Last updated on June 16th, 2024
YouTube is DEAD! NOW WHAT?? … No, this is not true, but what if it was? What if suddenly YouTube changed or stopped performing? How would it change your marketing strategy?
HOSTS: The VidAction Podcast is hosted by:
– Dane Golden – VidAction.tv
– Shelly Saves The Day – ContentMinis
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
If you’re doing video marketing to grow your business, YouTube has become so essential in your plan. But what happened if YouTube went away today or somebody bought YouTube and it entirely changed, what would we do?
What do we rely on YouTube for, and what would we do next? And one of the things for business is, I would just say, well, a lot of people might try something like a third party video holder, or a video uploader called Vimeo or a lot of other services. What would you, what would be the first thing you would think about Shelly if someone said, YouTube is dead, we need to adjust.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Well, first thing I would do is think about the existing catalog and library of videos. How much there is, where to put it, and how people would still be able to access it. So that’s one of the first steps that I would go is through an inventory, because a lot of the time the information is good. You want to keep it available and alive, so then you’re going to start exploring options.
Does this mean that my web host can provide it? Do I need to buy storage so that people can play it through the cloud? Can I do something like upload it to a different video site or link to it, or do those video sites allow me to embed? And so there would be a laundry list of questions that I would go through, but first and foremost is how do we not break the customer experience because they are accustomed to videos or information or us communicating with them via that way.
So I would look at something like that first.
Dane Golden:
Well, yeah. Let’s presume that Google is still alive. YouTube is dead, but Google is still alive, somehow. Some strange dystopian universe. This is what happened. Well, you’re right in that, let’s say it was going away and you had some advanced timing, you would want to download those videos. And YouTube, and other services do permit downloading of your own videos. And so that’s one way you could recover them. If you’re not, you’re, if you’re like me and don’t have a fantastic super organized way of looking at every single old video going back years. But for a business, you definitely want to be found.
And that’s what YouTube really helps you do, if you are an authority in your space, is it helps you get found. So, If there was another video service, we presume that Google would index it, whether it was Vimeo or if you uploaded to Instagram or LinkedIn or TikTok or whatever, that YouTube would go, that Google would go to, the extra way to, the extra mile to index those.
Okay. Well, what about new videos? What about new videos? What would, where would you put those?
Shelly Saves The Day:
Well, for one second, I’m going to back up and say, because you said I’m not very organized or I don’t know how, you know, I stored all of my stuff before. One thing that you might suggest or look at, and I have it be part of the quarterly kind of channel checkup anyway, for anyone who has a YouTube channel, especially a brand or business, is going to be to use the channel backup feature inside of TubeBuddy.
If you’re on star level or higher, you have the ability to download. Into a CSV file an entire, you can back up your entire channel or just since your last backup. And what it does is, it will download into then these data fields. What were the tags that you used? What was the description that you used? What was the link to the video? What was the original video file name? And you can even download some of these comments. So if you wanted to, you could still archive pretty much pieces of your channel. So if you need to go through and comb for new video ideas, if you needed to know. What originally was the date that I uploaded this, which one of the videos did have the most views?
Which of these videos was the one that was released in livestream versus other? When did we share them on social media? And then you can even go hunt them down. So just something that is overly quick to just Pass by really quickly, but it’s can be beneficial, especially for if YouTube has not gone down and you have a social media person on your team who doesn’t have access to your YouTube channel, they’ll then have all this information, what did they originally say about, you know, the video and the description.
They can have a two sentence blurb along with a tweet with your original link. I mean, stuff like that is just super valuable I think for an entire team that’s working together. But to answer your question then, if we were to put new videos, where would we put them? It’s also going to come down to my favorite.
It depends. Are they vertical? How long are they? Because if you’re still looking for free different places you know, Could it be on a TikTok? Could it be on an Instagram? Because you could do up to 10 minutes. Are you trying to do them behind some sort of paywall? because you could do a series over there.
Are you trying to put them under some sort of membership site where they give you a certain amount of storage as well? So it depends on how much new video, how much like access you’re giving to people or how you plan to do that if it’s behind a paywall. There’s just always more questions than answers when you talk to me.
Dane Golden:
You know, that’s a very interesting thing that you said, a membership site, like a Uscreen, like a Kajabi. Like a Thinkific.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Thinkific. Yeah. Anything.
Dane Golden:
Because one thing about YouTube, which is great for business is that you can upload things for free. However, they’re. After they watch your video, they’re off to watch somebody else’s video.
So if we found a way to say, Hey, listen, for you folks, we’re not going to charge you, or we’re going to charge you a very small amount, or some sort of something where our best customers, we’re trying to drive them in into our own community, even before they are customers, they’re proto customers, they’re customers who are being nurtured, but.
But you really want to come behind our wall in our secret area, in our beginner’s area, for people who are thinking about being customers. Sort of like people on your newsletter. People on your newsletter may or may not be customers yet, but you’re trying to nurture them. Well, this would be one, say, come to our free club where this is only for people like you, but now you have a lot of super engagement.
Shelly Saves The Day:
That could even happen on a Discord community. You can basically livestream or capture a livestream through like a virtual camera or something, or a screen accordion or whatever, bring it into a discord. And then as it’s an unlisted or private YouTube video, you could then leave that link inside the Discord as for replay or have it just before you know, viewable by certain members with certain roles.
So that’s another sometimes low cost effective way to create a membership as well.
Dane Golden:
Now, if YouTube was gone today, one of the things that I would be worried about is how do I advertise to my customers? Because YouTube is a phenomenal advertising platform that’s within Google, but it’s not the same. And as someone who has a performance based agency, vid action do TV where we help businesses and we don’t actually charge them, we only charge them when we actually make sales or drive significant leads for them.
I would have to be looking for a new platform. Would it be, would I really start to focus on LinkedIn ads, which are right now, are prohibitively expensive? Would we find some other, would we have to go to niche sites? Would we have to do the WordPress advertising or the core advertising, or would I dive right into TikTok and Instagram and Facebook, or would there be some other way with some third way that things.
Started to happen. So that’d be something I would be thinking about. And you’ll notice, Shelly, I did a way of introducing myself, Dane Golden, and dropping my own little promo in there for VidAction.tv, for people who want to receive business without actually paying if it’s a SaaS platform type of thing.
If you want to drive leads and sales, now I want to give you a chance to promo your business, Shelly Saves The Day?
Shelly Saves The Day:
Well, thank you. So I am Shelly Saves The Day, and I have two businesses, one of which is for people who have a video podcast or long video on demand type of videos. You. Are looking to create YouTube shorts or short form vertical video. I have a company that does that called ContentMinis. And then the other is if you are someone who is a brand or business looking to grow your reach and authority on YouTube, you can always reach out to me for coaching and consultation.
Dane Golden:
ContentMinis, I’m
Shelly Saves The Day:
We make your content just smaller. I think the tagline is, it’s your content just smaller.
Dane Golden:
ContentMinis your content only
Shelly Saves The Day:
smaller.
Dane Golden:
It should be your content only smaller. The smaller should be a deep voice only smaller. So, okay. YouTube ads, what would you do instead of YouTube ads? Where should I go instead of YouTube ads to advertise? because YouTube ads are a, I don’t even know lately what, $20-, $60- billion yearly business?
Shelly Saves The Day:
Yes.
Dane Golden:
Where’s all that ad dollars going to
Shelly Saves The Day:
Well, you know, it’s interesting because it could just move buckets from YouTube or Facebook, I’m sorry, into Facebook. I mean, because there’s nothing. Stopping a lot of people from having a community with paid videos and a series over on Facebook, and depending if you get enough video views, you could get into their own creator monetization program over there, if that was interesting to you.
But never forget that because they’re tied into Instagram and own it. They have the promoted posts available, so you can always. You know, spend money over there to promote some sort of course or brand or business or something that you’re selling. You see it all the time. And so it’s absolutely another way to not only host content for free over there, possibly profit from content over there, but drive sales and then leads to a website as well from there.
Dane Golden:
When. Of the things that, that is our sort of our third step in our content flywheel. So let me tell you about our content flywheel real quick here. So our tech content flywheel for YouTube actually starts on YouTube ads. We’ve done YouTube organic for years, but we changed where step one is because so many businesses, they get into YouTube, they’re like great organic, but you organic takes a long time to drive business and build business in. Some businesses just don’t have that time. Well, you know, it’s going to work, but you don’t have that time. So I actually recommend now that people start with you two ads, sort of the same way as those those Razors guys did. What were their names? The billion dollar business, that
Shelly Saves The Day:
The Dollar Shave Club?
Dane Golden:
The Dollar Shave Club. Yeah. They didn’t have any organic videos. They had one YouTube ad that they did very well. And they sold to Unilever for a billion dollars. So they did okay without just with one type of YouTube. But that’s the thing. If you target well, that’s the thing that most people don’t understand. They don’t know how to do an ad and they don’t know how to target well, and that’s why we offer that service.
But if you can target well, you don’t have to spend a ton of money. That’s where the flywheel starts. I believe next step is organic YouTube. So you need to do both. But it’s paid funnels, organic. Funnels website because as it turns out, no one will ever buy anything from you. Actually, while they’re on the YouTube page, they actually have to go to some sort of landing page, some sort of website or third party site.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Unless it’s built into the merch.
Dane Golden:
Oh, correction could be built in the merch shelf. In the center of that flywheel is the hub. The hub is email. So. The other thing that’s true about purchases is that no one ever buys something online without an email. There’s no interaction that ever takes place without an email, somehow wrong. Right. Pretty hard to find.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Integrated services such as, like log in with PayPal or Amazon, which provide the email for you…
Dane Golden:
OK, that’s fair.
Shelly Saves The Day:
… would be your closest exception.
Dane Golden:
That’s fair. So, With this flywheel? Well, I think I’m, I don’t know if I’m drawing it in reverse or forward, but it doesn’t matter. It’s going in one direction anyway, so YouTube ads, YouTube organic website, and that all creates the email list which nurtures and grows. Now, I left out a lot of social media on that, but social media I feel is sort of the external, or if you’re like a astrophysicist, it’s like a global cluster.
Things are happening, comets are shooting in, shooting out. But if you can get those things settled the social media is, can either be an add-on or a, an alternate universe. It’s the other Spider-man,
Shelly Saves The Day:
Yeah. Yeah.
Dane Golden:
It’s the other Spock whatever you want. So that’s any way our flywheel. So that’s why we believe that the website and how it integrates with YouTube is super important.
And what YouTube can do is it can embed. YouTube, I mean, websites can do is they can embed YouTube videos better than embedding any other platform. And what that does, if you’re using YouTube and you’re using your blog, is that those both go up in ranking on the Google homepage. If you reference them if you point from one to the other or embed one in the other.
And that’s a big thing because while. YouTube is the second most popular search engine. It’s like one 20th of Google, so it’s still good. But if people are looking for something specific, which is often how people’s exploration their top of the funnel exploration starts, if you can grab them and that first video or that first link from Google, that, that takes them into YouTube.
Now, if you’ve done a good video, you are. You’re the first person they found. That’s the Shelly’s the first person I found that talks about ContentMinis. Now I’m in her world and if I do a good job, I keep her in the ContentMinis world. So, YouTube’s dead Shelly. What’s another thing that you would do to supplant it?
Replace it. Fix it. Fix through your…
Shelly Saves The Day:
Well, one of the things I would definitely be looking at too is what is the business or thing that makes me money and what does my email list look like? Because sometimes you’re using social media to attract and nurture you know, like the brand new client, but sometimes it might be just as fruitful to upsell the people who are already in your world.
So is it possible then that you beef up email marketing and offers within your own email list possible? So it would depend on a few things, but it’s something I would explore.
Dane Golden:
Email. So, I’m not going to a video site anymore. So email is a way of delivering video, or you’re delivering text or images or-
Shelly Saves The Day:
Either or.
Dane Golden:
Uh-huh. Okay.
Shelly Saves The Day:
We don’t even know yet. because I don’t know the size of the list. I don’t know the intended audience. If it’s people who have previously purchased, people who’ve just expressed interest. I’m just, I’m curious at what point then you explore how email marketing goes into your existing pool slash of revenue.
Dane Golden:
One of the things, I was talking with a client recently about email. They’re like, should you know how can we use email to grow our audience? Well, this particular client is one of the ones. That’s doing really well on television. There’s some niches that do better in YouTube on television travel is one of them.
Things where people really want to see things in a bigger experience. Email is not that good for driving TV viewership because you get an E, you don’t get an email on tv. You know, there’s nothing that click to that takes you on tv. So it depends on the niche, but we really actually recommend doing a nurture sequence for your business.
Because if your business is, if your business is the kind of business that takes six to 18 months for someone to do business, once they find you, which is a lot of businesses, you’ve got them at the beginning of that, how do you keep them? One of the ways is getting them to download something that, that puts them on your email list.
Then we create these nurture sequences. What we do is we take a YouTube tutorial or you know, some sort of listicle or some sort of something on their YouTube channel. We turn that into a blog post. It goes on their blog. We turn it into an email that embeds the YouTube video and we have a fake play button, because you can never actually play videos within an email, but you can make it look like you can play it.
And then it goes to the, you click on it and it goes to the watch page on YouTube. That’s you three uses of the same content. That’s already good. Content’s already approved. Now they get something each week. That is. Hey, if you’re the person that wants to do X, Y, Z, take a look at this. Does everyone look at them? No, they don’t.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Interestingly enough too, I always thought. It was fascinating that YouTube specifies explicitly that it doesn’t even have to be your thumbnail inside of the email that gets people to click, because CTR and impressions don’t count when they come from an email. So you could have some other image, not even your thumbnail, something that is more enticing.
Who knows? And those impressions don’t count. I just always thought that was fascinating.
Dane Golden:
I never really thought of impressions coming from email. I guess that would count as direct.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Yeah, it’s it starts as a session count, but they don’t count it as an impression of the thumbnail. So I just, I always thought that was fun. Because really you could put any image.
Dane Golden:
Huh. I guess it must be accounted for in YouTube analytics under direct traffic. But but the thumbnail, what the thumbnail sort of does is says this is what you’re going to get. You are going to get a video if you click this. And it sort of, I don’t know. It sort of conditions you to li if you like them anyway, conditions you to like the concept of clicking on their videos.
Right? Hey, I click on their videos all the time. Really, actually, you’re clicking on something in an email, but you’re clicking on it. The other thing that does is Within the email, even though if, I mean, if they do open the email and they do click on the YouTube video, that’s great because they’re a very loyal audience and they’re going to actually watch it.
But even if they don’t, if they just see your name, it’s from Shelly, and Shelley says You should do ContentMinis at some point in your life, it’s going to remind me of that. Excuse me. It’s going to remind me of that. It’s just going to remind me. Shelly’s there, remind me. I like Shelly. I like her. I must like her because I haven’t unsubscribed yet. What about sharing? We do some sharing of YouTube on other platforms and it gives, sort of, gives us something to share. Now, the other, it’s not as easy to share on Instagram to LinkedIn or vice versa. Would sharing as far as videos, cross-platform be over? I mean, it’s already sort of over.
Shelly Saves The Day:
You know, I think that. Honestly, depending on the size of your audience across these other platforms, it usually doesn’t drive that much traffic in comparison to search or browse suggested. So it’s just a little lift. You might get more if you have a very substantial email maybe lists that are coming in from it, but they’ve also, on all these other platforms, made it so much.
More difficult to share. Where before you used to be able to see the thumbnail, now you see the thumbnail in a square with a truncated title. And so you have to do other things like, here, let me import the photo of the thumbnail and then leave the. The YouTube video link as a comment, or, you know, somewhere underneath.
So you still have something that’s a prettier cover image. And then sometimes now, even when you do it, they’ll try and launch in a YouTube video player inside of that native website. So they’ll play it inside of Twitter instead of taking YouTube. YouTube. And then you have to click on something to take you to YouTube specifically.
So they certainly. I don’t like it as much if it’s just a link to a YouTube video. So you do have to do those other things like import some sort of photo natively to make it look like it’s some sort of organic post on that platform. So does that then raise the bar of effort that is needed for people to be able to share effectively?
Yeah. I mean it takes low effort and you probably get low reward on the backside if you do it the lazy man’s way, but. I don’t know how much more the lift is if you do it the correct way organically. And there’s certainly different things, you know, like did you put an Instagram story with a swipe up link?
Now that everyone has access to it you know, did you do all these little tricks that we talk about? And so I think even when you do that, the amount of traffic that’s coming from your other platforms, like I said, unless you were just guardian on these other platforms I don’t know how much of a lift overall that is going to impact on your metrics.
Still worth doing, but not maybe obsessing and stressing over.
Dane Golden:
What about something like Twitch or Amazon Live streaming or things like that, would you see a lot more of that would live streaming and those platforms really go up? YouTube’s dead. Live streaming go up? Or would they do a lot? Would those platforms decide? They’re going to do a lot more video on demand.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Well, the people who are on YouTube are also on Amazon. It’s usually a product stream of talking about products that you found on Amazon. So it may or may not, because they may just be sorry. My puppy,
Dane Golden:
That’s all right. I think it’s that’s all. Shelly’s puppy, everyone. That’s all Shelly’s.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Poor little guy, he’s 13 years old. Everybody, he’s 13. He always likes to let me know he’s listening.
Dane Golden:
I think keep going. It’s part of the music accompaniment to this podcast live streaming.
Shelly Saves The Day:
It’s live. What can we say? You know, I think depending on the type of show that you have, unless you’re doing something that is product specific, always talking about other things that aren’t your brand or business. Hm. I mean, then maybe you might be multi streaming or you might see it on Amazon, but otherwise, I don’t know if you’re going to see that big of a lift in split splitting it out.
Dane Golden:
One of the other things that people might do if YouTube died today is they might try to get people, they might be more focused on apps and get people coming on over to their own proprietary apps and app video. Like, see, my app for video might happen a lot more. I’m not the person that goes and downloads the app for every company, but maybe that would change if this was a different world.
I think also companies like Wistia and Vidyard and other companies like that who have business players and other people who have. Sort of like hubs, spotty type of funnel video trackers. I think those people would start to see more business also because they’re good at saying, okay, your customer watched X percent of this video now encourage them to take this action.
So funnel based video, I guess, is what I’m saying. Would certainly see an uptick. And you know, there’s no reason businesses shouldn’t be using that today. It’s just a lot. Don’t.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Yeah. I could see also the rise of. If YouTube went down and Mr. Beast needed a place to host his videos, he would be the person to have an app that people could download and see previous or older content, and then probably dub versions in different languages and different things like that. So I could almost see that, or some sort of like Patreon type of place where you know, they have a free level and then.
I could maybe see that. And so it would be growing these membership sites, but I think, like you just touched on there would be choice exhaustion. Like I don’t want to, for my top five or 10 creators download 10 different apps maybe. And that’s the whole point of YouTube if you want, you know, the one place where you can come and find all the people that you want to watch.
And so there’s going to be then this rise of perhaps some sort of other video hosting platform of. You know, where everyone can be all together because the whole segregated experience isn’t actually a good experience for most of the viewers either. So,
Dane Golden:
So I guess in all these things, imagining this dystopian world where YouTube is gone. Guess what? That’s what we’ve learned that there, there is a lot of value for business doing, doing YouTube.
Shelly Saves The Day:
You know, one of the only other players I could, I mean really confidently come out and say maybe they could step up to some of this would be Amazon. Hosting video in aws, having integrations with a lot of people’s websites are all hosted on AWS, using their, you know, or, you know, databases. Because I don’t think Microsoft would take it on.
I think the only other one who would be aggressive enough to maybe go after something like that. And because of Amazon’s reach into Twitch and the streaming thing, I feel like they would be one of the only other people like poised to take it on.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, well, they certainly know how to host video. That’s not a question, particularly since they not only host Twitch, but they also host Amazon Prime.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Video. Yeah.
Dane Golden:
And they host Netflix.
Shelly Saves The Day:
Yes.
Dane Golden:
So, good topic today, Shelly. Until next week, how can people find Shelly Saves The Day?
Shelly Saves The Day:
You can hang out with me on YouTube under Shelly Saves The Day, or check out my website where you’ll find all the info for coaching, consultation, and ContentMinis, which is ShellySavesTheDay.com.
Dane Golden:
ContentMinis. Your content only smaller.
Shelly Saves The Day:
But smaller.
Dane Golden:
And I’m Dane Golden. VidAction.tv is my YouTube channel where we are uploading some of these audio podcasts as video. And you can see our shiny bright faces. Bright shiny faces. We can see ’em both and my, if you want to talk to me directly, book a call, a consulting call, go to TalkToDane.Today Until next week, here’s to helping you help your customers through video.