SPI 818: I Tried Shorts (Again) for 30 Days, and It’s Working This Time

SPI 818: I Tried Shorts (Again) for 30 Days, and It’s Working This Time

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host. The only reason he liked going to the bank when he was a kid was so he could play with the pen that had the chain attached to it. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Alright, about 30 days ago, I started a brand new YouTube channel. And no, this is not Deep Pocket Monster, the one that I’ve talked about before. That one started three and a half years ago. And that one is approaching 1 million subscribers, which is pretty cool. And it is producing revenue through ads and through sponsorships.

I have run live events for that community before. I now have a relationship with the Pokemon International Company. So a lot of fun things have happened as a result of that channel. This little side gig that was taking 20 percent of my time. Now knowing what I know and the mistakes that I’ve once made on YouTube, you know, doing it right, it’s doing great things.

But most of the videos on that channel are long. So these are videos that are over technically to be not a short, it has to be 61 seconds or longer, right? Over a minute, because anything under 60 seconds is considered a short on YouTube. So they’re all longs and by longs, I mean, really, really longs. They range from 10 minutes to we’ve had a video up to 48 minutes to tell an entire story.

And these videos have done millions of views. I think we’re approaching 200 million views in total across the last three and a half years. And like I said, approaching 1 million subscribers, which is just amazing and super crazy. But as an experiment, I wanted to know if I could crack the code for Shorts.

I had done a TikTok experiment for 30 days. This was a while back. I talked about it here on the channel and it just didn’t do anything. It didn’t go anywhere. It was just a waste of time. But I also didn’t have a plan. I just kind of went in and shot videos and I just did some videos here and there that I saw other people do that were kind of cool and I adopted them to my style, but I wasn’t really thinking about, okay, well, the psychology of the viewer.

And that’s one thing that I’ve learned about just YouTube in general and Google and SEO and everything. It all comes down to the psychology of the viewer or the searcher. And on YouTube, it’s especially important to understand, okay, well, yes, they are on YouTube watching videos, but who are they? What are they searching for?

What is their searching and viewing behavior and how can you tune into that so that you can better provide for them and their needs and their wants and why they’re there? This is what I’ve learned. A person who watches longs or regular VODs, videos on demand on YouTube, whether they search for it or they get it recommended to them on the browse feed or suggested feed or whatever, they have a completely different behavior in terms of watch behavior than somebody who’s watching Shorts, or Instagram Reels, or TikToks. I’ve said this analogy before, a person producing content like Shorts is like handing out Halloween candy. Person comes to your house, you give them candy, gives them a little bit of a sweet, they move on to the next house, they’re just swiping. They’re just continuing to move on.

It’s hard to build a deep relationship with them at that point, which is why I prefer the set up a restaurant and have a person sit down and have my meal and I’m going to give them a first serving, amuse-bouche, an appetizer. Then I’m going to give them the entree. Then I’m going to create this entire experience, which takes a little bit longer.

A person who wants Halloween candy on Halloween is much different than a person who’s sitting down at a restaurant to want to have an experience, right? So what I’ve learned is that these viewers are different, but I wanted to see just again, as an experiment, cause I hadn’t yet done it. And you know me, I like to throw myself in the deep end and really, really focus and try things so that I can pass things forward and that’s what I’m gonna do with you today.

I started a brand new YouTube channel 30 days ago, and I’m gonna give you the numbers and then I’m gonna tell you a little bit about the strategy. We are now exactly 30 days into this from scratch. Zero use of any pre existing relationships, email lists, or existing channels. I never cross promoted anything.

I just wanted to let YouTube do its thing and see if it could find the audience for what I was creating. 30 days later, it has a total number of subscribers of 46,981 at the time that I’m reading this right now. And a total number of views of 14.8 million. Within the last 48 hours, I’ve had 11,178,000 views.

So yes, a majority of these views have been coming in within the last week and it just continues to go up and up and up. The, let’s see here, the last video I published, which was 23 hours ago, so I’ve been putting at least one video up per day. That’s a big part of this, right? You’ve heard me talk about now, if you’re just starting out with something, you need quantity over quality.

You want, yes, you still want quality. You don’t want no value, but you don’t have to have extreme, perfect premium value in lieu of getting those reps in because you can learn a lot as you create more, and I’ve been learning a ton. So this past video that was published, that means it’s almost time for me to publish the next one, because I am going daily for right now, 23 hours ago, I 370,000 views, 17,000 likes, and the one previous to that 410,000 views.

That was one day ago and 22 hours, two days ago and 21 hours is 872,000 and just a ton of comments, a ton of watch time. Have I unlocked monetization on this channel yet? No, because for a new channel, you need a couple things. You need a number of subscribers, which I definitely have. You need at least 3,000 subscribers.

But you also need 10 million shorts views within the last 90 days. Or a certain number of public watch hours on videos that are longer than 60 seconds, which I have zero of those hours, because all my videos are less than 60 seconds. So this is all shorts only, by the way. So no, I have not made any money from this yet.

We’re going to be unlocking that fairly soon because once the data catches up, it says it’s showing data as of a week ago, which is why even though I am over the 10 million mark now, it hasn’t registered that yet for monetization because it’s just validating that those views were in fact real views, which it will, but it’s just catching up.

So, the channel is called Short Pocket Monster. This is literally the first time I’m publicly sharing it. I have shared it once on the Unstuck newsletter, which I recommend you subscribe to because I do share a lot of things like this as they come out and the unstuck newsletter often gets first crack at it.

And of course those inside of Pro, when I have different kinds of information, that would be useful, but I wanted to share this now I’ll likely do a workshop and pro at some point about this. So SPIpro.com, it might be even be for All Access. We’ll, we’ll see. I’ll have to talk to Ashley about that. So anyway, I’ve been publishing a video daily.

The channel is called Short Pocket Monster yes, it is like Deep Pocket Monster, except it’s Shorts. A few questions that you might already be wondering, Why didn’t I put these shorts just on the Deep Pocket Monster channel? And I did that for a couple reasons. Number one, like I said, shorts viewers are different.

It is a different audience. And yes, it is still Pokemon related, but it is a completely different audience. You can tell, When you look at the comments, because a lot of the comments on these videos where I’m opening cards and I’ll tell you the structure of the videos and why they’re working really well, because it is holding people.

People are watching 90 percent of these videos on average, which is crazy, but the viewers in general are more general viewers who aren’t really into Pokemon, who don’t have a relationship with Pokemon or who didn’t really necessarily grow up with it. They’re just interested in somebody opening a pack of cards and many of the comments are negative.

They are, why are you a grown man opening packs? Why are you wasting your money? This is a kid’s game, and like, loser, and those kinds of things. So Number one, if you’re going to be doing something like Instagram Reels or TikTok and Shorts and you’ll want to go viral and you want to go big and wide and cast a wide net, you’re going to receive those kinds of comments.

Will I ever meet these people? No. Does it get under my skin? No. Why? Why, why should it? I mean, it’s more sad than anything, right? There’s a lot of nice comments. Like I said also, this was not something that I told or even mentioned or linked to on YouTube anywhere else. I could have done that. It could have helped launch it, but I didn’t want it to do that.

I wanted it to be completely separate and just to see if the algorithm would pick it up, and it did. It took about 21 days. Three weeks to see any real significant results. For 21 days I posted, and none of the videos were really going wild. I was seeing a few thousand views on us on some of them, but most of them just had hundreds of views.

And then, like, clockwork, it’s, it was like, okay, You’ve been here for three weeks. Day 22, that video went crazy. And then the next one went crazy. And then I started publishing two a day for a while, just to kind of ride that wave. And it went even crazier. And I started seeing hundreds of thousands of views.

And then millions of views on these videos. And this is something that typically can happen. I can’t guarantee it can happen. But I know why it happened. It happened because I created something bingeable. And I gave it enough time, and I created enough of a library for things to be bingeable. If you create a format of a show, and it seems to do well on this kind of format, short video format, don’t stop doing it.

Keep doing it. This is what I’ve learned. There is a channel called Weird Bars of this guy who’s rapping super weird bars, bars being words on music, and he’s on like episode 164. That’s the one video that he started to see spike, and he just created an entire series about that. There is a producer and a DJ, a DJ named Wuki.

And he has a series called Beats I Can’t Release, and he’s on episode, I don’t know, 70 or 80, and every time, like, I subscribe to him, because you know what the next episode’s gonna be like, you don’t know exactly what it’s gonna be, but you know what the structure is, because you like What you saw and you’re like, I want more of that.

I’ve said this before. That’s why people subscribe. Not because as a thank you, which we as creators think, Hey, you liked this video. We’ll make sure to subscribe as a thank you. No, they have a like for that. A subscribe is a A vote for more of that, right? So if you have any sort of platform and you can check to see which pieces of content got more subscribers than others, pay attention because you want to do more of that, right?

There is a person in Australia or New Zealand. I don’t know exactly where his accent is. I think he’s Australian. Tim Naki. He started a series where he would bet a penny, I think, or you know, 10 cents for every follower he had on Blackjack, on just online gambling. I don’t condone gambling or online gambling, but I was watching him because this series was madness.

And he was like, okay, we’re going to come back tomorrow, every single day. Win or loss, we’re going to bet more tomorrow, we’re going to bet more tomorrow. And it wasn’t the fact that there was money involved, it was the fact that you knew what was coming and it was bingeable. And you come in on day 53 and you’re like, oh my gosh, I need to know the story behind all this.

And you kind of flip back and you just watch the rest of them. And once a person subscribes on any of these platforms, you’ve probably seen it, you get fed the rest of them. And the more that a person eats that, the more feeding YouTube or Reels or TikTok will do. So, this channel has blown up. The show is, I mean, and I call it a show, even though it’s less than that.

And this is the secret. You treat it like a show. How can you create the most miniature interesting show in the easiest way possible. I didn’t think I’d have time to do something like that, but I found by just experimenting a little bit in the beginning, that first week was purely just let me find a structure for a video that works.

I’m going to open these packs. I know I want to do that, but how can I do that? So what I did, And if you watch any of these videos on Short Pocket Monster you’ll see that within the first five seconds, sometimes within the first three seconds, you’ll hear a jingle. And I’m gonna play the jingle for you right now.

Should I open it? Or should I keep it sealed? So that’s the jingle, that’s the opening. And it’s in the beginning of over 30 episodes right now, this little miniature show. And it places that question, should I open it or should I keep it sealed? Most of the time I do open it, which people comment on.

They’re like, this should just be called, should I open it or should I open it? But it’s just kind of funny in that way. But really what I’m doing is I’m posing a question as to whether or not it was worth opening this or not. So what does that do? It keeps people to the end. Just like Tim Naki you have to see what his hand is for this blackjack thing.

Just like Wuki who you have to hear this beat because he sets it up. It starts with some recognizable song and then the beat kicks in and then he dances at the end. It’s just like Weird Bars, who, the guy who does Weird Bars. You just have to listen because his bars are super weird and you want to know how weird is it going to be.

Is it going to be weirder than last time? And with Should I? Open it or should I keep it sealed? It opens that question for people and so they stick around to watch. I don’t need any crazy backup story of how I obtain this thing sometimes i’ll show the fact that I bought it at a store and it has a price tag on it and those videos do pretty well. They all do really well. And at the end If I get a good card, I play a particular jingle. And at the end if I get a bad card, I play a different jingle.

Here’s that one Oh, no, no, you should have kept it sealed And I’m seeing comments on this like, I don’t even care about Pokemon cards, but I can’t stop watching these videos. Or, I’ve watched every single one of these. Or, I can’t wait till the next one, I watch this every morning when I wake up. A little 35 to 55 second miniature show that proposes and opens a question and then gives them the satisfaction of an answer.

Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but they know it’s coming. This is why millions of views are coming in. So this structure of an open question and then an answer at the end adorned with a little bit of decoration, this little jingle, is working like crazy right now. And I know that the fact that I’m sharing this, we’re going to start to see more and more of this, but I don’t care because I wanted to pass this forward to you because this is the formula that’s working right now.

And I’m seeing it everywhere else. And I just, it just took a while for me to figure out how to adopt it to what I’m doing. Now, a few questions I want to answer. And of course, I’m going to come back and share with you what the results are of monetization and all those kinds of things, which again, I’m very close to unlocking probably in the next week I’m going to I’m going to start to see some revenue data come in and I’m assuming and expecting it to be extremely small.

Even with millions of views, I mean, I am getting a gauge that a person might be able to earn $500 for a million views on a Shorts. This is as opposed to on the Deep Pocket Monster channel, same kind of content, Pokemon content, a million views, I might see five to six thousand. Right. Almost 10 X. It varies on video to video.

I have one video that is a long on that channel that is over 13 million views now, and has seen over $62,000 in ad revenue alone. So we’ll see again, make sure you subscribe because I’ll be sharing more of this information later, but a few things. Number one, the depth with the audience is not there. It would be very difficult for me if I for example wanted to capture their email address or or give them a call to action.

Many of these viewers are just doom scrollers, right? I’m also finding that a lot of the views are coming in over the evening because this is when people are, in fact, on their beds doom scrolling before bed or after class or after work or, you know, whatever. So I’ve been learning to I’ve been paying attention to when I see the most spikes and so when I should post and that is seemingly more toward the evening hours like I’m talking 7 p. m. to 8 p. m. Pacific time while both coasts here are in the U. S. at least still awake like I haven’t made any money from this yet so even though I’m at 14.5 million views Okay, so what? Honestly, it’s just like, it’s cool, and I can feel it. I can see why people are so obsessed with producing Shorts. But it’s not doing any business right now.

Like, I know as an entrepreneur and a business owner, like, Okay, cool, I got this many views, so what? It has to somehow connect with revenue. I’m gonna unlock that soon with YouTube. Bu on TikTok these views that are coming in, which I am, that’s another thing. I am posting the literal same video, uploading it natively to each of those three channels, Tik Tok, Reels, and YouTube, so Shorts. On tick tock, I don’t qualify for monetization. The videos have to be longer than 60 seconds now in order to qualify for monetization. So even though I have not as many views as YouTube, but still quite a few, I have videos that have over a million views on tick tock now, which I never had before on my main channel on my Deep Pocket Monster channel and Tik Tok. I can’t monetize there. So I guess I either have to find something to promote or be an affiliate for, or find some way to capture, like, it’s not going to happen. Like it’s sure. I have this brand recognition, which is a value, you know, I am spending money on these packs, but it’s also like, okay, brand recognition, brand value. I am getting views. So when there is time to promote something like a card party or what, what have you, then sure, maybe I’ll be able to get some sales. We’ll see. On Instagram. I’m finding that I am getting a lot of subscribers. I’ve been sitting at 25,000 to 30,000 subscribers on the Deep Pocket Monster official Instagram channel for a long time or a account or username.

And when I started this experiment, I’m now up to 82,000 followers and several more views. I mean, I’m getting. I think 4000-5000 followers a day now, at this point. It’s ramping up just like that. The YouTube shorts did. What else could I share with you? Oh, you might be wondering where I got those jingles from. I got those from Music Radio Creative.

So make sure to give them a shout out. If you’re ever going to get any sort of radio jingles or voiceover work done, that’s all through Mike and Isabella over at Music Radio Creative. So anyway, the last thing is editing these videos. I found a way to spend less than 15 minutes a day editing these videos.

It’s literally the same song, the same text on the screen, just a different pack being opened. I’ve got the system down and it’s like I don’t have to recreate the wheel. I’m literally just turning that wheel every single day and I’m getting faster and faster with my editing. I’m not seeing the views going down at all, even though it’s repetitive.

The fact that it is repetitive is why it’s growing. So find that formula that works for you. You can do what you want, but I think I found something. And I think every audience will find a different thing that they latch onto that they really enjoy. It’s been really fun. It’s been fun to experiment. I’m happy that I have been able to succeed on there at least so far. Again, what does success mean? A lot of views. Okay, so what? But it’s the start. And so we’re gonna see what happens and I’m going to continue to report forward and I’ll keep you posted on everything that’s going on. ’cause again, I’m just having fun. I love being the sort of crash test dummy here and passing forward this information.

So I hope this was helpful for you. Let me know if you heard this and if it is at all helpful to you. Let me know At Pat Flynn on Twitter or Instagram. Is where I’d love to hear from you and I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Make sure you subscribe. We’ve got a lot more stuff coming.

Cheers. Everybody.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!