I am adding a NEW case study to my IDEAL YouTube course this week. In it, I tell you how I transformed a tiny channel into one of the fastest-growing in its niche in the past few months. Get it and let me know if it was valuable to you!
Hey friends,
I just finished an article about the headline of this email for my X/Twitter. Might post it today or tomorrow.
But I held back.
X isn't the place where I tell everything I think.
My newsletter is different. You're here because you actually want to think about this stuff. You actually want to grow a YouTube channel and make it your career, if it isn’t already. X is full of people who just want to take your thoughts and reframe them as their own.
So let me tell you what I didn't say publicly.
In the article, I talk about YouTube potentially generating content instead of just recommending it. That's scary enough on its own.
But I don’t share in the article what I am doing to ensure my clients and I are somewhat protected from the worst possible scenario in the coming years.
I have a few things I'm thinking about more seriously now:
Building outside the platform. You reading this newsletter is part of that.
If YouTube decides tomorrow that AI content gets priority, my relationship with you doesn't disappear. Same goes for Discord, email, anywhere I can reach you without an algorithm in the middle.
Leaning into what's unfakeable. My lived experience. My actual opinions. The stuff I get wrong and have to correct later. The messy, human parts that AI can simulate but can't actually have. The relationship becomes the product, not just the content.
Staying flexible. The music industry didn't die when Napster and Spotify upended everything. But the musicians who survived were the ones who adapted. Shorter songs, direct distribution, constant release cycles, and touring as the main revenue source. The playbook changed completely. Ours might too.
The uncomfortable truth is this, friends..
When photography was invented, people said painting was dead. They were wrong. Photography pushed painters to do things photography couldn't.
But here's the part of that analogy nobody likes to mention: portrait painters who refused to adapt? They got replaced. The industry survived. Not everyone in it did.
That might be what we're looking at. Not the death of YouTube creators as a concept, but a massive reshuffling of who gets to be one.
I don't know which side of that reshuffling I'll end up on. But I will do everything I can to do this job until I retire. When I am 90. Or never retire. That is more likely.
Thanks, talk next week!
—Leroy