Those is like 5 or 10% of your potential audience, you know, and. And it's very hard to, like, unless you just wanted to go all in on one of those. It's. It's quite hard to do that. So there's a rule I like to think about called the. I just called the 80% YouTube strategy rule. Yeah. Where I say your video should have 80% overlap with your other videos, need 80% overlap each time. And what I mean by that is, like, when you look at a video on your channel, you have to ask yourself the question of this video, let's just say 100 people watched it. Just for argument's sake, can at least 80 of those people also be interested in this next video? And it's not what we think, oh, they should be interested. It's like, will they be interested? So I think for smaller, like, tams like that, in terms of expanding it, it's like saying, can we be a bit broader in terms of how we package it? Even if the content is still quite specific, because there's still probably a lot of people that you're not hitting that would potentially click if you just made it a bit broader instead of maybe going into, like, very specific things. You can do that in the episode, but in the title thumbnail, maybe it's, you know, specifically a little bit broader. Like maybe even for this episode, for, For. For me. Right. Like, I'm sure your exact, maybe perfect viewer might be, like, someone who's thinking for this episode, might be someone who's thinking about making organic content for their brand. And they probably have, let's say, a product, you know, or like, you know, a consumer good or a product. Right? Yeah. It's like, well, you could package it like the YouTube strategy for, you know, for CPG brands, for CPG brands. But I think I would just go a bit broader. I would just maybe from CPG brand to just brand. Because I don't think that. I don't think that eliminates the CPG audience, but it just gives the video a bit more broadness.

[Co-host]

Well, and then also, I mean, there's the element of which I'm really excited to get into your take on brand YouTube here in a second. But you know, you don't want to isolate yourself away from a software company.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, right.

[Co-host]

I think all sort of marketing is condensing itself and to just like we are in a sea of content and you have to get attention somehow.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

Because everyone, even C suite executives are liking your random Instagram posts. And it's like billionaires are like checking in on DMs, you know, on Instagram reels. Right. So like the things that are really powering marketing these days is just the ability to get eyeballs through content. And so to your point, like I don't want to isolate one of these YC backed software companies from this video by saying it's just the playbook for CPG brands. Even though what we're saying can be really valuable for a CPG brand.

[Brian]

One of my arguments to Brian has been, you know, if we position ourselves as just organic content, then I think it casts a big enough tam, especially where brands are going to. Right. Where all these brands are investing more and more money into organic. Where like if we're positioned as social or like the, the, the podcast more so dedicated to brand social. That. And I'm more so asking for your take. Do you think that's a big enough tam?

[Patty Galloway]

Have you ever calculated how many people you think there is in America that fit that?

[Brian]

I've gone on LinkedIn and just like search job titles and then I'll like combine them, you know, and there's millions. Like tens of. Yeah, probably in the range of 5 to 10.

[Co-host]

In, in marketing.

[Patty Galloway]

Yes.

[Brian]

No, no. In brand social. So I looked up like content creator. I looked up social media marketing, social media manager and there's definitely overlap. So I like, I did. It was like six to 10 different titles and then I kind of combined them using LinkedIn. Yeah, that was kind of my thought process.

[Patty Galloway]

I kind of, I kind of would look at it like this. I would look at it like it depends on what your expectation is for. You know, sometimes there's this funny like push and pull of like, you know, what's best for our brands and our podcasts and like the exact people we want to be watching or the companies we might have or whatnot. And then there's like the, the more vainglory goal of like. Well, I want loads of people to see it. Right. It's like that sometimes can contradict each other. So like, you know, I, I very much define myself as someone who just tries to maximize views for what the person wants. So like With Rebel, we do 10 million views on videos, right? But they're selling, you know, energy drinks. They're all over the world, you know, so that's important there. You know, we work with a hair care channel for a little while that was selling like just hair products, right. And it's like 50 to 100,000 of the right viewers there is way more valuable than them getting millions, you know. So I think it's, you know, it's maybe a question for you of like, there's probably a world where TAM is important to expand, but like, are we even capitalizing fully with our execution? Like, I kind of, I think about it like this big chart of like, here's, here's the TAM of everyone on YouTube, right. Here's our niche's TAM inside the circle and then here's our execution. And the question I would have back is like, maybe for execution right now, what's the gap between like, do we think we're already hitting 100% of the small TAM? Probably not. Like, it's probably like absolutely 100%, you know, if that.

[Brian]

Yeah. Do you then think about the framework that you have where if you're creating content, there's the idea of making your core content, your casual content, then your new content. Would you then say like, hey, your, your new content would be cast a much wider net, right. Like bigger tam and then narrow it in. Then later with, you know, they become a fan of you now you go a little bit narrower with, with the content.

[Patty Galloway]

So it's a great example of like the, the concept we were talking about earlier of like the quota. Right. Like maybe there's a quota for like, you know, most. The 80 rule. Here's the part of the 80 rule that I don't always explain very well, which is like it's 80 rule for overlap. And then there's also the. It's 80. Your topic should have 80 overlap with each other and you should do that 80 of the time.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

So you have this like 20 where you can kind of go a little rogue and try something unique and different. So again, I think we often like a channel should have like a theme and an identity that's pretty consistent. Like, that's a big problem when I see channels jumping around too much. But at the same time, there's always space to try something broader and bigger. You can almost look at those as like, almost like top of funnel in a way. I like this idea of like a home run single base hit strategy. You have these single base hits which are maybe your solid Videos that you just, you know, they're going to hit the right audience and they're pretty simple. And then maybe once a quarter, once a month, once every two months, it doesn't really matter. You're swinging for a home run. Yeah. And by swinging for home run, you might miss and hit air or you might, you know, hit a 500k episode.

[Co-host]

100%. So we were talking earlier about a lot of these strategies and how brands are not necessarily leveraging YouTube the right way these days. A lot of them are using them sort of maybe as a billboard or just like a source of information. Like what are some of the questions that you would tell a brand to ask themselves as they're building out their YouTube strategy? And do you have a framework for that as well?

[Patty Galloway]

I would really think about it like, are we viewing YouTube as just a content dumping ground, like a vimeo, or are we viewing it as something that's actually going to strengthen our brand, make it more premium?

[Co-host]

And is there a reason that they shouldn't view it as a dumping ground?

[Patty Galloway]

Well, the reason they shouldn't view it as a dungeon ground in my opinion. This, this gets more like philosophical of where I think marketing is going and I'm curious if you guys align with this. But it's like performance marketing obviously still works. It's very trackable and it's easy to present that to your, you know, CEO or whatever that we're tracking and blah, blah, blah. But when I look at the brands that are crushing right now and even new brands coming up, it's like, yeah, performance marketing is still a thing. Traditional marketing, billboard still thing. But so many of them have this like story, this, this content surrounding it. You know, whether it's the actual founder led story of like what the founder is doing and the story behind it, or you know, it's unique content around the brand and what makes the brand special. Right. Like I always use the example of Red Bull, which is like one of our, I guess our biggest like brand client right now. And like they, they don't view, they almost like don't view their YouTube channel or their, their content. Is this like advertising or this thing that needs to be completely tracked for or why? It's like, no, this is what makes, this is what builds brands.

[Co-host]

Yeah, it's like an ideological thing rather than a performance marketing initiative. They just know it will be good.

[Patty Galloway]

Exactly. And I actually think the reason why people shouldn't, brands shouldn't treat it like a, like a dumping ground or like a vimeo is because I Think you either do it or you just don't do it at all.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

Like, just don't have a YouTube channel. Then like, I talk to a, a tech company which I won't name, that has evaluation in the tens of billions and on their YouTube channel they had like these awful corporate training videos. Yeah. And I was like, why are they here? And they're like, well, we like to use it to share to our team. And they're like, and it would also be nice if some people discover these and think, you know, wow, that's such a cool company. No one is going to watch that. No one's and say that's a cool company. If anything, a lot of people are going to see that and go like, wow, they're lame. But that's a dumb company.

[Co-host]

It's something I've been really thinking about with regards to, um, you know, there's so many clients that we've had that were in undifferentiated spaces, whether it's electrolytes, greens, you name it. Supplements in particular. And it's like, how, how do you think like a supplement brand should be going about creating YouTube content with a growth initiative? Is it just only through social shows that appear entertainment value? Is it kind of capturing some sort of search demand against the problems that they solve? Like, what would you do?

[Patty Galloway]

There's, I think there's, there's two directions. Like one direction is very like educationy, conversiony focused, which would be like actual informative videos about supplements and about like the best, the best supplements to take for deep loading. The best supplements to take for building faster muscle, whatever it is.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

And just kind of hammering on SEO.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

Like I want to appear at the top of search results for, you know, these key terms. And that model is never the model that excites me the most because it's like, it's sort of like a slow grind of like we're going to make all these videos, they're going to do poorly at the start, but some of them will rank and you know, will drive website traffic and blah, blah. I think if you're a bigger brand though, and you're thinking about it more from a premium point of view, it's like every brand is, is the people that make it. Right. And I like the model that Red Bull and some of these other brands have. Like we work with Phil Dev Eagles and it's very similar. It's like, well, the Phil Dev Eagles is a brand, but the brand is built up with the players.

[Co-host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

Red Bull is built up sort of, you know, Max, Verstappen, Neymar, all the different athletes they have. And it's like, if I was a supplement brand, I would think about if I have like an ambassador program, like, those people might have unique stories. And it's not about, like, those people being famous. That's not what matters to me. It's like, is there something unique about these people? Do they, you know, have like, a specific morning routine that we can show and build a series around everyone's different morning routine or, like, and then kind.

[Co-host]

Of layer on those same principles that we talked about earlier. Contradiction and sort of, you know, the ability to find something in an adjacent niche and potentially layer it onto that.

[Patty Galloway]

Exactly.

[Brian]

One thing that I'm curious about, because for brands, especially if a brand is getting into YouTube, they. The ideation part gets very cloudy because you have to think like you. You think you maybe nailed the idea, or you have to think about 100 ideas, et cetera. You have a clear ideation process. Can you run me through it? And then I'm very interested in what your elimination criteria is.

[Patty Galloway]

Totally. So, yeah, I have an ideation process, which I just call it the YouTube idea flow. Right. And it's basically a funnel. So at the top, you remember earlier how I talked about, like, the different sources for ideas. You basically got internal. What's working already for us now, that's kind of hard if you haven't got a channel yet. But even I might look at, like, what's worked on other platforms. What do our audience talk about the most? These are like, things that, like, we see these as core things that work. You know, you've got internal and, you know, I want, in a given week or month, I want someone to be brainstorming like, 30, 40, 50 internal ideas. People always say that's a lot. It's like, if we sat down, we, like the three of us right now, could think of, you know, 50 internal ideas for your podcast or something. Yeah, sure. It's, it's, it's just a question of just sitting down. It sounds like a big number, but it's like similar thing to recently. I was like, I write 20 titles per video, and it's almost like 20 titles. It's insane. It's like I did it in five minutes.

[Co-host]

Well, especially in today's day and age. I mean, I don't know your stance on this, but, like, just have cloud or some. One of the tools even help you get to that number and then you can refine it from there, obviously. But it's like there's no shortage totally of ideas.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah. So internal. You got external and that's like looking at other. And this one, the brands are always like a little careful because they're like, oh, we would never like copy or do something like that. But it's like it's not a copy. And it's about like seeing what's trending externally. Like with the Philadelphia Eagles. We did a video recently which was testing 100 year old NFL equipment. Right. A trend all across YouTube was testing 100 year old food, testing 100-year-old gadgets, testing 100 year olds, you know, cars. Like there was this theme or trend across YouTube and like how does that trend fit into a brand? It's not the brand, it's not the players testing 100 year old food. Like, yeah, I mean that could work.

[Brian]

But it, you know, it's just a theme that you're replicating across a different idea and then formatting it.

[Patty Galloway]

Exactly. So NFL players testing 100 year old equipment. And it's like Jordan Maella, one of the star players with a, you know, really old football helmet, he's putting it on and it's, it's physical. He's touching it. He's like, what is this thing? And then he's comparing it to like a modern day one. It's like that's an external idea. So.

[Brian]

And that's the one where there's the contrast in the thumbnail. Right. Where it's like gray and then green and then it has him with new equipment.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

But again, you know, you even take that concept and apply it to the brands that we were referencing. Supplement brands that may be in the debloating space or supplement brands that are in the hydration space or whatever sort of medical thing. Back in the day there was some insane recipes and concoctions that doctors would prescribe to people in like the early 1900s. It's like testing the original D bloat recipe versus our product. Like which one makes you feel better? Right. Like there's that the stakes, the contrast that allows you to actually be curious and watch that video.

[Brian]

It's funny how like as soon as your idea goes. I start now thinking about ideas because I'm like, oh, like you could get an old Gatorade, like the first Gatorade from whatever the 70s, 80s, and then compared to, you know, element now.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, right.

[Brian]

And do the comparisons.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

Which ones sell to you?

[Brian]

Yeah, 100%.

[Patty Galloway]

Totally. And then you have to me that, that then you go again to your kind of like, innovative new ideas. And that's like the final part of the top of the funnel, which is like, hey, can we just have like a blue ocean? Like, what is some cool things that we can do? Thing that really helps me with that is just thinking, what. What's a brand's competitive advantage? Like, and it can kind of sound simple, but, like, what's the Eagles competitive advantage? Well, they have access to football players. You know, like, it's. Yeah. What's Red Bull's competitive advantage? Well, I mean, that one's a long list.

[Brian]

It's like Mount Everest.

[Patty Galloway]

We. We have a guy that can go down my Everest. We have 900 athletes, planes, cars, F1 cars, jets, fighter pilot jets, all this stuff. And it's like, well, those are our advantages. You know, people listening might be like, well, I don't have a jet. You know, I don't have that yet. And it's like, well, what can you.

[Co-host]

Say that there is something that you have? There's always something.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

You know, like, you just got to kind of look at your resources and then pull those into as a component, like the different things that we're talking about.

[Patty Galloway]

Exactly. So I'm trying to brainstorm maybe 30, 40, even 50 ideas in each one of those categories. I'm putting them in the top of my funnel. People always ask, how often do you do this? But some clients, we do it weekly. But I would say on average, it's like once a month. We do this big brainstorm to just get to this place. You put into your funnel, pass it through the funnel. The problem is also configure out a lot about a creator or a Brand's approach to YouTube by saying, how many of your ideas get made? And if someone's like, oh, most of them, it's like, well, you're probably not. You're either not brainstorming or you're not being harsh enough, or a creator might go 50%. And I'm like, I don't like setting the exact target, but I would say, on average, for each idea that gets made for our clients, 99% don't make it.

[Brian]

Well.

[Patty Galloway]

And I love this idea. I think Steve Jobs had this at Apple in the 80s and 90s. The 110 one. Come up with 100 ideas, whittle it down to your 10 best, and then the. The one best out of those 10 is the thing that actually gets shipped. And I think it's very similar with YouTube. So we get to the criteria, which is you were. You were asking about, and it's Basically like we have these, let's say 100, 150 ideas. What is a four or five step criteria? A tick the box that these ideas need to have in order to pass to the next level. That criteria to me will usually look like things like, can we easily package? This sounds so simple. But if that's not a tick the box, like people are like, I've got this great idea, I'm making it, but I just don't know how to package it. And it's like you don't have a great idea, then you've got a great idea in general, but it's not a great YouTube video because packaging is half the game. There's many ideas that have sat on the shelf for me for, for a long time, for years that I still haven't figured out how to package and I just haven't made them with clients. It's like, I just, it's great, but the content will be great, the video will be great, but I just don't know how to put this into a title thumbnail. So that could be something. You know, the another thing I like to set is like an aspirational view target. Can this potentially hit X amount of views? You know, so from my personal channel I did it. It was always can this hit a million views? And it sounds like such a basic thing again, but it starts to be even just like thinking like that makes you start to like analyze an idea through this like stricter criteria. Because I made a video before on a certain creator and thinking about it like that creator on his own channel was doing like 200,000 views. So like if I had to pass it through that criteria, it's like unlikely for me making an analysis video in this crater to get a million views. And I should have done it.

[Co-host]

So that's, it's, that's very true in like our, I mean we both do a lot of short form content. Breaking down brands and particularly outcomes. You know, it's like, did they achieve such an insane outcome that this is even going to be interesting to enough people for this to get amplified? You know, like if someone sold 100k worth of product in 45 minutes. Okay, well now you're talking about they did a million in a day. You know, that's pretty interesting, right? But if it's like they did 100k in a month and they just make pretty images, it's going to be really hard to find that unique thing that is actually novel and people are going to pay attention to, you know, do.

[Brian]

You Ever see a correlation between short form and long form? And the reason for that is I just put out a YouTube video two days ago or a day ago that's like how to. How to launch your brand social show in 2026. The reason I made it was because on instagram it got 2 million views. And so I was like, okay, let me see if I could package it, bring that same idea more, you know, scaled and bring it over to YouTube. It's performing well now. But then you say, you know, can it get a million views? And maybe a million views isn't for me. Right. Because it's like it's. Maybe it's going to get half a million views. Do you hear that idea? And you're like, that's. I would have, I wouldn't have checked the box on that.

[Patty Galloway]

Well, yeah, there's a really good question there of like, how well is it like short form convert to long form?

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

I will say, in a world of let's say you've got no data, no evidence at all on something, and then you've got evidence in the sense that something's worked for a competitor and then you got evidence in the sense that something's worked for you. So it's like this, this kind of like pyramid where like, if something's worked for you before, like, to me that gives me pretty high confidence it's going to work again.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

So maybe my confidence rate is like 75, 80%. This is going to bang. You know, if something's worked for a competitor and done really well, like, I'm going to lower that a little bit because every audience is a little bit different, but it's still going to be like pretty, pretty high. And then if something, we've no data, we've never tried, we've never done it before. Like, my confidence is going to be pretty low. Yeah. Short form is like, it sits just above that to me. Interesting that there's a little bit of carry through, but it's quite often a different audience. Different platforms have different audience. Some things work really great. In shorts, we had this series with that basketball career, the largest basketball career in the world that we did a few years ago on short form, which was like pumping up a ball until it explodes. It's like such a silly thing, but it's like attaching like, you know, a ball to an air pump and then letting it pump up until it explodes, like, how long would it take? Right. Yeah. And then, you know, we, we leverage that even further. We go like, well, let's have three in a row and they're racing. It's like a football versus a soccer ball versus a basketball which explodes first. Then it's like, before you know it, I was like, what are we doing here? It's like, we got two yoga balls, we got an air mattress, we got a football, and we're blowing them up. And they were. They were banging. We got hundreds of millions of views on each. We got like 100 million views on one short doing that. And then we were like, we should make a long form of this. Ah, bombed. Really? Haunt. Really? We did a great title film. I thought we tried our best, but it just bombed.

[Brian]

I would have thought there was a clear correlation between. Hey, the interest is there. So I'm going to scale the information based on the interest from this. This platform.

[Co-host]

Well, it makes sense because, I mean, there's definitely.

[Patty Galloway]

What.

[Co-host]

What's been crazy to me is there's not even a correlation between YouTube shorts and a winning Instagram reel.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

You know, like, I post, like, a Instagram reel from our podcast that went pretty viral, and it won't even do that well on YouTube shorts. Just different audience, different behaviors. Like, people are on there for different.

[Patty Galloway]

Reasons and, and different mechanisms as well. Algorithmically, they're, they're. They're all optimized for a very similar thing. Right. But, like, remember earlier how we talked about this multiplier effect of, like, a little change can have such a difference in outcome? I think the same is true of, like, how different platforms measure performance. Right. So I can just say candidly, like, from what I know of the Instagram algorithm, like, watch time is important. Like, how long someone's watching for is really important. Swipe. Whether they swipe or stay is important. Obviously, all those things.

[Co-host]

Shares are really big on it.

[Patty Galloway]

But shares to your friends, like, sending it to people, saving it, sending it, that's really important. Yeah. I don't share YouTube shorts to friends because you don't have friends on YouTube. Like, that doesn't exist. So, yeah, YouTube prioritize slightly different things than Instagram. Like, they might prioritize. I know that YouTube, prior to shorts, like, you know, completion rate, average duration, like, they look at likes a little bit. They look at, like, satisfaction. Like, how satisfying do we think this was for viewers? They look at vsa, which is viewed versus swiped away, but they're not looking at shares as much.

[Co-host]

YouTube shorts might even be. I mean, there's some crazy brain rot on YouTube shorts.

[Brian]

Oh, yeah.

[Co-host]

Like, even more so insane. Yeah.

[Brian]

Like, I feel like a tana has one that has I think a billion views. And it's like, it's the craziest thing you'd ever, you'd ever.

[Co-host]

Cutting a balloon in half.

[Patty Galloway]

We made a short with a client that did a million subscribers. Wow. On one show. My God.

[Co-host]

Okay, so that was actually going to be. My next question was like, how do you incorporate shorts into your overall client strategy?

[Patty Galloway]

So I like to think about it like this. Like people, again, they think of their channel as this whole thing holistic. This is my channel. I look at a channel and I look at it as we have a short form audience and we have a long form audience.

[Co-host]

Right?

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah. So those are million subscribers we got from one short, which again, like, mind blowing. That's great for our short form audience, but we don't have an expectation that that's converting to our long form. Because what matters more than subscribers, you know, subscribers don't really matter that much anymore. What matters much to subscribers is view viewing history. Like how someone watched you in the past. That's what really matters. So if you think about it, if someone comes for a short, their viewing history for shorts is there, but they have zero viewing history for long form. So YouTube basically have no idea if they're going to enjoy your long form now. We always make these leaps, which is like if someone likes a short shorty, they like my long form. But like sometimes it can draw from a completely different audience. Like we notice quite often with our clients that like our shorts will end up like reaching different people, like and maybe a younger demographic, maybe different, you know, in terms of geography, like maybe more. A lot of Indian short viewers, for example, like it can sort of change a little bit like that. And the way I think about it is I, I think about it as two separate things. It's like we have a short form audience, we have a long form audience. So we're going to try crushing on both.

[Co-host]

Because some people advocate for separating the two. Doing like a shorts channel and then just a regular long form channel.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

You're not a fan.

[Patty Galloway]

Not a fan.

[Co-host]

Seems dumb.

[Patty Galloway]

I'm a fan. I'm a fan of separating channels. When long form is like, like, let's just say someone has a channel that's a personal brand channel. Let's just say my channel where I broke down YouTube channels, I wouldn't then mix in a podcast on that channel personally.

[Co-host]

You would?

[Patty Galloway]

I wouldn't, wouldn't.

[Co-host]

You wouldn't put a podcast on that?

[Patty Galloway]

No, because they're long form videos that are like competing with each other and that have different audiences. Like I'm making eight, nine minute breakdowns and then I'm making like a two hour interview with like an editor or like a, you know, a YouTuber. To me, that feels like a different channel and a lot of channels. That's a question I get a lot which is like, should my podcast be on a separate channel? You can get away with having them on the same channel, but quite often I'll separate them out but with shorts. Again, like think about why you would do that. Why you would do that is in my opinion just false information, which is that shorts are going to impact your long form but they're not going to impact the negatively or positively that much at all.

[Brian]

It's more so for the vanity metric of getting the subs from it. Yeah, we talked a lot about getting the thumbnail clicked. Now I want to go through into your retention strategy. What is walk me through that? Is it, is it like very fast intros? I've heard you talk about like the best thing is going to be now to slow things down. How are you thinking about retention going into 2026?

[Patty Galloway]

So the first, first place to start would be the intro. Yeah. And I kind of have three steps I like to think about for a great YouTube intro. Very simple. Number one, deliver on the click. Okay, so to me that looks like if you are selling me something in the title thumbl I just want confirmation that that is going to be in the video. Now it doesn't mean I have to get it all delivered right now, but if you tell me, let's just say like really simply like I bought a new car. Right. And then you start the video with hey guys, I'm heading to target right now. What's going on? Like having a good day. It's like you told me you're buying a new car, where's the car? Or what's happening. Whereas if you start that video, you show the car or you say, I'm gonna go pick up the car immediately. I feel like now I have confirmation that I clicked on the right thing. So I always think about delivering on the click in the first like 5 to 10 seconds. You can do that visually or verbally. Like visually showing what was in the title film now or verbally telling me.

[Brian]

I'm going to get notice one performing better than the other visually.

[Patty Galloway]

Okay, yeah.

[Brian]

So like if the thumbnail for this or you know, it's relevant to breaking, if the thumbnail image is like you showing Brian the iPad like this and then the first second and, like, we cut an intro is you kind of, like, showing it to the camera. That is kind of how you would say.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Brian]

From the click. Okay.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah. Or, like, you know, if. If the. If the thumbnail is based around a certain talking point. For me, like, let's just say that talking point is, like, I can make any niche go viral or, like, subscribers are dead in 2026 or whatever. It might be in the, like, Sizzler, like, intro that you might do. Like, I would just make sure that talking point is mentioned, like, really early so that I'm like, oh, I know this isn't just gonna bait me completely. You know, it's like, diary CEO does a great job with that. He'll have this, like, crazy title thumbnail. And then you're like, I was watching.

[Co-host]

Diary of CEO last night, and my cortisol just flew.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

I mean, it's just building and building. Building stress. Stressful as hell.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

Yeah. Which is effective.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Brian]

12 million subs.

[Co-host]

So, okay, you kind of. You said, like, let's go back to your intro framework.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

So deliver on the promise number one. Number two, just create. Just create an intrigue in the viewer. Now, that can be as simple as, like, you know, again, delivering on that promise and then teasing what's going to come. You know, it could be like speaking Diary of a CEO, like, just like, stopping on these pauses about what's he going to say? What's his answer? Like, what happened to you when you were a child? It's like, pause. It's like, what is it? You know, I always just look at an intro go like, where's the intrigue here?

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

Sometimes, especially in education niches, people get too, like, pragmatic, and it's like, we're gonna analyze the five most important steps to growing a YouTube channel in 2025.

[Co-host]

It's like, it's every canon intro I've ever done.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah. It's like, why don't you say exactly.

[Co-host]

What you're gonna get? On today's episode of Sword Equity, why.

[Patty Galloway]

Don'T you say something like, in this video, we learned something that is going to completely change how we think about YouTube going forward. Leading YouTube strategist Patty Galway shared something that, honestly, I didn't anticipate. I didn't. I didn't think this would be a real thing, you know, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, suddenly the viewer's like, what's going on here? Like, I. I would always do intros for my channel. I would say things like, in this video, we're going to break down how Mr. Beast grew his YouTube channel. Right. That's a statement sentence, which is great. Now, that's not an intrigue sense, because he discovered something in October of 2017 that changed everything. And it's like, what the hell? Yeah. Like, what is it? So.

[Brian]

So the intrigue sentence is almost a thing that, like, gets you to lean in a bit.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Co-host]

When do you introduce that? Like, technically, do you. Do you do that after the initial statement?

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, I usually will leave with a statement. Like, there's a few ways to do intros that I find effective. Like, I just. Statement intrigue. You're stating what you're going to cover, and then you're teasing with some sort of intrigue sentence. And that intrigue sentence, when I give people these rules, they get lazy. Right. They're like, in this video, we're going to break down YouTube tips and keep an eye out for step number five. It's going to be so cool. It's like, right. That's just annoying.

[Co-host]

Specificity. I hate that always. Yeah, it's always specificity at the end of the day.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

I mean, that's kind of the last line of defense against AI and bad copywriting and script writing.

[Patty Galloway]

It's like, exactly.

[Co-host]

The October, like, 2017, like, that's something that AI can't deliver or a shitty ghostwriter can't deliver. It's going to be someone who actually understands the value of planting it.

[Patty Galloway]

Yes.

[Co-host]

You know, as the source of the intrigue.

[Patty Galloway]

Exactly. So after that, like, I'm crazy. I'm crazy. Step two is creating some form of intrigue in the bureau. You know, what's going to happen? Why should I keep watching this? What's the kind of payoff? Like, these are the things I'm trying to create of, like, why would someone keep watching this video? And then my third step is, like, a really interesting one, I think. And this is my style. People have different styles, but I just call it the seamless flow. So I feel like the best intros on YouTube, it's hard to point where it ended and started. It just sort of flows.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

There'll be some people that contradict this. Like, I think, you know, like, the Irv CEO doesn't have the most seamless flow, but it works. It's people that, you know, do different things. But I just love this idea of, like, instead of being like, here's the intro, we're gonna go through these steps. What did patty discover in 2025 that's changing YouTube? Blah, blah, blah. And then like big pause. And it's like in today's episode, that just feels very, like, disjointed to me versus, like the Patty steps. These are gonna be all these things for YouTube in 2026. And the first thing we're gonna start with is this. And it just starts, you know, or starting with is a great bridging sentence. It's like we're Gonna break down 40 tips for losing fat in 2026. Starting with, you know, like a bridge. So a seamless bridge into the context.

[Brian]

Yeah, I advise doing the same thing on short form. And I almost talk about scripting should feel like one long run on sentence. So a lot of times and when I hit the hook, I could be like, this is this brand's content playbook. So the first thing where there's no break really between the hook, it's like the hook right into the. Into the value for. For the short form. And I started testing that. I did three tests. On my third test, I changed and basically made everything bridge. And it was my first million view video on short form. And I don't think I've done it well on. On YouTube. And I'm like, three videos in, four videos in. I don't think we do it well on. On our intros for the podcast either. Like, they're not seamless bridges. It's like we're going to cover these five things. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay, let's get into the episode. Versus, like going back, probably looking at how we, you know, one of the parts of the episode and just like it seamlessly going into that maybe that question, right? And this was the most important question I got. And it just goes into it. Something along those lines to, to create those bridges.

[Patty Galloway]

Like, imagine if you had started. Imagine you'd done something like, you know, we're going to go through these really important tactics and instead of going like, starting with. Or like. And the most. The first, most important one, you said something like, all right, now let's get into it. It's like, people do that still these days.

[Co-host]

And I'm like, no, I dead ass hit that.

[Patty Galloway]

It's servant for loss. We do. Let's get into it. It's like, you know what that is? To me? That's like a. A boring signpost sentence versus a smooth bridge.

[Co-host]

For sure.

[Patty Galloway]

Let's get started. No, that's not. Just tell me.

[Co-host]

Alrighty.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Brian]

How do you think about using leveraging foreshadowing in your. In your videos?

[Patty Galloway]

I. To me, foreshadowing can be subtle or very like overt. You know, I think YouTube lends itself to being quite overt and you know, very like obvious foreshadowing to the point of like, let's just say Mr. Beast is making a video. At the end of the video, there's a 100 million dollar golden yacht. Instead of going like, we've got something special coming, he'd be like, there's a hundred million dollar golden yacht at the end of this video. Keep watching, keep watching. You know, obviously that's for kids, but I think foreshadowing when you watch the Godfather is, you know, Michael Corleone holding a cigarette and his hands aren't shaking after a traumatic event and you're like, well, he's, he's losing his, his sense of innocence, you know, like, oh. Whereas with YouTube, it's like, no, you're just sort of telling me why I should keep watching. So an interesting framework I think about for this is like I, I call it like the invisible or the made up focus group, where it's like, if we pause a video, let's say at the 1 minute mark, 2 minute mark, 4 minute mark, wherever, let's say we pause at the 3 minute mark. Just for argument's sake. I love to ask myself this question of like, if we put our audience into a focus group at this point, what would they say is coming up in the video and what you want is someone to be like, oh yeah. So he's giving me all these tactics, you know, a little bit later he's gonna talk about this. And then there's also this like, thing he mentioned that I just can't get out my head. I can't wait to hear what he says versus someone being like, I don't really know. It's kind of just flowing and I don't know where this is going, you know. So I like foreshadowing that creates this like exact expectation of what I'm gonna get in the rest of the video.

[Brian]

Yeah, of it. The last part I want to, that I'm curious about is then how do you think about a podcast episode in comparison to maybe like Mount Everest where you need a layer in progression, Right. So that the. That is always feels like it's moving towards an outcome. Because that could be harder if it's just Brian and I talking versus like climbing Mount Everest. We're seeing if the outcome is to see, right, if they reach the top. How do you think about the differences but also the similarities that could be applied across different categories and formats.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah. I think it's less of, like, a big payoff or, like, a progression that it gets. Like, because if I said to you, like, let's make a podcast that gets more and more insane every minute, or more and more insightful every minute, it's like, that just doesn't really fit with the format as much. But what I do think about is, I think about, like, the payoff sale can be completion. So what I mean by that is like, my complete strategy, or the complete guide to YouTube or the complete Guide to losing Weight. And it's like the payoff is kind of like when you finish it, you're going to have this full playbook of everything you need to know. Another thing I think about is just morsels of, like, maybe there's not this sense of progression, but maybe there's a few questions that we're alluding to. Or, you know, I like this idea of, like, soon X first Y, which is this idea that I'm sure it's not unique to me, but I. I termed it that soon X first Y, which is like this idea that you say a little bit later, I'm going to ask you about this, but first, this. And the key is that your ex and your. Why both need to be interesting. I watch this like a soccer or news channel because I'm a big soccer fan. And he'll say things like, he'll start his video, and he'd be like, oh, we got some really big news tonight. You know, this is happening. This is happening. He goes, I really want to talk about this tweet that this player put out that everyone's going crazy about. But first we need to talk about. They'll say things like that. And when it's done subtly and not, like, too performatively, it just hooks you and goes, like, when is that thing going to happen? So I think that's what a podcast needs. It needs this kind of sense of, like, I'm getting great value now, but there's this thing that's going to come at some point later in the video that I'm waiting for, like, this answer, this. This thing. You know, this specific tip. What happened in November, October 2017. You know, that kind of thing that.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Should we structure that in or anybody podcasting, like, should you almost manufacture those elements into the video?

[Patty Galloway]

I think manufacturing ahead of time is the ultimate thing. But even. Even after time, it's like using VO or using your intro to kind of like, create those moments. You know, think about. I like to think about every video and even A podcast as this skeleton ahead of time of like, here's roughly what we're going to cover, which I'm sure you guys do. It's like, roughly, these are the things we're going to cover. And then I look at that skeleton, I put it in front of me as a one pager and I'm like, where am I inserting little like retention devices? So I could say in the first two minutes I'm going to insert some foreshadowing of like a question we're going to ask later. Maybe at the five or six minute mark, I'm going to like, you know, throw this like curveball in of like, you know, there's something we didn't talk about earlier that I really want to get your opinion on. Or, you know, these like little things that I might like, script in between sections. So I will think about that.

[Co-host]

Yeah, one piece of that too is probably the chapters. Right? Like, I mean, I know when I like opt into a two and a half hour podcast, there's just no chance that I'm going to watch the whole thing. So I usually will skim. Kind of like the chapter names.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah, right.

[Co-host]

I mean, is that something that you would say is mandatory for most podcasts?

[Patty Galloway]

I would say for podcasts, I like it. I like chapters for education, tutorial, listicles, podcasts. I don't like them for anything that's like narrative or like story based on. Yeah, because I just feel like it just incentivizes people to like skip to the big payoff.

[Co-host]

Does YouTube care if people skip ahead?

[Patty Galloway]

Here's in terms of the hierarchy of what YouTube is prioritizing for, I think their number one thing is really like viewer satisfaction.

[Co-host]

Interesting.

[Patty Galloway]

Because viewer satisfaction, people might think of things too. Like individually, they think about like, well, you should clearly care about people watching my video for the longest period of time. And that's really important. But satisfaction means that someone's had a good experience on YouTube and probably gonna go watch something else versus close it and open up Netflix. Right. So I think about it like this. Does YouTube care about chapters? Like, if chapters helps with viewer satisfaction, it makes people like more satisfied. Because if you click on the podcast, it's very tactical and multiple parts, but there's no chapters. You're probably like, this is annoying.

[Co-host]

Yeah, what am I even gonna do here?

[Patty Galloway]

I'm not gonna watch this versus you click on it and it's like, there's chapters. It's really clearly laid out. You know, you can watch what you want. You're going to End that podcast. Even if you don't watch much of it, even if you watch 20% of it, 10% of it, you're going to leave it thinking. That was a useful, insightful. You might like the video, you might share the video, you might go watch another video right after that, which is the step that YouTube really cares about, like getting people.

[Co-host]

That's really interesting. So it's like kind of a combination of all of the different behaviors that they want.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

Is put into this one metric that they're using.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah. Like their, their hierarchy to me would be like YouTube care about satisfaction, then you should care about average duration, you know, and like people clicking, like those two, two sort of things go in tangent like someone clicking and someone watching for a long time. But so often people like will put the watching for a long time ahead of the satisfaction and in doing so they'll make a video that is like stringing someone along, not redelivering anything.

[Co-host]

So many of those like the equivalent of the SEO recipe industry where it's.

[Patty Galloway]

Like how to make banana bread. Banana bread is great. Banana bread is the best thing that banana.

[Co-host]

Banana bread originated in 1885 and you're just like shoving the.

[Patty Galloway]

I'm sitting in front of my oven. I need to. Yeah.

[Brian]

Well, Pattyman, I appreciate you coming on. This was a blast. I have a lot of notes, I have a lot of things that I'm going to. We're both going to be taking from this and infusing into our content, into the pod, into into our own YouTube channels. And I appreciate you coming on because this was, this was incredible. All the knowledge and information that you shared for us.

[Co-host]

Yeah. Tell them where to find you. I mean, kind of different things that you're doing.

[Patty Galloway]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. This was a, this is a pleasure. And thanks for pulling out all the stops. I know. This is all for me, right? Yeah, yeah, it is.

[Co-host]

Exactly.

[Patty Galloway]

But great, great set and really nice interview, guys. It was, it was a pleasure in terms of people finding what I do. I mean, I'm very active on Twitter, PattyG96. We're pushing 150k followers there. So there you go. Help out with the journey.

[Co-host]

Nice.

[Patty Galloway]

LinkedIn as well. I post quite a lot of stuff and I don't really do much YouTube content personally these days, but I might be making a little comeback at some point this year, so.

[Co-host]

Well, and if they're interested in taking action on some of these things you're talking about, you also have the cohort based stuff yeah.

[Patty Galloway]

We run a accelerator cohort three times a year. It's about 100 students each. Yep. Typically, like, creators and, like, brands that are trying to figure out YouTube. And it's eight weeks of just, like, me sharing my entire playbook of how YouTube looks and went for, like, if.

[Co-host]

This was the free version, just imagine what would be going on in this accelerator.

[Brian]

The hour 30 minute conversation versus the eight week program.

[Co-host]

Yeah, you're going to get locked in.

[Patty Galloway]

There you go. Yeah.

[Brian]

He man well, we appreciate you. Thanks again for coming on, brother.

[Patty Galloway]

Thank you.

[Co-host]

Yeah, thanks, Patty.