10 Good Things: Ephron, Bamford, Seinfeld, Mulaney, and more
Reject the algorithm, not hot topics, what makes YouTube Shorts go viral, etc.
🔗 Reject the algorithm. “Because the algorithm will make you do things that you don’t really want to do.” On the downsides of chasing commercial success…
But, at what cost? After all, would you rather be yourself and be known by thousands, or be someone else and be known by tens (or hundreds) of thousands? Do you want to copy what the masses are doing or do you want to blaze your own trail?
🔗 Ha:
Ya better have a fresh take if you’re gonna go there.
🔗 Mulaney on Theo pod is something else. Theo speaks addict in a way that gets something deep/new outta Mulaney.
🔗 Funny or Die’s Matt Klinman (in 2018) on how/why the money from making comedy vids online drying up.
The worst part is that as an artist, it feels like your own fault. We’re used to a world where if you put something out there that’s good, people see it and share it. But that’s just not true in this world. Someone can make something really good, and just because of some weird algorithmic reasons, or if it’s not designed specifically for Facebook, it doesn’t do well. And then it becomes impossible to know what a good thing to make is anymore.
🔗 A study of 3.3 Billion views to decode the YouTube Shorts algorithm.
Most creators make Shorts between 20–40 seconds, but Shorts between 50–60 seconds perform the best, averaging 1.7 million views in the study.
Longform videos convert subscribers better than Shorts do.
Longform videos converted 22.7 subscribers per 10,000 views while Shorts converted 16.9 subscribers.
But the inverse is true for creators with over 1 million subscribers. Why? Galloway’s theory: “These channels are making better Shorts on average that reach more viewers, and are using better call-to-actions inside those Shorts.”
🔗 Comedy writer
tells about the platform / tilt (i.e. when something weird happens in a totally normal scene).We're all like talking this is normal, everybody's normal. But then, Michael starts talking in Spanish for no reason, like the the world is no longer normal. We've tilted.
🔗 Nora Ephron learns how to write a lead. “There's the facts, and then there's what people really need to know.”
“It was an electrifying moment. So that’s it, I realized. It’s about the point. The classic newspaper lead of who-what-where-when-how-and-why is utterly meaningless if you haven’t figured out what the significance of the facts is. What is the point? What does it mean? He planted those questions in my head.”
Up ahead: More from Bamford, Seinfeld, and Mulaney...
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