You're listening to digital creator. My name is Dylan Schmidt. Like usual, I am switching it up. That's been the theme of 2024, just finding a groove that really fits for this show. So I wanted to start off today's episode with a few questions I have been asked in the DMs. I was just sharing with Jeremy. Jeremy, I don't know if you'll listen to this podcast, who is a member in the creator club that it comes in waves. Sometimes I don't get many questions in a week. And then, like, today, I got 5 questions before 8 AM. I do my best to answer every question as long as there's, like, good intention behind it. You know? It's not like someone trying to sell me something, which is the case in a lot of DMs and emails and things like that these days. Also, I really, really appreciate when I can when I'm asked a good question and when I can answer it in any type of public format, because most people have similar questions. And that's one of the beautiful things about podcasting, about this podcast is I can take a moment to answer some of the questions I got, and we can all learn from my responses, and I can download what's in my brain to your brain. Now the first question is about heart surgery. So no. These are all related to podcasting, content creation, and video quality. So let's dive in. And then we'll cover some recent, topic around YouTube that came up. Okay. Here we go. So quick question, Dylan. Should I be stressing over audio quality even if it's a video podcast? Audio quality is number 1 in all content creation. It doesn't matter if you're making social media videos, podcasts, YouTube videos, whatever. I would lead with the audio. If you want to do a little test, record a video with bad audio and good video and see how you feel when you're watching it. Or alternatively, record a video with amazing audio and not so good video and do the same thing. See how you feel when you're watching it. Audio quality is number 1. It doesn't matter the format, whether it's a video podcast or anything. People will tune out so fast if the audio quality sucks. We look at the top, video podcasts. They're primarily focused on good audio. You'll hear the host say, hey. Can you move that closer? There's someone monitoring it. And, yeah. I would not stress over any of the whole process as much as possible, but I would focus on getting good audio quality and then the video secondary. Another question I got is, should I be replying to comments and engaging on social media or just focus on pumping out more episodes. You definitely want to be engaging with your audience. If you just focus on the output, that's one strategy, and it works at a certain point because you can't reply to people. But if you're in the beginning stages of any podcast, engaging with your audience is more than just trying to get them to listen to your podcast. It's really about having a conversation with them and opening up the channel to be a two way street because podcasts are just you talking. It's not like a live thing. People aren't back and forth. When you're engaging with people on social media, look at it as a place to listen. Look at it as a place to ask questions that you can actually get responses back versus like this podcast where I just talk and I don't hear anything back. So really use social media as a place to be social, not just as a place where you're just pumping out content and not engaging with anybody. I try to, like, do my best and engage with people, use their name because I want to feel personal, and I really want to create a connection with the person. I don't want it to just feel like I'm doing the absolute bare minimum. It takes seconds out of my day. They took seconds or however long out of their day to write me. So I really think it's important, and, I just I make it a practice to see the other person on the other side of the message rather than just see it as text on a screen, and I'm just, you know, typing away is just another task. No. Engaging, you know, networking, however you wanna describe it, is real. And that's how, like, real audiences are built. That's how you really build a platform. If you're starting from scratch is through just like 1 person at a time. Just focus on 1% at a time, and then eventually it becomes, oh my gosh. I can't handle this. And then that's a different problem. But if you don't have that many people showing up, there's no reason why you shouldn't be, like, replying and engaging with people that are showing up for you. It's your job to show up for them at that point if you want more of it. Next question is, my podcast clips don't seem to be converting into more listeners. What should I do? Podcast clips are great on social media. If you look at most of the voices these days on social media like the Alex from Moseys, the Gary Vaynerchuks, all of those people, authors, speakers, doesn't matter, you name it. A lot of their content is podcast clips. And how often have you gone from a podcast clip to listen to the full episode. I'll speak for myself rarely if never. Right? I mean, maybe I'm in this on this less than, like, I can count on my hand, like, probably how many times I've done it. But I'm aware of them when I come across maybe their podcast on a different platform or if I see a link in an email or I'm looking for a new podcast, I'm like, oh, yeah. That person. So it's not just about, like, that moment of the podcast clip thinking, you know, oh, I'm gonna post it, and I'm gonna get this result. It's also about just creating content for the platform. Not looking at a podcast clip is like advertisement, is more just your contributing content, and you're adding value through whatever the message or point is in the video on the platform, not so much a podcast clip. It's just the social media clip. And I think reframing it makes better clips because you're not so focused on how can I convert people from social media to podcast listeners? Instead, it just becomes how can I make the best social media clip? And that's a way different conversation that I think is the most important one to be had, which is let's just make great clips for social media and keep going and make the opportunity available. You could put, like, a a p s. I just uploaded speaking of p s, p s, I just uploaded templates in the creator club called Postscript selling, which work for podcast. There's a podcast one in there. So, like, say you did a podcast clip, you have your caption, and then it says p s. If you wanna listen to the full episode where I go even deeper on this topic, you can tap the link in my bio to hear it. And that's just, like, a really light way of, you know, you like this? Keep it going. But it's not the focus and ruining the clip by being like, hey. You know, subscribe to my podcast, because people really are only taking away 1 message from your clip. And I could go on and on about this, but they're really, like, extracting, like, one main thing. Right? And if you're making your podcast, like, the main thing of the clip, like, you gotta listen to podcasts. You gotta listen to podcasts. People aren't getting any value or insight of what's actually in the clip. So lead with the value of the clip and the rest will happen naturally. And that's all of the questions I wanted to cover. If you have more questions, you can feel free to just DM me on Instagram or email me. Hi at Dylan Schmidt.com. Next, I wanted to talk about this news that seems to be flying under the radar. I've only seen 1 person talk about it, which is actually how I learned about it, which is Patty Galloway, and he focuses on growing YouTube channels. He's worked with Red Bull, Mr. Beast, Noah Kagan, a lot more, has a large following, super knowledgeable about YouTube, obviously and he posted this. And, again, like, I don't see anyone else talking about this. But Neil Mohan is the YouTube CEO, and Neil posted bring up the article on my side over here, and I'll link to this in the episode description if you wanna read it for yourself. A letter from the YouTube CEO for big bets for 2024. It's kind of like a blog, if you will, I guess. And I wanna break down these 1 by 1 because it's really important for us as creators to, like, know what's going on here. Couple quick stats, though, that I'm just gonna read from this article I think are fascinating. Number 1, viewers globally now watch more than 1,000,000,000 hours on average of YouTube content on their TVs every day. That's wild. I know for myself, I watch YouTube every night. I'm, like, refreshing, clicking through. I go to Apple TV, and that's how I consume the news. That's what I'm watching every night. Some other stats he shared, shorts is averaging over 70,000,000,000 daily views, and the number of channels uploading shorts has grown 50% year over year. Patty Galloway had a fantastic take on this that I wanna share. Patty says, I don't think this is really news to anyone, but for a while, a lot of people thought shorts would fail or follow the same fate as stories or community posts. Patty says, nah. Literally, nah. Shorts are a part of YouTube forever. Let's see some more things here. Neil shared, we now have more than 8,000,000 subscribers to YouTube TV. I think we're starting to see a trend. Here is where, you know, YouTube is really being a center point for a lot of people tuning in on their TV, not just, like, their mobile devices. Okay. So that was just, like, some stats that were listed here. That wasn't even, like, the main 4 big bets that, Neil has listed. So Neil listed number 1 big bet is AI will empower human creativity. Neil saying, basically, that AI tools are gonna democratize access and push the boundaries of creative expression, supporting creators, and YouTube recently announced new AI experiments that demonstrate this drive to innovate. One of those being DreamScreen, which is, in Neil's words, scaling creativity by giving anyone the ability to make AI generated backgrounds for YouTube shorts. It lets you create anything you can imagine by just typing in an idea, like a popcorn volcano or a disco forest and through the YouTube Music AI incubator, which is simply put away you could create AI music. So Neil is saying AI is here to stay in terms of how it's going to be integrated with YouTube. But he definitely makes it a point to highlight that it's not to replace creators. It's to enhance their creativity. So this will be interesting to watch. Big bet number 2 in 2024 for YouTube by Neil is creators should be recognized as next generation studios. And in Neil's words, over the years, creators have built a name for themselves. They're entertaining people around the world, making us laugh and bring us together. They're also doing something even bigger. They're redefining the future of the entertainment industry with top notch storytelling that can't be dismissed as simply user generated content. And what Neil goes on to talk about here is that creators are entrepreneurs, and YouTube is helping creators diversify the ways they make money on YouTube. They're all for trying to figure out ways to get creators to make more money. I like this line from what Neil says. Being a creator is a full time job with an international audience, but most governments don't account for creators in their labor data. We believe creators should be recognized for their work and creators at the top of their game should be acknowledged in key industry forms. Sounds great. Let's see how it plays out. And then big bet number 3 is YouTube's next frontier is the living room and subscriptions. So like I said at the beginning of this segment, viewers globally now watch more than a 1000000000 hours on average of YouTube content on their TVs every day, and Neil links to a Nielsen's report, that's a tongue twister, that in the US, YouTube was the leader in streaming watch time for the past 11 months. He announces that YouTube TV now has more than 8,000,000 subscribers, which if you're not familiar, u t TV is kind of like cable, except you don't need a cable box. Just like Internet TV, but you get access to channels totally separate than the YouTube premium subscription and ballpark estimate of pricing, like, YouTube TV is somewhere around, like, $80 a month. YouTube premium subscription is somewhere around, like, 12 to $20 a month when it comes to YouTube music. And part of the YouTube premium subscription is you get access to YouTube music, which he says the premium subscription has a 100,000,000 subscribers, including trials. An interesting, takeaway from Patty Galloway. He says that we need to be not thinking of YouTube as just an app on a phone, but more so thinking about it as a streaming service on a 50 inch TV as well and that a lot of his clients, which again is like mister beast, those types of creators, are getting a majority of their views and revenue from TV viewership. And big bet number 4 from Neil is protecting the creator economy is foundational, which goes on to talk about their commitment to, protecting the YouTube community, and their responsibility relies not just on engagement, but on giving viewers and advertisers confidence that they can count on YouTube to deliver high quality content, and it's important that they have a healthy online experience for not just creators and the audience, but also for kids. So they're gonna be working on more layers of transparency and protections. And one of the things that Neil notes in the coming months, YouTube will be introducing labels that inform viewers when the realistic content they're seeing is synthetic, or in other words, is artificially generated, which is also something that Meta just this week announced that they will be, saying as well. I don't know if it's for Facebook, but for sure, Instagram, that they're taking seriously the idea that if something is AI generated, it needs to be noted or it will be removed. And the timing of all of this definitely is not a coincidence with the upcoming election where things are gonna naturally be more controversial. So those were the 4 big bets that Neil Mohan says YouTube is making in 2024, which if we just had a recap real quick because I know it took a lot of, like, stops there. Number 1, AI is going to enhance creativity, not replace creators. Number 2, creators should be recognized as next generation studios. Number 3, YouTube's next frontier is the living room and subscriptions. And number 4, protecting the creator economy is foundational. I think this is great. YouTube is going to be leaning more into podcasts in 2024. And with UMG pulling their music from TikTok, it will be interesting to see how trends kind of get disrupted over on TikTok and how that affects people maybe migrating to YouTube, which there's already so many users on YouTube, so they really just have to keep the attention that's already there, which is not an easy ask because, you know, you have a platform like Instagram where there's now so many different ways for creators to create on that app. You can go live. You can post stories. You can do, threads. You can do DMs, the notes thing. There's highlights there's reels. There's images. There's carousels. All these different ways, and it's a lot. And a lot of people have seen their reach go down on Instagram the past few months. But on YouTube, I mean, some of these stats are staggering with the the 1,000,000,000 watch hours, and, you know, we know people are paying more and more attention to YouTube. It definitely is not going down. So I think YouTube just continues to be, you know, a great bet for creators with the caveat being any of these platforms can make any decision at any time. You might have known recently I got my Facebook hacked, and I couldn't get access to that. I just got it back, this week, it was a 114 days. I did not have access to the page, to the business account, and to that profile. Finally had access to that, proud to say. And then I had lost my YouTube, which I believe that was close to 60 days. I didn't have access to it because they said I had, like, some spam or hurtful or deceitful content on there wasn't the case. I happen to get lucky with an awesome Google Workspace support person, and they were able to help me get access back. But that was still almost that was over 2 months I didn't have access to that YouTube. So even if YouTube is the best bet for me, I'm always thinking podcast because it's not just 1 platform. I'm thinking email because I have a direct way of reaching people who want to be reached, and I'm thinking multiplatform. If 1 platform decides that their, you know, automatic content removal shuts down my channel without literally any notice I am still posting on Instagram and engaging with my audience there. I'm still, you know, recording this podcast and talking to you here, and I'm still sending out a weekly email newsletter, which by the way, if you wanna get on that, just go to dylan schmidt.com, and I send it out every Tuesday these days. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of digital creator. It was a pleasure talking with you. I'll see you soon.