On a bright, dusty day in the fall of 2018, Samir Chaudry stood at the Grand Canyon on the precipice of a dream realized. He had gone, he would later reflect, from working in a “cockroach-infested warehouse” as a fledgling content creator to here, in the red Arizona dirt, filming the actor Will Smith leap via bungee cord from a hovering helicopter.
On a bright, dusty day in the fall of 2018, Samir Chaudry stood at the Grand Canyon on the precipice of a dream realized. He had gone, he would later reflect, from working in a “cockroach-infested warehouse” as a fledgling content creator to here, in the red Arizona dirt, filming the actor Will Smith leap via bungee cord from a hovering helicopter. ... (READ MORE)
On a bright, dusty day in the fall of 2018, Samir Chaudry stood at the Grand Canyon on the precipice of a dream realized. He had gone, he would later reflect, from working in a “cockroach-infested warehouse” as a fledgling content creator to here, in the red Arizona dirt, filming the actor Will Smith leap via bungee cord from a hovering helicopter.
That on its own was enough to make a video about, as Chaudry and his partner Colin Rosenblum have done time and again and to great effect. On YouTube, where the pair have earned an audience exceeding 600,000 subscribers, Colin and Samir are responsible for clips that have been viewed nearly 160 million times in total.
Smith said something that day about his safety instructions during the jump, that he needed to not merely release in his fall but push out, vaulting far from the helicopter to avoid swinging back into it. Chaudry took the remarks with greater meaning. “If you’re serious about something, you actually have to jump and go for it—you have to go all the way in,” he says. “The only place you get hurt is in the middle.”
From his studio in Santa Monica, Chaudry discusses exactly the roles young creators need to hire to build out their teams, his close relationship with MrBeast and what the top-dog YouTuber has taught him, and why, when creators think about monetizing their content, they’d better think long and hard about establishing their value prop first. “You have to find your path to creating value, and a lot of that is going to happen through just repetition, repetition, repetition,” he says. “The thing is, you can't bullshit in content. The numbers are right there. The audience is right there. If you're not providing value, none of this matters.”
(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Chaudry: It [was] a job. [Now] it can be a career. That's the primary thing that's changed.
Content is a product. When I first started in 2010, content was just an expression. It was just like, “Hey, what are you feeling? Make a video about it.” Very few people knew that you could make money doing it. The traditional way to make money was to express yourself, get picked up by a show, or be a writer, or get into the traditional world of entertainment. There [were] a lot of gatekeepers, so you had to create within the lines. Anything that was happening on social was pure expression. How did Instagram content start? It was us taking photos of our lunch. It was just trying to express and connect. In art, everything starts as expression and connection, and then over time it slides into this direction of a commodity or a product where it can trade.
Today, in the world of content, both the artists as well as the entrepreneurs are looking at content as a product. Content as a product is a completely different thing than content as art.
We spent a day with Van Neistat, and he said something really interesting about how he films and how he creates. He said, "I'm not a garbage collector." He's not just filming aimlessly. He's filming very intentionally. He knows exactly what he wants to capture. That's when you are so defined as an artist where you find your voice. Two different points there: One is that content has become a product. There's more strategy that goes into it. There's more thought. There's more competition. Capturing attention is a lot harder. Then the other side is that the more reps you have, the quicker you are to find your voice, and to know exactly what you're trying to film and what you're trying to say.
Chaudry: I've always looked at content on the internet as a means to create community. For me, when we first started creating content, it was all about the sport of lacrosse, which is something that Colin and I both grew up playing and something that we felt we wanted to be plugged into the broader community.
I grew up in Los Angeles, where not very many people play lacrosse. My path to finding other people in my tribe was by creating content about it and finding them on the internet. I think that this desire for community and to find like-minded people, what we found in 2010 and 2011, was the quickest path to that.
Fast forward 12 years later, and what Colin and I are doing today is the same thing. We felt a little bit on an island as content creators and felt like we weren't a part of the broader community in 2016, when we started the Colin and Samir [YouTube] channel. We've been on a path to create that community and create a hub for it—a central space for this community of creators.
Chaudry: It actually could create this whole new experience that's more in line with where the internet is going, which is more active participation in the internet. Even when you look at YouTube, the reason it is wildly different from television when I was growing up is that I would turn on the TV and the TV would tell me what was on. Yes, I kind of knew the programming times. Yes, I knew that “The Simpsons” was on at 7:30. But after that I was kind of like, "Hey, TV, tell me what's on next."
Now, on YouTube, I'm going on my computer and actively searching a creator or searching a topic. I'm finding that video. I'm going into the comments. I'm having an exchange with someone else. I'm giving a suggestion to the creator. The creator's then saying, based off the data, "Okay, people stopped watching at this point. They clicked on this thumbnail. They didn't click on that [thumbnail]. I'm going to change my content based on the inputs you're giving me."
It actually is a two-way street, and it's more than a two-way street because it's creator to fan, fan to creator, and then fan to fan. There's three different dynamics happening. That activity is what the expectation is on the internet. Let's say that a creator opens up and says, "My channel—you can buy a piece of it." Now, all these people [who] have been fans since day one want to buy a small piece of the channel. Maybe not even for the opportunity to generate revenue, but actually just the opportunity to be a deeper part of this community.
Imagine if the more active you were in that community, the more the “stock” of that community rises. Now all of a sudden, instead of me just being a fan of a creator who has 100,000 [subscribers] and wanting them to get to a million, I'm actually connected to the concept of them getting to a million subs. It's more of a game that I get to play a part of. I'm more incentivized to share their content to get more fans, to get more people involved in it. I think that it's all representative of this active participation in the internet, saying, “I'm not here [just] to consume. We're all actually creating this experience together.” Whether you are the video creator or you are the fan, they're all part of it together.
Chaudry: Yeah, I would love to do it. I don't know that the technology is there yet on a video or channel basis, but I think it's a great way to bind together a community.
What I don't want is to create a situation where our fans feel like it's a good investment, and that they're just there to make their money back. I would want it to feel more of a deeper version of Patreon, of something that's like, “You're supporting us and there's perks to that, and there's opportunities to connect with one another.”
That, to me, is what's special with the internet. It unlocks people like us. You can find people like yourself, and you can create intimate relationships with them. Us being in L.A., there's a bunch of creatives here. But let's say you're from a small town in India, and there's no other YouTube creators around—how do you find people like you? I think there's a way to do that on the internet, and then a more formal way to bind together through being collective owners in something.
Chaudry: Being a creator is being an entrepreneur. There's a level of sacrifice there if you truly love creating art. I think you have to first come to terms with what you are doing—that you are developing a business, if you want this to be your sole source of income. To create a business out of it, you have to develop a format and it has to have a process behind it. It has to be sustainable, and it has to be monetizable. What I would suggest to any creator first is to just give yourself the space and time to create freely, to find the thing that you enjoy doing.
The thing that you enjoy doing has to be put into a process that can be done over the next 10 years. To give you an example, what I don't recommend you do is what Colin and I did. We stepped out of our last company with zero plan and just started making YouTube videos with no understanding of how we were going to make money. That creates a lot of stress. The amount of stress that sits on you as a creator who's trying to create freely and struggling with generating money—it's not a great way to create. Give yourself the space and time to say, "Okay, maybe I'm working this job and this is what's paying me money, and then I'm making time to go make stuff over here.” Then I'm creating and I'm creating and I'm creating. Because, being a creator, you're not going to find your format overnight.
I mean, there might be some people who have a flash in the pan, and it takes off. My honest answer is it probably takes five years to find your flow as a creator before you're actually going to be making good money and figuring it out. This is an exercise I think every creator should do: Think about your audience, because that is really at the core of it. Your business is aggregating an audience. Who do you want to create for? Who's the audience? Why are they there?
[Then consider], What's the value prop for this audience? How are you going to deliver that value prop? What's the process? Is it a weekly show? Is it every day? And then how is that monetized? Is that monetized through advertising? How are you going to interact with the advertisers? Let's say your thing starts taking off. Do you know what pricing you want? Do you know how much money you need to make? I think having those things in mind as you're creating is what's going to turn it into a business. Because even for us, when things started taking off, you have an advertiser call, and if you don't have a menu they don't know what to buy. You're like, "Shit, what do I sell? Do I do 90-second integrations? Do I do custom videos? Do I do consulting? What do I do?" Thinking about those things is important. If you're not one to think about those things, create and find someone who can help and think about those things, because this is a very long road of a career.
I used to think that you just make stuff and, if you're good, then show business comes to you and is like, "Hey, Samir, you're in. Come on over here. Now you're a part of show business." That's not the way the world works now. You make it all yourself. No one's going to reach out their hand and pull you into this world of teaching you how to do all of this. I think that's a huge part of what we're wanting to do with our show, with our newsletter. We want to create this environment where you can get educated on how this business works and what other people are doing and what the different roadmaps [are]. Because, as a young creator, I just think it's really important to recognize what is the business of this.
Chaudry: There's some advertisers who will come to you and establish a CPM, which is a cost per 1,000 views. That's a very simple way to understand what the market is. For me, what we recognize is [that] we're in a niche. We know our audience, so we know exactly who that 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 people who are watching us are. The type of content we make is not interesting unless you're a creator. The people who are coming and watching 20 minutes of our show, they are interested in the creator economy. To me, that makes our audience higher value.
Say we're making a weekly show. It's myself, it's Colin, [and] we have some editors who work with us. How much does it cost on a monthly basis? How much does each episode need to go for? It's pretty simple math. Then we can be very honest with our advertisers. “This is how much it costs.” Then, as you grow, “Hey, we've grown by X percent. Let's raise our prices X percent.”
My suggestion to a creator is to think about your ins and outs [costs]. That's how I think about this all the time. What's going out the door? Even to pay yourself. Do you have a studio? Do you have staff? Do you have an editor? Do you have software expenses? Write all that down. Then think about what needs to come in to cover your out. It's the most simple, elementary way to do it.
What's challenging is, if there's [only] 100 people watching your content, it's going to be hard to generate a good amount of income from that. So it might not be advertising. It might be merchandise. It might be Patreon. It might be other ways. [For creators to succeed] in the advertising business, you need a lot of eyeballs. They need to be very specific. You need to understand what's your value to the advertiser, because what you're doing in advertising is you're saying, "My content provides a value to this group of people." The advertiser then says, "We want to provide value to that group of people, as well, so we will be a part of your content." It's just understanding that you are a bridge to provide value to a group of people, and the advertiser that comes along wants access to that bridge. They're paying essentially a toll to go communicate with those people.
That's the advertising business. Not every creator wants to be in the advertising business or is built for it, but it is the foundation of the creator economy. I think it's the most important business in the creator economy. My suggestion to a young creator: You're probably not going to have a staff. You're not going to have a studio. You're not going to have any of that. But make a Google Doc or an Excel sheet that just says, “Here's how much money needs to come out of this business every month.” It might just be to pay yourself. Then if you want to go deeper into that, it's like, What's your rent? What's your car payment? Then go out the door with those prices [to advertisers], and if everyone is saying “no,” then you haven't created enough value [with your content] yet.
Chaudry: For me, it's, “Are you telling your story properly, and then are you telling an honest story?” We are honestly creating a show for creators, and the numbers don't lie. We are honestly talking to a couple hundred thousand creators on a weekly basis.
If I call a barbecue sauce company, and I'm telling them that story, they do not care about that story. But the advertisers we work with—Samsung, they care about that story. Shopify, they care about that story. Jellysmack, they care about that story. Riverside, vidIQ, all of our sponsors care about that story, and that is their mission, too. We are mission-aligned with our sponsors, and that makes the sponsorship better. It makes it more effective. Everything is better about it when we are telling a story and we know who to tell that story to.
Chaudry: One of the most valuable things he shared was his focus. It's been challenging for me to focus. I think it's very hard to focus when something's not working. I'm very impatient. When we were first starting, our videos weren't working. We liked what we were making, [but] there wasn't a ton of audience for it, and that meant that when we picked up the phone and called advertisers and said, "Hey, we talk to creators and we do this," that they were like, "Yeah, but the audience isn't big enough for us. That's not worth it for us." I then went quick to us becoming a production company, to us doing consulting work, to us doing freelance jobs—anything to bring the money in the door.
One thing to pull from Jimmy [Donaldson, MrBeast’s real name] is that, if you actually want to be a YouTube creator, you just have to do everything you can to make the best videos possible. One of the first conversations I had with Jimmy, I was talking to him about some of the other projects we were doing. He was like, "Well, then you don't have enough time to make your YouTube content." I was like, "Well, that's actually correct. You're right. We're spending a lot of time doing other things." He was like, "Well, which one do you want?" I think that there's this unbelievable simplicity to that, which is just, What do you want to focus on? What's most important to you? To him, it was to make the best possible YouTube videos, and that's what he did.
There's a great story about his first brand deal, where they gave him $10,000, and he gave $10,000 away to a homeless person. His mom was like, "Why can't you just give $8,000 and keep 2,000?" He was like, "$10,000 looks better in the title. It's going to be a better video." I think that's an example of just honestly being like, What is the best video to make, and almost at any cost? That's what’s inspiring about him, or Marques Brownlee, or Casey Neistat, or any of these creators who have done just unfathomable things and just amazing things. They have this radical focus. They do things that you think about, and you're like, "Casey Neistat made a video every single day for 800 days? Do you know how much focus you need to do that?” Or Marques, who's just truly, honestly in love with tech videos, and makes amazing tech videos every week.
When you get to this point of fame, there's so many opportunities. People are knocking at your door for the coolest shit. "Hey, do you want to come to Vegas to do this? Hey, do you want to come to the Super Bowl? Hey, do you want to come do this?" A lot of these top creators are saying, "No, I got to go make videos." As you're growing, whatever type of entrepreneur you are—because a creator is really an entrepreneur—that's just quality advice that you can pull from that Mr. Beast interview. What do you actually want? Do your actions reflect that?
Chaudry: There's one thing that happens when you're just creating regularly that I think is a really important thing to note: All of this is storytelling. So what has happened to Jimmy just in creating for the past 10 years, which is what would happen to anyone who's focused on creating, is you become a better storyteller. At the core of it, his job is to capture our attention and keep it, and that's done through storytelling. Even when you look at his Feastables launch, which is his chocolate bar, he captured our attention through this unbelievable launch and this video and these boxes with locks on it. There's just this big flashy thing to capture our attention.
Then he keeps our attention by: Every single chocolate bar has a sticker on the back that you pull off. You enter in that code to a website, [and] you can win a prize, a Tesla, or even a chance to be in one of his videos. That keeps your attention probably for the next couple months, because there's going to be winners, there's going to be—he has this eye on storytelling, and [the idea of], “How is this story going to be told in the market?”
I think it's unlikely that you watch every video he uploads, but you still have this feeling of MrBeast, of the story of MrBeast. What he's gotten incredibly good at is capturing attention and keeping our attention. If you notice, every couple months, there's something to announce. He was just finishing the cycle of #TeamSeas, which is him raising $30 million to take trash out of the ocean. Then what happens a few weeks later? Feastables. You think about a year's time, he's telling a macro story about MrBeast while he's telling micro stories, which are the videos.
Chaudry: The first one I would say is click-through rate. For us, we look at 10%. YouTube's going to feed [previews of our videos] to a million people pretty quickly. If 10% of those people click on it, we get to 100,000 views.
Now, the second thing is that if those people click on the video and they're only watching 10% of the video, then YouTube knows it's not a great video. Even you as a creator know. You put together really good packaging, but the video [itself] wasn't great. That's why those two things play together—click-through rate and retention. Because the core of it is, if they don't click, they don't watch.
Then the second thing is retention. I'd say those are the simplest things to look at and to not obsess too much over those, but to really understand: Are you coming up with good ideas? That's represented by click-through rate. Then: Are you capturing and keeping someone's attention? That's through retention. It's the same thing that we talked about before. Storytelling is capturing someone's attention and then keeping it.
The other thing we look at is engagement—comments and shares. That, to me, is what really matters. I don't think subscribers is really a metric, or followers is a metric, that I look at at all. It's almost like a vanity metric at some level because the reality [of what’s most valuable] is, it's views per video, it's engagement on a post, it's, “Do you actually have a community?” As the creator, you know when you have a community. You know it. It's just a feeling. You're in lockstep with your community. You're creating for them. They're there when you upload. They're there when you post. They want more.
As a brand or someone who's looking from the outside in, I would definitely say [to] be a little wary of just looking at subscriber or follower count because what you're actually trying to gauge is, “Does this person have a connection with their audience?” Because that's what you're interested in. Have they captured attention and are they keeping that attention?
Chaudry: For us, it's more of a feeling. You know it when you see it. Sure, there's probably metrics that people track. Like, is there 10% of your subscriber base that's watching every video? But at the end of the day, it's a little bit relative, because you can build an amazing business with [only] 1,000 people being a fan of something. It's just a different way to build the business. It's just relative of what matters to you.
If you're in the advertising business and you need to reach a critical mass of just anyone, you're going to go to a podcast or a creator with over a million views per video because you just need a mass market. If you need to speak to creators, you might call us. If you need to speak to fitness people, you're going to call someone else. It all just depends on the relative nature of what you're trying to do with your business. Again, I think you can build something pretty compelling with 1-10,000 people being actual fans of you. Actual fans.
Chaudry: Because of the era we both grew up in—[Colin and I] were born in '89—we grew up with TV and movies. It's crazy that we grew up without the internet. I remember when AOL became a thing and my family had one computer, and we had this modem that went in and this cable that allowed us to connect to the internet. I remember when videos started coming out on the internet. But, to me, the gold standard is the Oscars still, because that's how I grew up.
I would say that the experience of putting out a piece of content and having numbers on a screen go up, and checking data and metrics, is exciting. [But] the experience of screening your work in front of others is one of the most beautiful experiences as a creator and artist that you could have. We've done it a few times. I would love to do that more. I would love more of that physical experience. Going to the movies as a kid was such an amazing experience. Seeing a piece of work in a group of people is completely different from watching it on your phone. So I do aspire [to do that]. All of this started with a desire to express and create. We have now turned it into a business, and now we have a format. I think the reason why [mainstream success] is still attractive is just the freedom of expression.
But I don't want it until that expression can actually be free. I don't have any interest in going down the route right now of traditional Hollywood, but I could see myself wanting to make a short film in the next 10 years, when I can fully finance it by myself. Where I can rent a theater by myself and I can make that experience what I want it to be. Now, I'm not shutting off the concept of [exploring] what it's like to be in a writer's room in Hollywood or work on a film. But the reality is, I've done some work in traditional media, and once you've experienced making your own stuff, you can't go back. It's a completely different experience when you're sitting in your own office, you have an idea, you shoot it, you edit it, you put it out. It's a completely different experience than when you're in traditional entertainment.
Chaudry: I think Yes Theory does it the best. Communities are built around common interests, and are made even stronger when they're around transformation. Why did CrossFit take off? CrossFit took off because there's a group of people who came together, and they got to do this thing that bettered themselves in an environment where they had support and friendship. At the end of it or through it, they were all transforming, and they were watching each other transform. When you take a step back and you look at Yes Theory, Yes Theory's concept is around saying yes more and saying yes to things that would put you out of your comfort zone.
Their mantra is “seek discomfort,” and so that is this collective energy towards putting yourself in uncomfortable situations to experience the best things in life. I've watched their community grow to a point where they are people who have been married in that community from meeting through watching Yes Theory. There's people who have created businesses. There's people who have created lifelong friendships. I've traveled through India, and I actually was able to go to a few Yes Theory meetups and experience the community globally. People sitting in a circle, sharing things that typically you wouldn't share with strangers or with friends, and supporting each other.
YouTube comments is where [Yes Theory fans] can start to meet. There's this massive Facebook group of hundreds of thousands of people in the Yes Fam. There's a discord with over 40,000 people who hang out in the Yes Fam, and then they've self-organized into Yes Theory India, Yes Theory Brazil—then every city [in those countries] has their own version of it. The proof is in the pudding there. Transformation is a very powerful thing. Is your storytelling transformative? If it is, most likely a community is going to emerge.
The Nelk Boys are also another group who's really done a great job with community. I'm not a part of that community. I don't fully understand it. But I would say that's one of the stronger communities out there today.
Chaudry: It depends on who you are as a creator. Casey Neistat edited all of his videos. You might say to another creator, "Hey, get an editor so you can do other things." But that was his craft—editing and creating. Colin describes it as, “If you're a painter, and you get another painter to paint your paintings, who are you then?” The thing with Colin and I is, I've done more of the business development side, the sales, the strategy, even operating almost [as] the producer in our relationship. Colin's the writer, the creative, the storyteller, the director of the shows. We operate on those two sides. As we started to grow, both of us needed support, but we both are still in those domains.
[Creators] have your audience that you want to speak to. Typically, you can figure that out yourself. You should figure that out yourself. That's your impetus for creating. What we did is, we kind of shifted everything into this talk show that we have. Because, in that talk show, we could start to assign roles. We knew what we needed there. We needed people to help us shoot it. We needed people to help us mix audio. We needed people to help us put B-roll over it. We needed someone to help us research and write scripts. All of a sudden, there were roles, and then we could assign those roles.
On the creative side, our first hires were editors—[no], I would say “creatives.” Our team is built of mult-italented creatives who are able to do post production, who are able to do thumbnail design, who are able to do script research, who are able to do photography. I think that's the world of a creator today, is this multifaceted creative.
The format kind of dictated the process, dictated the roles. That has unlocked a lot. We couldn't hire until we came up with the Colin and Samir Show because we didn't know what anyone was going to do. Then once the show came together creatively, now you have a business problem, which is, “Okay, now we got to monetize it. Now we're able to get down to that part.” For me, now I'm on the phone with advertisers selling, selling, selling, but I also need to be a part of the show and part of the creative flow. Then we brought on a team to help us with the monetization and with selling our ad slots.
Chaudry: We have Colin and myself, then our creative team is comprised of a production specialist/editor. He does everything from making sure all the cameras are dialed, how we shoot properly, making sure everything's color graded, [that] it sounds good. He's also an editor. He cuts a lot of our stuff. He cuts a lot of our short-form social stuff. Then [we have someone who] does animations, graphics, story [editing]. That means he takes the show and makes sure that the story makes sense. He's kind of putting in some of that spice or that flash that you see in the Colin and Samir episodes, with Colin's guidance around, “What do the graphics look like? What does the B-roll look like? Is the story being told properly?”
We have another editor, who does shorts. He cuts all of our short-form content. Then we have a production manager, who operates also in script research, production management, ensures that we're on schedule, ensures we're working with our partners correctly, ensures that [everything] is being run smoothly. She also deals with guests. That's the core creative team of the show.
We also have another creative team, which is the newsletter. We write a newsletter twice a week. Colin and I are the managing editors of that. We read everything. We work in a writer's room with all the stories. We are talking to other creators to get features on them. Then we have a writer, who writes that newsletter twice a week. We're working on going three times [a week] right now.
On the operation side, part of that newsletter team and part of our business operations team [forms] a group called “smooth ops.” It's made up of two people who are formerly employees of Morning Brew, who left to start their own thing. They've also helped us operationalize the show. I would say one thing that was really interesting was when they came on board, it wasn't first in a sales relationship. The relationship was helping us figure out how to operate with more efficiency. I think that is something that I wasn't positive how valuable it was going to be, and it turned into one of the most valuable things: [Taking] a look at us and saying, "Here's what a week in the life of Colin and Samir can look like, and for you guys to operate efficiently."
That actually was one of the most helpful things. “Here's how the team could be built. Here's how the sales can be done.” On top of that, we are now also represented by United Talent Agency to help us start to expand and look into more opportunities and more broader [ideas], like, “Who are Colin and Samir in this world?”
Chaudry: It's always going to be bifurcated into the creative [side] and the operations/revenue side. I would say, right now, we feel pretty good. I think this team is solid, and we can exist in this team. It's a question of additions now. Do we want to add another show? One thing that Colin and I are really excited about is adding more audio programming. We want to explore the world of audio, so I think having an audio producer [will be something we look at]. But everything should be staffed against a process, and right now this process is working, and this process is something we want to just get better at. Until this is fully dialed, I don't think we're ready to add a new show or a new anything. I would say, [for] this year, this is our staff.
As we start to look to add more written content, we will then come up with [new] processes. But as a frame of reference, when we launched our newsletter, we wrote and distributed our newsletter to our in-house staff for two months before we launched it to figure out any holes in that process. If we're to launch a new audio show, if we're to launch a new YouTube show, we likely would do something similar, where we're experimenting in house first and then figuring out if we need additional team members or if we can do it with this team.
Chaudry: The pie chart is split into two sides. One is what we'll call “business to business” (B2B). Your business-to-business sales are [via] YouTube AdSense, because that's you being a good business partner to another business, which is YouTube, who is now selling advertising and sharing it with you. That's a B2B relationship. Then your advertising relationships are also B2B. You're on the phone with an agency or an advertiser, and they're buying into what you're doing. You have one side of the business that's B2B. For the vast majority of YouTube creators, that's going to make up well over 50% of your business. For us, for Colin and Samir, 95% of our business—maybe more—is advertising and AdSense.
The more diverse creator opens up the other side, which is direct to consumer. The direct-to-[consumer] side incorporates merchandise, it incorporates Patreon. It could be selling educational courses, selling digital content through Patreon, something like that. Then maybe there's a little sliver of something else that's somewhere in the middle—on the B2B side, some creators do consulting work. They might be [doing] public speaking, [creating] other products that they might be selling. But those are typically for very specific creators.
For us, we don't really sell anything to our fans. We made a storytelling course that went well, but we live in the world of advertising, and we feel like that's what our show is built for, and that's something that Colin and I love. We love the advertising business primarily because we've found something that we do that there's other advertisers that want the same thing. But sometimes, if your show format isn't built for advertising, you turn to your audience and say, "Hey, let's do this through Patreon, or let's do this through merchandise. Or let's do this through a course." There's a lot of other ways [for creators to earn money] in the direct-to-consumer side.
Chaudry: You need to define to yourself what's a living wage, and [ask yourself], “Are you going to be happy making a living wage doing this?” Because if you're not happy making a living wage creating, it's not for you. You have to love it enough to say, "I will do this and make a living wage doing it." That's first. I think that's really important.
The second is then understanding, “How do you get to that living wage?” I would say merchandise is a great way to do it, but merchandise is also challenging. There's also, again, [selling] courses or digital content direct to consumer. I would think about, "Okay, if I get to 1,000 people who just love the thing I'm talking about, would they pay $100 for a course? Am I providing enough value there?"
That's my honest answer. You're a small business owner, and recognize that it's hard. It's not an easy thing to be a content creator. Being a creator is not a career. Being a creator can be a career. It's not guaranteed. I think that's where you have to take a step back and say, "What does it mean for me to make a living wage doing this?" Then if you get to that point and it goes any bigger—amazing. But how are you going to make a living wage doing this? What's your process? What's your monetization, if it's not advertising?
For us, again, we had a storytelling course maybe two years ago and 1,000 people bought it, and it was 100 bucks. That's a specific example, and that's pretty good. Yes, there's two of us, and we live in Los Angeles and that's not a ton of money, but you can get by doing that. I just would urge someone who's becoming a creator to think about, “What does the world look like if you're just paying your bills by doing this? Are you still happy?” That's a really important thing to ask yourself.
Chaudry: There's some specifics around how we do it, but I would say that the reason why I love short-form content is that you can take more shots. As a creator, you're finding your voice. To find your voice, if you're uploading once a week, you've made 52 videos in a year. That's not that many videos in the grand scheme of things. Now we're uploading three shorts a week, so we get to 52 videos pretty quickly. I think that's what's important about short-form video, is you learn how to capture attention in a very short amount of time. You learn about how to create quickly and you find your voice. If you're brand new at creating, at the end of the day monetization is only going to come if you build a fan base. Building a fan base and building an audience is pretty hard if you're only uploading once a month.
My high-level suggestion is: Upload a lot of short-form content, because you get a lot of practice making videos. Can you tell a story in under a minute? That's an amazing constraint. It reminds me of being in film school, when they would give us an assignment. There was an assignment that was [to] make a five-minute video with no cuts. Now you actually have an opportunity to develop your voice, because you were just given an assignment.
[For new creators], your assignment can be [to] make a one-minute video every single day. That will allow you to find your voice. The thing is, you can't bullshit in content. The numbers are right there. The audience is right there. If you're not providing value, none of this matters. You have to find your path to creating value, and a lot of that is going to happen through just repetition, repetition, repetition.
Chaudry: Not really. In short-form video, economically, the reality is we're not making a lot of money. But it's bringing us a lot of distribution, a lot of viewership. In any business, if I told you there's a great way to get 30 million people to look at your product in a month, you would do it. Just to give you a frame reference, that's our [total number of] shorts [YouTube] views in the past 28 days—30 million. Thirty million people seeing the Colin and Samir brand, getting a taste of what our content feels like, looking at our faces, getting an opportunity to subscribe.
Why would I not take that? When it doesn't work is if someone comes over to your channel and the long-form videos don't reflect what you just did in your short-form video. Then it doesn’t make sense. But for us, our short-form content is representative of what we do in our long-form content. If you like the short-form content, you're going to like the long-form content. It's the same value prop. It's the same audience. It's just a different process. That, for us, is the net positive. Exposure matters in our industry. It matters in any industry. Exposure is the most challenging part of what you're doing. If there's a way every day for you to try and attract new customers, new users, [a] new audience, you're going to take that opportunity.
Chaudry: There's two creators that I really like. One is Max Fosh, from the U.K. He's a comedian. The reason I would bet on him is, first of all, he's an incredible storyteller and an incredible creator. He's amazing on camera. But he's a standup comic, and he went on tour recently and did a couple of tour stops, and he filled those theaters he played in with his subscribers. I think that is the future of all entertainment—building a relationship, building a community [online], and having those materialize or manifest in real physical spaces.
The second is Becca Means. She started on TikTok. She represents the future of multi-faceted creators, where she's an incredible singer but she can also connect with an audience through her personality, through comedy. Almost this mix of an Emma Chamberlain meets this amazing singer. If she can find her voice on social—right now, I think she has 20,000 [subscribers]—people are going to love what she does.
Chaudry: He stood up and gave a speech, and it was very surreal to be standing there and listening to Will Smith giving a speech on his 50th birthday for his friends. But he did a heli-bungee jump that day, and he told a story about how, when he went up there for the training, they said, "When you jump, you're going to have to go for it. You're going to have to jump far out and go for it so you don't get hurt.” Because if you hesitate and if you're in the middle, you might swing back and hit the helicopter, and you're going to get hurt.
He talked about how that was a metaphor for everything in life. If you're serious about something, you actually have to jump and go for it, and you have to go all the way in. The only place you get hurt is in the middle. I would say to any content creator, any creator out there, when you look at if you actually want to do this, it is hard. It's not easy to do. So when you jump in, the only place you're going to get hurt is in the middle. Go all in, and jump as far as you can into it and actually love it, because it is an extremely hard thing to do.