🔴 Deleting YouTube videos to get more views

ft. Alex Emery, creative director and content strategist

Author

Francis Zierer
October 18, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 19 minutes

Today’s issue in partnership with The Webby Awards

Today’s guest is Alex Emery, a creative director and content strategist who spent the first 8 years of his career at Sky Sports before leaving 2 years ago to work with creators. His first client was John Nellis, a YouTuber with 5,000 subscribers at the time — that number is now 1.75 million and counting.

In this issue:

  • 📺️ Working with traditional media vs. creators, from a guy who’s done both

  • ⏯️ Lessons on developing excellent, channel-growing YouTube content

  • 📹️ Recognizing good YouTube talent as a producer

We haven’t had a YouTube-focused guest in months, so you’ll find a special, expanded “Steal this tactic” section down at the bottom of today’s letter.

— Francis Zierer, Editor

1 million, 1 million, and counting

When you reach 1 million subscribers on YouTube, the company sends you a golden plaque to mark the occasion. Alex Emery has two. Neither one bears his name.

The YouTube channel inscribed on the first plaque is Sky Sports Football.

Alex joined Sky Sports, the UK’s largest subscription sports television group, as an apprentice. He was hired and stayed for 8 years, producing content across all their social media channels — YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat — but he shone brightest when allowed to focus on and lead their YouTube channel a few years in. He was 23 at the time.

This was August 2018, and the channel, launched 3 years earlier, had 250k subscribers. Alex’s content strategy quadrupled that number to 1 million within 9 months. The core concept — clips from the company’s vast stable of star-studded television programs — didn’t change. The differential was Alex’s studied-to-the-point-of-instinct clip selection and packaging skills; titles, thumbnails, and platform-native editing.

A high tolerance and hunger for risk

The scale and speed of Alex’s achievements at Sky Sports outpaced the organization’s ability to reward him. This is not to say he didn’t receive due promotions and raises or was ungrateful — far from it.

Alex’s reward for cracking YouTube at his day job was the opportunity to try cracking one of his employer’s dozens of other digital media properties.

“Okay, there's a lot of transferable skills, but I don't specifically want to be working on Twitter and covering cricket, [a sport] I don't like. Essentially, what was my dream job quite quickly disappeared and turned into a different role.”

Sky Sports has over 10,000 employees. It’s owned by Sky Group, which is owned by Comcast, who took the company private after acquiring it 6 years ago. Alex wanted equity in his work, and there was no world where his employer could give it to him.

This is a core appeal of the creator economy: a creator is a startup. A creator is a small business for which overhead can be as low as rent and a phone bill and the upside could be millions of dollars (or pound sterling, in this case). The downside, of course, is there are no guarantees. You only eat what you kill.

It’s not even that staying at Sky would necessarily mean stability; Sky Group announced at the top of this year that they expected to cut around 1,000 jobs over the year.

Alex left Sky Sports in June 2022. His team gave him the YouTube plaque as a parting gift.

A few weeks earlier, John Nellis, an acquaintance, had called Alex up asking if he knew anyone who could help him with YouTube.

John had been working as an air traffic controller as long as Alex had been working at Sky Sports. He’d recently been making fantasy football content on YouTube. When he called Alex, he had around 5,000 subscribers. They started working together in their spare time, secured a contract with Fantasy Football Hub to make content for the brand’s YouTube channel at a per-video rate plus a percentage of ad revenue and quit their jobs.

“John and myself, we're both incredibly motivated by equity and rev-share models.

If you tell me, okay, here's a stake in that so when it succeeds, you can win, too, then you're going to get way more out of me [than with just a flat fee].

John's the exact same. We have that synergy in the way we operate, so that was the tipping point where we could jump and it was somewhat justifiable.”

Being John Malkovich Nellis

Initially, Alex planned to work with a stable of creators, some on ongoing contracts and some on a one-off consulting basis.

There is now little time in Alex’s life for other clients: “What happened is John has blown up so fast, and we’re operating at such a high level that he’s the best place for my time.” Alex was a one-man production team early on, doing everything from filming to editing to strategy. They’ve since brought on his cousin to take some of the editing and production off his plate, giving him more time for high-level strategy and creative direction.

John waited a few months longer than Alex to quit his job, leaving in December 2022. By the end of June 2023 — a full year after Alex left Sky — they broke 400k subscribers. Another year later, this past summer, they cracked 1 million. Today, they’re at 1.75 million, having added 500k subscribers in just the past month. I asked Alex if that growth spike was due to a recent video featuring French superstar Kylian Mbappé; he says it’s more related to improvements in their Shorts strategy.

Identifying the talent is the talent

Alex quit his job to play the high-risk, high-reward creator game. But why hitch his cart to John, of all the creators out there, other than proximity?

Being a good producer means recognizing talent, even when only 5,000 YouTube subscribers have validated it. John is indefatigable, charismatic, and humble. I watched one video where he convinces first the owner of a random Florida restaurant to let him cook and film in their kitchen and then a security guard at MLS team Inter Miami’s stadium to let him bring the the food into the grounds. In other words: he convinced people to break rules that could have consequences for their jobs, just for the sake of a YouTube video they had no stake in. That’s talent.

Crucially, John recognizes that he’s not the star; he is a facilitator, a presenter, a vessel for the viewer. This is core to the content strategy Alex has built with him:

“There are a lot of people who would want to be like, ‘No, I want to be front and center. I want it to be about me, me, me.’

In football, when you're a creator, you get invited to a lot of games. You get given a chance to meet players — this, that, and the other. After a while, not only does the magic wear off, but you just think, ‘This is better in someone else's hands. Someone else would appreciate this more than me.’

I have a mate who's an Arsenal fan; he can't get a ticket for love nor money. And I'm at the North London derby in VIP. What is that about? So we were just like, okay, how can we make content about this? How can we live vicariously through these people? Seeing people happy and ecstatic is great content, because they lift you, because you can see what it means to them.

A lot of our content strategy now is about finding people who would appreciate experiences more than us, in a super authentic way.”

Replacing a traditional salary (and then some)

Alex had been with Sky Sports for 8 years and John had been with the Irish Aviation Authority for nearly 9 years when they quit to focus on YouTube; they both gave up healthy, mature salaries.

A creator’s salary might balloon, but it’s rarely steady month over month like a traditional paycheck. Alex says it took “six months to a year” after quitting to replace and surpass what he made at Sky. Here’s how he makes money:

“I have a stake in all the brand deals that come in through the channel. AdSense, affiliate marketing, one-off brand deals, brand deal retainers.

There are pillars that power the business, and then outside of that, I do bit of consultancy with individuals who come along and book an hour of my time. And then I have clients on retainers as well that I work with alongside Seb [Losardo, former Sky colleague].”

He’s now making more money than he ever did at Sky, while still working reasonable hours. He rents an office and does all his non-field work there, coming in before 10:00AM and leaving no later than 7:00PM. He only works weekends as required for shooting, like if they’re filming at a football game.

John, for the foreseeable future, will remain Alex’s primary focus. As in most any creative profession, the best creators are not lone wolves. They are a business, the product of a team, the more-than-the-sum-of-their-parts output of, at the very least, a sharp creative mind and a sharp business mind working together. This will only prove truer as the creator economy matures.

Further together

Alex has no particular desire to be in front of the camera. It’s not what motivates him or where his skills are best applied.

But there is precisely one video on John’s channel, from June 2023, where Alex plays a co-starring role. He and his cousin Jacob race John and his cousin Brendy from Manchester to London for VIP tickets to a football match. There’s a 16-hour clock, they’ve no money, and they’ve a few tricks to play against each other.

Jacob now works with Alex as an assistant editor and producer

I watched and enjoyed the video. It's a fun concept, expertly structured to keep the viewer invested, and a perfect example of why Alex prefers to be behind the camera:

“It's difficult to produce when you're on camera. I've seen it a lot at Sky as well, where people try to be on camera and produce.

My sense is that if you're doing [both], it's so much harder to make objective decisions because there's a myriad of other decisions about the way you look, or the way you said a line, or did I come across right?

What I do with John works because I’m making that decision, and John is so, so good at just accepting it. He's genuinely never once said to me, ‘I don't like that shot because I didn't like the way I looked’ or ‘I didn't like the way I came across.’

If it was me, I know I would make the wrong decision because I wanted to look better or sound better. And I don’t think I would be alone in that kind of stance. But John just lets me take that stance of: What's going to get us the most views?”

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn — he’s available to consult
Watch and subscribe to John Nellis on YouTube.

🎙️ As always, it was impossible to fit every topic we touched on in the newsletter — here’s some of what’s left in the podcast:

  • ☁️ War stories from Alex’s time at Sky Sports

  • 🧠 We go deeper on Alex’s end-to-end production process

  • 💷 Breaking down all the ways the John Nellis brand generates revenue

The Early Entry Deadline for the 29th Annual Webby Awards is just ONE WEEK away! Since 1996, The Webby Awards has been recognized as the preeminent international honor for Internet excellence, and this year, they’ve introduced a brand-new suite of categories for Creators.

Join past Creator winners like MrBeast, Java Doodles, Abi Marquez, Recess Therapy, and Mark Rober in new categories such as Best Editing, Best Series, Best Narrative, Storytelling or Writing and honors across Art & Culture, Comedy, Gaming, Music, Social Impact, and more.

Don’t wait! Create Your Mark and Enter by the Early Entry Deadline on Friday, October 25 for the best available pricing today!

YOUTUBE STRATEGIST shares the SHOCKING secret to his success

Here’s the secret behind Alex’s YouTube successes: a decade of experience and study. There’s no formula, only action and study compounding over time. That said, he did share a few lessons.

Titles and thumbnails

The content is irrelevant if you can’t get someone to click on a video. Alex does use YouTube’s thumbnail AB testing tool but gives more credit to his developed instincts:

“Can your title fit in one line? Is it easy to digest in a brief glance? Can you understand the concept — how do your thumbnail and title pair together to best portray the concept? Does your thumbnail create enough curiosity so that you want to watch the video?

How does the video itself relate to the title and thumbnail; does it satisfy what the viewer expects when they click? There’s so much nuance to it.”

Retention editing

Retention editing is a style, associated with MrBeast and encouraged by YouTube’s retention metrics, characterized by an almost overwhelming mix of fast cuts, sound effects, and graphics. A number of articles earlier this year proclaimed the style was dying out; the point, after all, is not a specific editing style, it’s to get viewers to watch a full video. Editing can only do so much.

“I take more of a stance in terms of, okay, how much is the storyline enjoyable to the viewer? Do they have a grasp of where the story's going? Do they have all the context they need to consume what they're watching? And do they have enough trust in you that what you're going to deliver is worth staying for?”

Developing video concepts

“We use a lot of inspiration from creators, but what I hope is that no one ever can trace where the inspirations come from.

If you look back, all the videos we've ever made have an inspiration point. They have proof of concept. We need to know before we make it that there is interest in this kind of idea. But it's going to be spun in a way that you hopefully can't trace where that's come from.”

Deleting videos

At the time of writing, there are only 18 long-form videos on the John Nellis YouTube channel. There are many more shorts, but they’ve clearly pruned the long-form catalog. I asked Alex why they do this and how they pick which videos to delete.

“The logic for deletion is that our catalog of videos at the moment is very bingeable. They're what we want you to see John as.

Whereas keeping up, like, a live stream or ‘10 Sorare players you should buy’ is just of zero value. The logic is as simple as asking me, ‘Do you want someone to watch that?’ I'd just say no. So, delete it.

[Creator Spotlight replies: Like how EA wants to sell FC 25, they don't want to sell FIFA 13.]

Exactly. If I was working with a FIFA creator, I wouldn't be against nerfing all of their old FIFA videos and making sure that just all the newer ones are there.

Then, if you have a smaller catalog, let's say we have 10 to 12 videos, you could quite easily go through and binge them all. Whereas if we had 160 videos, you wouldn't know which ones to watch. You've got a smaller pool, so you're more likely to consume the ones we’ve presented you.”

Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the podcast hosted by Creator Spotlight editor Francis and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

This week we’re joined by Elise Pepple, Executive Director of Marfa Public Radio, to discuss how important radio as a pillar of rural communities, podcasting vs. broadcasting, what you learn sitting on the NPR board, and telling stories about and (more importantly) for communities.

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