MrBeast’s New Editing Era • Youtube promotes tiny channels • Twitter monetization is a mess

Hi! 👋 I'm back with some topics that have been discussed recently by fellow creators and creator economy folks, and today we talk about small Youtube channels' conspiracy, Twitter monetization nightmare, Linkedin being cool (and ugly), and MrBeast having a new era.

Btw, If you've spotted any heated creator economy discussions that you feel is unfairly ignored by the media, feel free to reply to this email!

Now, let's dive into it.

→ MrBeast just stepped into a new era of editing

Along with MrBeast breaking the bar of 200M subs recently, it's interesting that he's stepped into a kind of a "new era" of editing his content.

As you may’ve heard, a couple of weeks ago he decided to... close his mouth on all thumbnails, and surprisingly the viewer retention has gone up.

This week, Jimmy revealed the steps he took in his recent videos to further increase the retention: he stopped screaming so much, especially in the intro, he cut less, and generally slowed down the pace of the entire video.

Why it matters? A whole generation of YouTubers thoroughly studied and copied all of his tactics and 'hacks', and they were convinced that the secret to success on YouTube was overediting…

But along with that, there's been talks going on in the industry that the YouTubers have to slow down their editing.

Matt Koval made a video about it nearly a year ago. Paddy Galloway talks about it. Michelle Khare's team also talks about it. Max Reisinger and Ryan Ng have been telling this all along while pushing the idea of #YoutubeNewWave.

And now, even MrBeast has stopped editing as MrBeast. So you should probably try it too!

→ New Linkedin Top Voices

We've got even more Linkedin Top Voices over the past week, including some great minds from the creator industry which I definitely recommend following:

• Eric Wei, co-founder of Karat Financial

• Jolyon Varley, co-founder of OK COOL

• Jacques Keyser, Programming Director at VidCon

• James Creech, co-founder of Measure Studio

• Peter Yang, Product Lead at Roblox

→ Linkedin is cool, but why are Linkedin newsletters so bad?

So, I'm seeing more and more signals on Twitter(!) confirming Sarah Frier's statement that Linkedin is cool now. It really is.

Alex Lieberman from Morning Brew talks about high organic reach on Linkedin more often; Trung T. Phan, who back in the day wrote a brilliant text "Why is Linkedin so cringe" now actually recommends to start posting there... So, obviously, more and more b2b creators are gradually coming there to create content, which was the main goal of the mentioned Top Voices program.

The problem is, that I've only posted a single issue of my newsletter on Linkedin (it’s right here), but I'm already suffering! This is a good example of when you love the platform, but you're hurting because you can clearly see where it needs to be improved.

James Creech made a great post about how Linkedin newsletter is not a creator's friend, with lots of great arguments from the fellow Linkedin creators in the comments. The main point is that the platform doesn't share your subscribers' email addresses with you.

Altough I agree with that, I'm willing to swallow it, because they obviously want users to consume content right there, not on a random email app.

But I just cannot comprehend why this tool looks like a blogging platform from 2007? There's almost no analytics, formatting is poor, and embedding doesn't even work for a Linkedin post itself...

Also, further to this topic, I've noticed a great discussion under Dylan Harari's post about LinkedIn needs a creator-monetization program, with some good points that this actually might be a low-priority for Linkedin right now... Too bad.

→ Youtube actually loves small creators

There are so many conspiracies amongst aspiring Youtubers that the platform discriminates against small channels, and therefore it's so how hard to gain views and get into suggested or browse section.

I'm not a Youtube expert, but Roberto Blake definitely is, so here's a quote from his tweet that sums it up:

Well, now you know. And you can actually check it yourself -- just go to the main page (usually 4-5th position), or look at the suggested videos on the desktop (usually 3rd), and you'll almost always find one newly published video with less than 100 views.

For me, the turning point was when I came across a brilliant video from Zackary Smigel in August in which he touches on this topic. The video had only a couple thousand views back then, and Zackary's channel had about 600 subscribers.

A couple of days later the video went viral, and within a week it brought him over 2 million views and +50,000 subs.

Interestingly, according to Rene Ritchie, Youtube has a dedicated team helping new and emerging creators get discovered. As Rene added, just to "make sure every single video isn't from MrBeast", lol.

→ Twitter revenue share monetization is a mess

As you probably know, X/Twitter has an ad revenue share program. Which has incentivized the worst case scenarios of social media content on a enormous scale.

You know, all those meaningless replies, memes and gifs under the tweets of big accounts, just to gain the coveted 5 million views and 500 followers, and get into the monetization program.

But the worst part is, judging by the questions I see from Twitter users, that not all of them realize that they get income only from the ads under their own tweets... So they continue to post such content in the replies, making the process of discussion under tweets from big accounts nearly impossible.

I also see that the revenue is fluctuating all the time (which is obvious, as it depends on viral views).

But what I've noticed particularly strange in recent weeks is the number of complaints about the complete disabling of ads below the tweets of some users who are already in the program.

However, some users claim that ads are turned back on after reaching out the support. So here's a new conspiracy: has Twitter found a way to save some money by just randomly disabling ads for some accounts?.. 🙃

Anyways, thank you so much for reading! ❤️

If you enjoyed it, I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments or in a reply email!

And if you haven't subscribed to this newsletter yet, and you’d like to receive these summaries in your inbox, sign up with the link below:

Sign up for Overheard by a creator