So if you've been trying to get ahead on YouTube but you've been frustrated because the platform's changing, views are down, and there's a lot of new features, this is the video for you. Because I got Roberto Blake dropping pure game, no fluff. Let's dive into it. You gotta just press record. Roberto, my first question for you is what's the most underrated AI tool or workflow that creators should be using right now? When it comes to ideation,
you know, I've coined topic title thumbnail and timing. That's been a industry staple. So it depends on what tool you're gonna use to address each of those problems. YouTube has Ask Studio, which most people don't know about, and it's $0.
So it's a $0 solution.
That's probably where people could start with YouTube Ask Studio. It goes off of your own data. The limitation is it will not tell you about your competitors or other people in other niches. So then your next option is people would go to the general broad AIs of, like, Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, but that's not gonna be YouTube specific context unless you already have YouTube specific information to give it. So the better option there is to use a tool like either vidIQ, which sponsors you or one of 10 who I've worked with. And so those would probably be your two best tools to do competitor analysis and research to qualify your topics,
build out your content pillars, or even get inspired for outliers. And then when it comes to titles, you can either use a tool,
or you could just check your own gut with a tool. And then after that's thumbnails.
For thumbnails,
you could go the handcrafted route with some AI supplementation if you're already using Canva
or Adobe.
Both of them let you work by hand with AI assisted tools as well, or you could use one of these AI image generators. You could use Firefly. You could use ChatGPT's
image, uh, two point o. You could be using Nano Banana. You could be doing anything you want there. I would try to your last thumbnail with Tech Stack. For me,
and the way it's probably gonna go from now on, is I'm combining my handcraft
with AI for some speedier things.
I don't do the photo retouching myself anymore even though I could because why am I gonna spend twenty minutes on retouching a photo of mine or even five minutes when it can be done in seconds? So I'm using some of these things for speed,
and now I just move myself to being an art director
as if I had a team of people working under me. The retouching person,
the whatever person. So you're operating inside of Photoshop with Adobe AI tools. Is that your main platform? That's my main platform personally. If I need something really quick on the fly because I already have my own photos, studio headshots
put into this thing and it knows my YouTube channel, for that, I'm using one of 10. Must have creator tools for
packaging and getting more views.
Ask Studio, which is free, and that is already just embedded in the back end. You can start talking to basically AI chat that's connected to your YouTube analytics.
You're then saying, the problem is though, if you want to actually do competitor analysis,
you could you could use vidIQ or,
uh, one of 10. I mean, one of 10, I'm sure, does other stuff as well. But outliers is the big concept Yep. Of one of 10. Right? Absolutely. And so outlier research,
that was all for you talked about two big problems, ideation, titles.
But then the second one would be retention
and storytelling or video editing. I always say that retention is
structure, script writing, storytelling, and style.
And I think that AI can help you there. A lot of people try to have it do everything.
I think that where it can really help you is just kind of even fine tuning
the structural breakup of your videos. Because I think it's hard for people to just kind of maintain steady beats and energy and break their video idea or concept up into sections.
The other thing is it could be good for research. It's better actual
ability
is to help you figure out the logistics of even executing your video idea
in terms of what it's gonna take in terms of the physical ability to do the idea that you had in your head and to plan out the execution of it and to give you a procedural for that. So what would you say to someone who's listening? They've heard of some different AI tools, but they're feeling overwhelmed by AI tools.
If they're part time and they're like, okay. Do I use Gemini, or do I use Claude for my writing, or do I use ChadGBT? And how many pro accounts do I need, and I'm trying to budget, what advice would you give somebody? I would tell everybody to actually see if they're even maxing out the limitations of the free accounts at $0.
And then instead of feeling overwhelmed,
recontextualize
how you're thinking about this AI gives you the ability to compete with someone who has a team. So all these different individual tools, stop thinking about tools in your tech stack that are overwhelming you and treat them like independent
freelancers or contractors. Treat each of these tools like a team member now. What is one AI tool or AI workflow that has saved you the most time this last year? I would probably say
that it's Adobe Podcast Enhance,
but also that's built into Adobe Premiere Pro as well. Isn't it also free? So that one's free if you long you have an email address. So is Adobe Firefly for generating images. Adobe Firefly is free. If you have an email sign up. Now there are limited credits for the free account just like all these other things, but there's a free tier of it. But so I would tell people for that instead of, oh, it's gonna do all the work and do my thumbnail for free. Think about this. It could just actually finally do some of the photo retouching highlights and do the relighting.
And even just doing that would make your thumbnail, like, a 100 times better. What would be their fastest way to use simple photos on their phone and to retouch, relight them for as cheap as possible? I would go into that or even into
Gemini or ChatGPT,
the even the free tiers of those and one of these image generators. And I would basically just tell it to
retouch your photo and to focus on sharpening the eyes, hair, lips,
and nose. And I would tell it to
bump up contrast and just make this more attractive while not structurally
altering
my face or anything about me. So do you think have you looked at your viewership? Do you think your largest viewership's on TV? Everyone's saying that's where the viewership is. I mean, isn't it true though it's still distributed across multiplatform?
The YouTube of 2016
is not the YouTube of 2026.
In 2016, you remember this, Sean, Streaming
was not a big deal on YouTube, and the streaming culture hadn't exploded yet with all these people like, and
so on and so forth. Same thing for short form. Yeah. Short form platforms exist, but Vine went under in, like, 2016.
So YouTube was a monopoly of long form content and was the monopoly of Internet tension. If we're gonna watch lean in content that's visually stimulating, we wanna watch it on the biggest screen we have, and that's our sixty, seventy inch TV, not our five inch phone. The shift and the schism in YouTube happens because device
context now really matters in terms of what's the best experience
on every device,
and then that changes what formats and what content people preference on those devices,
when they watch, and how they watch. And YouTube also
changes what it serves you based on what device you're watching on during what time of day you're watching on. So what would you say are your best practices for anybody that wants to get results with live streaming? One, treat it not like an afterthought and not like a throwaway disposable video.
When you do live streams, keep replay value in mind of people replaying and rewatching it. Keep repurposing
value
for multiple formats and multiple platforms in mind from the very beginning.
Keep reaction value in terms of having things in your content that other people could react to, clip, and share on your behalf,
and then also have reshare value for other people to say, you have to watch this thing that I watched. You have to give me your feedback, your opinion, or we have to watch this thing, and we have to debate about it, whatever it is, or, oh, you guys see this funny moment or clip. So you want those four r's in place when you're streaming. What size is it okay to start streaming? Day zero. Day zero. Even with nobody there? Especially with no one there because that's how you're gonna get in your reps and your practice. You don't want people there
when you're doing your dressed rehearsal, if we're being honest. I'm very bullish on this concept of device context is actually gonna be more important than format, and YouTube is kind of, even with this, proving it by universalizing
the format to say, you choose what the best experience to consume this content in is for you. Future looks bright on live streaming.
And and then you also drop in this nugget of format is a strategy, but you're saying context? Device context. Device context. Planning your content, knowing how it's gonna be perceived and consumed on devices. From a content strategy standpoint, I think that you should actually be diversifying even within your content pillars across
your formats and device pillars in terms of, okay. Here's my long form, and I know it's gonna be on people's TV screens, computers, and phones. And so regardless of what device they're on, here's how I'm gonna make the video, structure the video for a lean
back experience.
If you are the kind of person who is making content where you have that going on,
then your community is gonna love it whenever you go live because now it's a special event. Whether you're doing that weekly or twice a month or once a month, it's now a special event. And they're also gonna want the clips and the shorts from that special event the same way that they watch clips out there from live events and when people go and do tours, concerts, or what have you. So you're setting yourself up for multi format, and you're being intentional. And so there's plenty of stuff for them to watch on any device in any format. What do you think about the channel collab feature? Does it lead to more views? I everybody I've seen using it. Even people use it on their own channels. Right. Between two of their own channels. It's been massively successful for them. I've seen people finally scale their second channels
to start getting views on the level of their main channels. I've seen people revive channels with this. Um, it's been functionally very well. And I think it brought collaborations back to YouTube in a big way that we hadn't seen before because between the pandemic and, like, cancel culture collabs seemed to go away from the fabric of what, you know, made YouTube great,
and now it's back. So we're talking about all kinds of, uh, new things.
You dropped a bunch of live streaming game. There's some new live streaming features,
And
I would love to talk about Shorts. There's a massive opinion. Do you think
Shorts
hurt people's channels and killed channel growth?
It depends on how they're executed,
and it depends on whether the channels actually had momentum or not.
Uh, but what I will tell you is this. Another thing with, um, shorts and where I don't feel it hurts channels is
a lot of people's expectation of it and the reason it feels like it's hurting and underperforming
is they're treating it like a derivative
of YouTube long form instead of treating it like its own thing. It has its own best practices. You also don't need to put in the same editing criteria into a short that you do a long form because it's a different audience. The structure is different. The even the hook, like, with a regular YouTube video, you have eight to fifteen seconds to hook somebody. With a short, it's two to five.
The structural difference in short form from long form is radically different, so you have to build a short form mindset
for creating content. You can't just piggyback off all the best practices of long form. That's hurting people a lot. There's also the output frequency. The optimum output frequency for short form, you can tell people never bother to try Instagram
or Instagram Stories or Snapchat or TikTok and that they just started short form from a YouTube long form mindset,
Sean, the output necessary to really truly be successful with Shorts, unless you're a great cinematographer
like Max the meat guy, and he's just a unicorn,
unless you're that,
the output amount is really a minimum of three to five shorts a day, and the optimal amount would be five to 12 a day spread out over thirty minutes to an hour of releasing each short. We talked earlier about second channels.
There seems to be a buzz right now. It's still probably underground for 99% of listeners,
but, like, you could call it a second channel strategy.
So break down
your understanding of a second channel. Old school, people had sometimes, like, main channel, vlog channel.
Second channel might have been a hobby or an expression. But what we're talking about is there's like
it's like a strategy people are doing. Think of it like this.
They're
expanding the franchise,
but they're not changing the category.
So what they're doing is instead of going, oh, I had the main channel, and now here's the personal channel for you to get to know me as a person. No. What they're doing is they're just giving you another way to interact with exactly the same thing, the same value proposition
as the first channel,
But now
they're just changing
the style or format of the output, and that's why it's just this higher signal because it's moving away from what appeals to the commons
to appealing to the denser part of their audience. And it's a franchise that expands from the one instead of the 1,000 true fans philosophy,
what if you had 100,000
real players? So what do I mean about real players? Play long term games with long term people.
So the basis of the 1,000 true fans, those are your loyal Rider Day super fans.
Now what if you had an extension of that
that 10 x is twice over? That's how you get to a 100,000. Why do you need a 100,000? That seems like a big number.
Because even if people are real players in intentionality and they're aligned on values
and they recognize the value and the quality of what you're providing,
they may not be ready yet at scale, but here's the key. So it's a lower level than a true fan?
No. It's actually a true fan,
but they aren't at the level of commitment that turns them into your highest ticket customer.
But they are someone who can qualify to be a customer.
In fact, this content is qualifying them further and taking them to where they can afford the high ticket or to go deeper or the next investment because, alright, they already know you because of the main surface level content. They've gone now here where it's like you do lower lift. You don't have to do as much to attract them. You're now in retention mode. It's like, okay. The main channel attracted you. This thing, though, retains you because you've graduated to where you're absorbing more value. You qualify for higher value, but that doesn't mean that you qualify
for higher products yet. But you could. So when is somebody ready for the second channel strategy? I give the advice to a lot of beginners, like, when they're just starting to not start two channels because it's hard enough to run one. It would seem that a lot of people
that are that are more professionals, they might have teams or they're delegating to editors or some different things. Who's ready for a second channel strategy? If you have people on payroll already
and you don't feel like they're absolutely working themselves to the bone and they're already on payroll, or you've optimized your system so well to where they have all this extra time and they're like, oh,
boss. So what put a little bit more quality and craft into what I'm move them to a second channel. Go ahead and use a second channel and then say, guys, I don't need to squeeze 10 or 20 more quality out of this because it's not gonna double
our view counts. But if I take that same leftover energy and we just have more content going out and we have it on another channel here,
then we're gonna literally double their our money, and I can pay you more because now we'll just have more content going out the door, and you don't have to put in the same level of effort to this, but the same intention.
As one of the OGs in the creator economy who's gone through the ups and downs of life,
energy,
moving Yep. Challenges, consistency,
how do you think about being consistent? I know I mean, I follow your stuff online. So you had mentioned you now you're building AI software. You have a live show. You've had certain seasons where you've been more consistent.
Multiple channels, short form, long form,
live streaming.
What is your current perspective for yourself personally? How are you staying consistent? For the solo and working class content creator, one of the reasons I'm so passionate and bullish about AI
is that it can get people through those tough seasons if they can optimize, if they can put out more content, if they can have more momentum. For the people who can't afford or haven't gotten to that team level yet, AI
is the competitive advantage for them, and it really can scale that working class content career who only has ten hours a week, twenty hours a week. It's really there for them. For that person, I'm not telling you to take yourself out of your content, but if there are things that it allows you
to show up in the way that you need to instead of not at all so I would say, from my own experience, the things that have helped me in times of consistency
is you rise or fall to the efficiency of your systems, but also your support.
The thing that will help you be consistent is you have to have a structure, orderly life. But if you don't have the structure and boundaries, if you don't have systems so that when you are starting something, you're not starting from scratch every single time with your very limited resource of time and your limited bandwidth, energy, attention,
you know, especially if you're a working class creator who has a family,
then you have all these competing priorities.
So what's so wrong
about using a supplemental system? It's not about outsourcing all of it. It's about what about making up the difference because your battery's running low? How's that unreasonable?
Why not be kind to yourself and do that? So that's my point of view that loops everything we talked about. It was a lot of threads to connect. I think I brought it all back together. So if I want to be more consistent and when I want to be, it's systems,
structures, support, and strategy. If you have those things nailed,
then you're gonna do well. You mentioned clippers earlier.
This is maybe a new concept for people.
Clippers as a
type
of creative,
a whole network.
Explain the concept. You know, I think it was an interesting one.
There's there's the Logan Paul impulsive podcast. Oh, he had Joel Osteen on. And he was like, hey, Joel. You should get some clippers. So Logan Paul told Joel Osteen, do you have clippers? He goes, what's a clipper? Like, you're doing a great job of meeting them where they are. You know? But you we gotta get the clippers going for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's really clip on me. Telling you. The clip wrong. Y'all gotta help me. Yeah. Y'all gotta help me. So, um, a clipper would be there's a couple ways to approach this. For streamers, they've been doing this for a while, and they tasked their mods with being clippers and finding the best parts of their livestream, chopping those up to clips, and distributing them, um, not only for the On different channels. Different channels. So they're distributing the clips Not just on the creator's account. Yeah. But they're also what a lot of them do is they say, hey. I just want more people to see me, and I want more distribution. I want infinite scale. And,
therefore,
what the creator is doing is paying them for every 100,000
views
that they're that they generate,
like aggregate. So
freelance
video editors
work with channels of any size
and But usually the more popular ones. But per view. Yep. So there are freelance clippers that work for MrBeast. Mhmm. I mean, you'll see people in the comments that are like, yeah. I got a thousand dollars. An army of them. Yeah. There's an army of them. So people doing it at this at the highest level, there's some some entrepreneurs
that maybe have money they really wanna spend on personal branding,
spend $10,000
a month, a $100,000 a month. Imagine spending $50
for a 100,000 views, and they're real views. They're they're organic, all algorithmic driven because you're like Is that the I mean, the numbers range, but $50 for 50,000 views sounds like a great deal. $50 for a 100,000 views. $50 for a 100,000 views. That is a real number, and that's on the higher end in some cases.
In some cases. There are some people who get more than that, but Where do you find Some people get more. Some people get Usually, people from their own community. So imagine that your favorite creator puts out a call for Clippers or they go through a website
where oh, and that's my favorite one of my favorite creators. And so imagine you're a fan of Logan Paul or I show speed or KSI or mister beast, and you realize, alright. I'm gonna be given permission to make a mister beast or a Logan Paul fan account, and I get to keep all the revenue I generate, and I'll get paid for performance. So for people that are hearing about this the first time, it it could be argued that, like, an individual, like a Luke Belmar. But we'll talk about I think he might have been spending 10 k to a $100,000 a month in Clippers. And so think about it like this. If you're getting billions of views of attention and you I you and I know that with short form especially, because we know now we have the data now. YouTube didn't put this data out there before, but now we know we see new viewers, casual viewers, returning viewers.
If you're doing like, if you have a 100 kids working for you that each are pulling in
a million views
a month,
you're getting a 100,000,000 views a month Yeah. For
not a lot of money. You can't buy
regular ad distribution and get a 100,000,000 views for $5,000
a month from Google. Big key is to fuel
the clippers is not just the content a,
but content that's clippable and these now some of these clippers might be able to make magic happen better than you could have ever imagined, but nevertheless, it's still predicated on the input. Exactly. Garbage in, garbage out. So then you already spent money. See, this is just long tail extending
your investment.
You put money into the beautiful studio,
the work that you're doing. Maybe you have a cohost podcast locations,
um, whatever your interviews, whatever you're doing. You put money into that. Now you're expand you're extending the lifespan of that investment because you're scaling it past just what your own account generates now. Yeah. Because now you have an army of a hundred hundred fifty clippers
out here. You put a couple thousand bucks. And for these kids, it's good money for them. And they like doing it, and it's building their portfolio. And they can be working for multiple people, and they can gain this distribution. They could be using OpusClip,
for example, and they could be having five, six, seven accounts each themselves. So, like, yeah, you have a 100 clippers. Every one of those clippers for all you know has 10 accounts because that's how they're getting you the aggregate of their views. Yeah. Yeah. Do so many outputs
that it would be unreasonable for you to fail. We already said that short form, the optimal for it is, like, 10 plus a day if you're really gonna go hard. These kids are money hungry and incentivized
to do that and to have multiple accounts. You could do 10 a day on 10 accounts. So now you have a 100 kids putting out a 100 videos each a day. Yeah. And they either perform or they don't because that's how they get paid. Let's say because they all wanna make some decent money and you're paying $50 for, uh, a 100,000 views, all of them wanna get $500.
So all of them have a real incentive to try to get you, like, a million views every month each. So now you have a 100,000,000 views on the line in the pipeline.
Sean,
what percentage of that, if you have any kind of reasonably priced mid to high ticket offer, do you need to convert out of a 100,000,000 views? How many of what percentage of that do you need to convert to make real money? So you take a 100,000,000 views
multiplied by point zero one is a million. People
would be the per yeah. That would potentially convert on something. Let's take it two zeros down to 10,000 customers generated off of a 100,000,000 views. Like, that's, like, barely this thing's barely working. Okay? So that's, like, not even
point 1%. It's, like, um, you know, a fraction of that, but still 10,000 customers. If you sell anything at all in the world, you are doing just fine. And
the sheer volume and scale of attention that that can now backchannel
to your main content in the first place, if even, um, a percentage of that, a mill 1% of that translated back to your own main channel's long form, you just add a million views to your pipeline.
If you have, uh, even halfway decent RPM on YouTube,
you just made profit
off the money you spent for the clipping distribution, and that's at a 1%
back channel conversion rate to long form views.
Number one. Clipping industrial complex. The clipping industrial complex, knowing what's happening in the creator economy is number two.
You could think about applying that, and everything's, like, factors of scale. OpusClip, which, by the way, you know, we've worked with OpusClip in the past, but it's one of our favorite softwares. Our affiliate link will be in the description. Roberto's got a bunch of resources as well in the description. And as usual, my name is Sean Cannell, your guide to building a profitable YouTube channel, and I can't wait to connect with you in a future ep