99.8% remote interviews suck—these creators fix this • Linkedin loves long-form content • Youtube goes faceless

Hi! I'm back with some topics from fellow creators and creator economy folks, and today we talk about fixing the remote interviews, Faceless Youtube, Linkedin long-form content, and hidden benefits of Youtube Premium for creators.

Let's dive in 👀

→ How to fix remote interviews?

Just like most meetings could've been emails, 99.8%* of remote interviews on Youtube could've been just an audio track on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Most interviewers are lazy. They take a recorded Zoom call with a camera randomly switching back and forth to whoever is talking, cut pauses, 'ums' and 'uhs', upload it, and that's it.

I think it's much more comfortable to just listen to this conversation, then watching. That's basically why many of these podcast episodes only get ~100 of views on YouTube.

When I first came across the interviews Jay Clouse does sitting in his home studio, I realized that I actually want to watch them rather than just listen to (I'm not even subscribed to his content on any podcast platforms).

The same goes for Hayden Hillier-Smith and Jordan Orme's "The Editing Podcast". I mean, just look at the their interview with Dodford, a creator who's making biography videos which are literally masterpiece-level:

Jay, Hayden, Jordan — they really know how to make an engaging story out of an interview, not just asking questions and letting the guest speak, but helping the viewers better understand the guest's train of thought and internalize the all the insights they come up with.

So, here's my lessons from their videos on who to make a great remote interview:

• Don't make the guests introduce themselves. Instead, always make an effort to do a succinct but engaging intro about them

• Make catchy teasers of what viewers will learn from this interview at the beginning

• Visualize what the person is saying (add screencasts, footages, graphic explainers, photos)

• Show short talking points all along the video to help viewers better internalize the main ideas

IMO, these things make their interviews at least x5 times better than the majority of content you see in the video podcast space. Know any other awesome video podcasts with remote interviews? Drop them in the comments!

*based on my own deep research.

→ Linkedin loves long posts, but there's a nuance

An interesting observation from Taplio's co-founder Tom Jacquesson for those of you who write long-form content on Linkedin. He analyzed the organic reach to average post length ratio of 130,000 posts, and from his graph it might seem that the longer the better:

"But take a closer look at the data you'll see:

- A 40% boost in reach between 280 char. and 500 char.

- No boost (slight decrease in fact) between 500 char. and 800

- A 1% boost between 800 and 1500

- A 5% boost between 1500 and anything above"

Long posts are a means, not an end!

→ Faceless Youtube

A trend I've been observing since this year is faceless youtubers, aka youtube automation. You've probably came across a video or two, about how you can "automate your Youtube channel and become a millionaire"... Most of them repeat basic stuff just like dropshipping moneymakers, but 0.01% seem to be real gems. Let's talk about them.

Basically, the idea of a "faceless youtuber" is that these content creators find potentially viral topics, and create entire networks of Youtube channels, mostly on news, documentaries, historical video essays etc.

The scripts are written by ChatGPT, the voiceover is recorded with AI, and the video editing is made mainly by freelancers.

If you make a little effort you get content of this quality, and there are literally thousands of such videos created every day, if not every hour. Honestly, I want to believe that YouTube's anti-spam team is ready for the amount of generated content we'll be seeing next months.

But if you put in the effort, your channel explodes with your very first video essay, just like this one:

If you want to dive deeper, I really recommend Think Media Nolan Molt's interview with Noah Morris and Caleb Boxx. It's just insane what these guys do:

Faceless youtubers create software to find viral niches that they can potentially go into right now.

They're building software for full automation from idea to voiceover to editing, and according to some members of faceless youtubers Discord servers, production costs are already at 90 cents or less.

And yes, they create memes about many of us, personality-based creators (and it hurts!):

→ Adsense revenue vs Youtube Premium revenue

YouTube has started shoving Premium more and more actively, displaying a huge banner if you have adblock installed. This naturally caused another bursts of anger in many users.

I've already raised the topic of the benefits of paid social networks for creators in this newsletter, but what I didn't realize is how much more profitable Youtube Premium viewers are for creators, compared to monetizable viewers who watch Adsense ads!

Great point from Roberto Blake:

Thanks again for reading! ❤️

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