Would you like to know about two different types of YouTube channels because this will be useful for you to start or grow your own channel?
MrBeast vs Me — 2 Types of YouTube Channels and Creative Strategies for Views
The video you’re about to watch is a free preview lecture from my complete YouTube course available at https://jerrybanfield.com/courses/youtube/
Thank you very much for being here, I hope you love and enjoy this blog post and the video.
Let's compare my channel with that of MrBeast.
The point of doing this comparison is to look at different types of channels and creative strategies on YouTube and see some of what works and what works in a different way.
Let's first start with a direct comparison of the channels and we'll explain some more of the details.
If you look at my channel, I've got 288,000 subscribers right now and you'll notice these are my four recent videos in the last few days.
Then on the other side we've got MrBeast.
He is at 28 million subscribers, which is almost exactly a hundred times as many subscribers as I'm at, which means it's very easy to calculate views by essentially dividing by 100.
Therefore, if you wanted to compare my views with MrBeast views and they say comparisons is thief of happiness, so don't compare anything if you want to be happy.
I'm going to do it anyway.
If you want to compare views, you could look at and divide.
If MrBeast views were the same as mine in terms of subscribers, he'd have about a hundred thousand views on his newest videos at my level versus you can see my newest one six hours ago has about 153, and then that one's got 244 views.
If you look at mr MrBeast channel, he's got 10 million views on this one two weeks ago, 19 million views on this one three weeks ago, and you'll notice up front an immediate difference.
I upload videos every single day and MrBeast uploads videos once a week or so. These are two very different creative strategies that are employing and there's different monetization and follow through that comes as a result of that.
As a creator, a key question is how often do you want to upload?
MrBeast for his creative strategy says that he thinks and puts a ton of thought and energy into just getting the idea and executing his videos.
The basic idea he has is to make videos that are absolutely outstanding, sensational, that have the best chance to go viral and get discovered in browse features and suggested videos.
That's great strategy when you've already got a lot of subscribers on YouTube. When he started blowing up, as far as I can see, he had maybe 50 or 100,000 subscribers.
Both MrBeast and I started our channels at comparable times in history. He's been on YouTube for years as have I, and he put up a lot of videos before very many people started watching them.
What he does now is an all-in strategy on each of his videos where he can put out about 50 videos a year and every single video essentially is a lot of pressure. He needs to have big ideas. He needs to do amazing videos. Sometimes he just does a little short video, but most of the time he really puts a big effort into his videos, does amazing things like you can see this "$60,000 Hide and Seek Challenge."
One of his first videos to blow up was a 24-hour challenge he did. You can look at some of his popular uploads here, 74 million views on this one, making $50,000 donations.
What he's done is basically put in the money he's earned back into his channel right away.
Now this is the strategy that I would say is very popular when people are teaching how to do YouTube channels and for branding. He's picked a name that is not his own name, but something that he can really put anything on his channel.
He has not made himself into a niche where he has to put up, say Minecraft videos or anything specific. He can really do whatever he wants to and I've done the same approach for my channel.
Now let's look at some of the downsides for this strategy and I'll show you some of the differences on my channel that might not be obvious when you look at them upfront.
The downside of this strategy is, are you going to be able to get these results?
MrBeast put up a lot of videos on YouTube before anybody started watching him. If you're going to make things that are viral and sensational, you've got to have that initial foundation of views that gets you up there so that YouTube will show your videos to more people because you're completely relying on the YouTube algorithm to put you in browse features and to put you in suggested videos.
I don't have to have the YouTube algorithm do hardly anything for me to get views on my channel.
Let's talk a little bit more about my strategy first before we do a deeper comparison.
My strategy is I put a video up every day that's relatively easy to make, that doesn't take a lot of thought, and I basically aim for organic search on both Google and YouTube, which means I don't need the algorithm to actually push my videos.
Then what I do is I sell my online courses on my website, in my videos, and I get in on topics that earn good ad revenue on those specific topics, which means I don't have any pressure to make a video that goes viral.
I've tried different strategies and I like my strategy because it's very simple and easy to do. I just show up and make video tutorials essentially for search for people who are going to be looking or for my followers.
Now the downside of making videos for organic search, that means who's your intended audience?
MrBeast's intended audience is people in browse features and suggested videos, which means people are scrolling on YouTube. That is a very competitive position to be in and that is a much harder strategy I would say to do and be successful with if you don't have any initial viewers on your channel.
It's easy to look at MrBeast's channel and say, well it's working really well for him.
What you don't see is all the channels it's not working for, YouTubers who are trying to be like him and just do not get those initial views and don't go anywhere with their channel because if you do this strategy, you don't have people that you will get finding your videos indefinitely.
If people don't watch them most of the time, right when they come out, you often will not have much of a chance of getting more views on them and that is a real heartbreaker if you've put a week of time into making a video, and then you can't get anybody to watch it.
This strategy is more challenging to execute and go forward, with high risk in terms of you could do a lot of effort in your videos and nobody could watch them versus high reward.
My strategy is more of what a friend calls blue collar work.
I know when I make video after video on the format I'm doing, I know I'll be able to pay my bills. I know I'll be able to sell online courses and you can do this strategy without an established audience.
What is the strategy?
You just put up a video every day that tries to answer something people are searching for.
I'll show you some examples of this inside my YouTube analytics.
My strategy is to go for this traffic.
This is where I get my traffic on YouTube, from "YouTube search," half my traffic is from YouTube search, and then the next 24% from "external," and then I can also run ads on my videos because then those are selling my online courses at the same time they are promoting the video.
You'll notice about 10% of my traffic is from "browse features" and "unknown," and "suggested videos" is also a small percentage.
Now, the downside of my strategy is when someone subscribes on a specific tutorial, and then I make 10, 15 or 20 videos on a different subject, then the viewer decides they don't like my channel anymore and they're not getting what they wanted.
The upside of doing my strategy is I don't really need subscribers to watch my videos because YouTube will send people to my videos based on what people are searching for.
If you look over here, this is the YouTube report for how people discovered my content and you'll see 14% from YouTube recommending my content, which is good in the sense that I'm not dependent on the YouTube algorithm.
People are looking for the videos I've put up and many of the videos that are getting watched on my channel are older videos that people are searching for.
When I put videos up, any single video I put up can make thousands of dollars in sales and online courses.
If you try to do a strategy like MrBeast, you are completely dependent on YouTube recommending your content, and unless you also can somehow make a video that will go for a very specific search term.
Often trying to do a video that works really good for search versus a video that will more push the algorithm on browse and suggested video, which can be done.
It can be done, but it can also be pretty challenging to put both of those together in your creative vision.
For example, if you look at the videos MrBeast is making, there's probably not a lot of people searching for a "$60,000 Hide and Seek challenge."
There might be. There might be on any of these particular videos or there's probably not people searching specifically wanting to see someone that says they're Santa Claus, but there might be.
Any of these since he gets so many views, he has a chance to rank high, but MrBeast is the exception. If you are making videos and you don't have an established audience, then it can be difficult to get into this part of the algorithm.
Thus, for your channel, you want to consider up front how are people going to watch your channel?
Are people going to search for the videos that you are making? Are people going to type into Google and YouTube and find the videos you're making?
Or, are people going to scroll through YouTube and find the videos you've put up there?
That's a big creative difference you want to establish.
Now it is possible, the best place to get views, the easiest is to go for YouTube search and external because you can put videos up where you literally don't have competition. I'll give you an example of that as well.
If you go to the overview on my channel and you look at my top videos uploaded over the last month, you can see the top videos I've got are often much older videos, but let me scroll down and I'll give you a good example of this strategy and action.
I put a video out two or three weeks ago that I published, which is a three-minute video. It only took me a few minutes to film, was very easy to make and I'll show you the analytics on this video.
This video has earned me $10 and it's got 4,000 views.
Now notice if you looked at my recent videos, most getting like 300 to 400, maybe 200 to 300 views on average in the first week from my organic traffic, from browse features, suggested videos, et cetera.
The comparable traffic that MrBeast gets most of his views from.
What I do, this video has actually gotten the majority of its traffic after the first week or so. Again, this video aimed specifically at YouTube search and external. This video will give me views indefinitely and the ad revenue is continuing to go up, and could earn $500 or $1,000 over the next year.
This one video might get a lot of subscribers as initially every video I put out, I lose subscribers because of my strategy of going for organic search. Every time someone subscribes for one subject and I put a different subject out, you lose subscribers, but then as you see people watching that are discovering my channel, then they subscribe, and this means I continue to reach new people every day indefinitely.
Now, what's magical about this video?
This is a very easy video to make that even if you had zero views and zero subscribers, you can make a video just like this and get almost the exact same results, and by almost the same results, I mean indefinite ad revenue, and indefinite views.
If you look at a lot of my new videos, you might ask, how many views do I have on my channel?
But if you go sort through all of my videos, I've taken down 10 million views off my channel. I've got 15 million views total and I've got a lot of videos with 100,000 plus views on them and a bunch of videos with 10,000 plus.
Let me show you the highlight, the best example of this strategy.
This is a great strategy if you want to be able to earn money with your YouTube channel because you don't need to have any kind of following and YouTube will promote for you.
You can see that one video earns $300 in ad revenue. That is a perfect video for selling online courses.
Here's the G Suite tutorial I made about a year ago.
This one video in the first month that it came out, it did not get the very many views you would say.
If you look in the first month this came out, this got 361 views.
However, now it's got 31,000 views on this video, and if you look at the ad revenue, this one video has made $1,000 in ad revenue even though it was a very easy video to make.
That video only took me maybe an hour or two to make and upload it. If you consider that now MrBeast with 10 million views, he does probably make about ten to a hundred thousand per video in ad revenue, assuming they're able to be monetized, and there's no copyright content ID claims, which the bigger the creator you get, the more people are likely to want to take a piece of your action on any little thing as has happened to some of his other videos.
Therefore, you look at $1,000 to make a video in a couple of hours and you can essentially do that same creative process every day and you don't need an established audience to get these results.
That is really good.
However, the difficulty with doing this strategy is the viewers are often unhappy in seeing so many different subjects.
If you can just put tutorials out on one single subject, then that can work great.
However, in making a YouTube channel and branding your channel, you want to think about what can you do for the long term?
How can you make a channel that you can keep uploading to for 10 or 20 years because you will not get these results like MrBeast if you stop uploading videos to your channel.
For branding, it can work really well to pick something super niche.
For example, I've heard there's this successful Instant Pot channel on YouTube and that's so specific that you have to make Instant Pot tutorials basically for people to watch them, and if you do something else, people will probably go in and be upset, and not watch them.
Therefore, you want to consider for making your channel, what kind of a strategy do you want to do?
Now, this one, this is a beautiful strategy if you can fully execute it.
If you look back to MrBeast videos, if you can stand to put up hundreds of videos before you get these kinds of results, if you can stand for years to put your heart and soul into videos and try to share them and work up to getting these kinds of results.
Then this can be a great format if you want to go all in on your videos, do amazing things and count on YouTube to send you people that are browsing in the home feed or suggested videos.
However, my strategy, if you want to be able to have a business online to make money quickly on YouTube, even if you don't have any subscribers, this can be a really good strategy to do.
The best part is once you do this and are able to sell some online courses or whatever else you want to sell, then because YouTube search traffic is ideal for selling things. When you've got people just browsing and clicking on YouTube and suggested videos, sometimes it can be a bit more difficult to try to convert a sale there because there's a big difference in buyer intent.
When I'm making a video specifically on how to do something on YouTube that you searched for and found it, I've got a good shot at converting a sale out of that.
I've seen some of MrBeast's videos and what he was doing for monetization before, it seemed trying to sell t-shirts in such honest videos. That seems like there are opportunities to earn a lot more if you've got targeted search traffic versus a more of a mass broad audience who may not be in the market to buy a $300 course from you.
Thus, these are two different strategies that you can do to build an amazing channel on YouTube.
I hope you've enjoyed this comparison today, to look at the differences and some of the things that are not so obvious.
I go into detail about my channel because this isn't obvious to the average YouTube viewer who comes around and says, "Man, you got a bunch of subs and you got no views on your channel."
Well, that's because you don't understand how the views come through on my channel. A lot of people seem to understand this, but what you don't get about this is how you actually work up to that.
This is easy. This is challenging.
This is what a lot of people are trying for and fail at.
This is what almost anybody can show up to YouTube and do a good job doing, and earn a decent amount of money doing it that way.
Why do you think I do?
Now I appreciate you reading this.
I hope this is helpful as you're thinking about branding your channel and it's best to do something you can do indefinitely.
MrBeast and I, both of us have in common, neither of us ever needs to change our YouTube channel names. We can both upload any kind of video we want to our channel and people will watch it.
We've got very different ways of getting traffic, but the bottom line is MrBeast and I both make a great income off of YouTube.
Mine has supported me for years online and has built me an amazing business. For MrBeast, you can see for yourself if each video he makes earns ten to a hundred K in ad revenue.
That's pretty sweet as well.
Thank you very much for watching this and I hope this is helpful for you.
Final Words
Yes!
You just watched all that free preview video from my YouTube course.
I'm thinking the odds of you liking my full YouTube course are really high because you've already spent this much time with me.
Will you let me tell you a little bit about what the course includes?
The beginning of the course has a section with all the newest videos, all the best of what I've learned. It's meant as an executive summary that you can watch the whole thing, the first section and get a lot of value out of the course.
Then, there's 10 plus hours of more detailed tutorials. I add 10 to 20 new videos every year to this course. I even give you private label rights when you buy it, which means you can upload, share and sell it yourself and not pay me anything.
Of course, there's the 30-day money back guarantee. If for any reason you don't like the course, I'll give you a full refund on it.
What you're going to love is when you buy this course, you'll get three weekly group-coaching calls with me included and a lifetime to my students group on Facebook where you can share your YouTube channel, ask questions, get help, get love, get all that support you need for being a YouTube creator from me and all of the community of students along with you.
When you're ready to purchase, will you smash that "Take this course" button to add it to cart, using that button, and then hit that "Proceed to checkout" or "Pay with PayPal" to complete your purchase.
I imagine once you complete the purchase, you'll be so excited to use the link to log in, use the link to view the course, use the link to apply to the Facebook group and be ready to take your YouTube channel to the next level.
Thank you very much for watching this video here with me.
You can continue learning with us in the full class today “The Complete YouTube Course — 0 to 288K Subscribers!” at https://jerrybanfield.com/courses/youtube/
I love you.
You're awesome.
I'm so excited to see you in my complete YouTube course.
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits from video transcript by Michel Gerard.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://jerrybanfield.com/types-of-youtube-channels/