How to Build a YouTube Audience That Stays | Matt Whitman

0:00The number one piece of advice that I could ever give, and I just wish I had it so concisely right from the beginning, is it is not about you, it is about the audience, it is about the people on the other side. Think about what someone might need for their lives to be better, what questions they're asking, make a crystal clear value proposition, as you've done here, Dusty, and then deliver on it to make their lives better. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's conversation on the creator's hub podcast. I am joined today by Matt Whitman. Matt is the co-host of the No Dumb Questions podcast with Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day. He's also the Matt Whitman YouTube channel, the 10 minute Bible Hour podcast. He's the author of the best-selling book, The Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible. Matt enjoys making funny, accessible content about history, academic Christian stuff, and the Bible, Matt, how are you doing today?

1:02Doing great, nice to be here, Dusty. Absolutely, well, I'm really looking forward to chatting with you as of recording of this episode, your Matt Whitman YouTube channel has 281,000 subscribers. You've uploaded over 500 videos, so you've built a really amazing community over on your channel. The podcast is doing really well. Can you let the audience know, how did you get into this? What was your first foray into the creator space and how did that kind of happen? I've been writing and making music and acting and doing film stuff for just all kinds of creative stuff for a really long time. I mean, since I was a kid, I started editing in Premiere and writing at the end of college, maybe like 1999. I might get fact checked on this, maybe Premiere didn't exist until 2000 or something, but I think I remember editing in Adobe Premiere in the 1990s if that's a thing. And so I've just always liked stuff like this. When I was a kid, like in maybe eighth grade or something, they asked us what we all wanted to do when we grew up

2:04and I said that I wanted to be like an adventure, travel, history, channel, host, and do things like that, felt the same way through college. As, I mean, how can I put this? Okay, you can only unwrap a present for the first time once, right? And it's amazing to see something new to have the joy of discovery. And then after that, the only way you can feel that again, about that thing, that event, that person, that beauty, that work of art, that cultural text, whatever it might be, is to vicariously experience it through somebody else as they see it for the first time. I love that experience. I love getting, you know, more, you go see Rome for the first time, right? It's beautiful, it's magical, it's enchanting. Well, the second time it is less so, unless you bring somebody along with you, then it's even more fun if they're kind enough to let you show them some things that you love about it. So I've always liked making stuff that invites other people to unwrap a present

3:05that I've enjoyed unwrapping and then see what they see and learn from them as well. So I did that in a lot of different formats, you know, going back a long ways. And then in the early 2010s, I was working at a church in Wyoming by Yellowstone and it was a really cool gig. I never meant to be a pastor or anything. I kind of just, I did the academic side of church history and religious studies and stuff and there was a cool church and they needed a pastor and I was like, well, I think technically I'm trained to do that, let's do it. So I jumped in and did that job in a beautiful place, but it was a very remote mountain town, you know, a big church in a small town, right? So everybody would travel, like if you go to Home Depot, that's a weekend. It's one of the most remote places in the lower 48. But, you know, I know that you've got people listening to your show here who have varying religious convictions or whatnot. So I'll explain a little more than I normally would, but my preference for what happens in church with sermons is you pick a book of the Bible

4:06and you just chip away at it a little bit. And that way it kind of takes, you know, the pastor's biases out of it. The text kind of does more of the work, right? Well, that's really hard when every time somebody from your church needs to go to Home Depot, they're going to miss church. So you've got all these really faithful people, but it's hard to do a series when everybody's gone all the time for the whole weekend because it's just the normal rhythm of life. So I started putting stuff on the internet and the idea was that I would do like a daily show style, kind of quick 10 minute, hey, it's not church, we're just going to have a laugh about things, but we'll keep you up to speed on what we're doing at church and, you know, then I can cover books of the Bible the way I want to. And very, very quickly that outgrew the church in 2014. I think I started working on it into 2015 and then it kind of decoupled from church. We got on to the next thing and I was still going on this one book of the Bible. Some of your listeners might know it. It's called the Book of Acts. It's about like the early history of the Christian religion and all of that. And so I got done with Acts and then I was like,

5:07oh, I'll do some other stuff too. And just gradually I found this whole community of people who were kind of like me raised around Christian faith. It turned weird. Christianity, I don't know whether you're into this stuff or not, but it went through like a gigantic overhaul with the advent of my space. The Western Christian faith was not ready for everybody being in the same room at the same time and talking about all of their convictions at once. And I mean, it's got pretty rocky. I would posit that a lot of the politics and culture that's happened in the last 20 years is because of that rocky transition. Well, I was caught up in that. I went through the same thing everybody did. I was raised with this thing, but now the world has changed so much. What do you do with it? You go through the ups and downs of faith. And so I just found a whole bunch of people on the internet who were like me able to kind of have a laugh about some of the sillier things that go along with church and Christian religion and things like that. But also suspicious there might be something to it. I lived on both sides of the divide of belief

6:07and not belief. So I found it really easy to empathize with people who are coming at faith from either of those perspectives. And just gradually it grew into a really nice, functional community. And we just kind of did Bible stuff for four years or so. A buddy of mine and I, a buddy who's had great success on the internet, his name's Destin. He does what you mentioned at Destin does smarter every day. On YouTube, he and I decided to do a show together starting about 10 years ago. We still do that to this day. And so that was kind of my second foray into internet stuff. And then it's evolved since then, but we can talk about that more as the conversation goes along. So that's how I got into it. What was, or do you remember the moment when you said to yourself internally or even you might have verbalized it, hey, this may be more than just a hobby. You know, you transitioned from kind of being a pastor and you were kind of dabbling with YouTube and video stuff. Was there a moment or a specific season where you said to yourself, oh, wait,

7:09this might be something beyond just a hobby? Yeah, it sounds kind of crass to admit that my first paycheck had a lot to do with that, but you asked an honest question. I'll give you an honest answer. You know, the church I worked at, I made a very nice, perfectly functional middle class salary. Nothing to brag about, nothing to be ashamed about. Just, you know, the kind of thing you could raise a family on and make it work. So I had no gripes at all with where I was at. You know, I'm not gonna build like some kind of fortune or great retirement with it or anything, but it was great. I was very happy doing what I was doing with a great church, but you know, a destined channel, smart everyday, it's a much bigger thing. And he was ahead of me in the game in terms of sponsorship and how that works. And the first time that we did an ad integration on the podcast, I was like, oh, wow, that's, I did not expect the number to be that good. It's not income replacement, but dang, that's,

8:10now I kind of know like X number of loyal audience people equals I number of potential income. And yeah, I mean, what's the factor, right? If you wanna jump to this and you wanna do it full time, the question is, can I pay my bills? Can I provide for the people I'm promised to and be holding to? And if you can't, don't go full time. So kind of just running the numbers and saying like, if I worked this hard and did this much stuff, I could earn what I earned currently with a church salary and then I would have the option if I wanted to to jump over to this full time. And how did you learn the mission premiere? Did you just basically just what I call YouTube University got on there, watched video tutorials, started learning how to do all this and then basically you were, how did you already have experience? Yeah, I mean, my experience with premiere predates the existence of YouTube.com. So I mean, yeah, I started, you know, right at the end of college, right out of college. So what is that four or five years before YouTube

9:12was even a thing, right? So you just figured it out, I guess. There were like little books that you could get at the library. And the books would tell you how to edit things. My wife was a certified trainer for Adobe and Microsoft. She's still really handy with the Adobe suite and with Photoshop. So she actually was sort of my go-to for asking questions. And then, you know, since then, well, yeah, sure. I mean, if I don't know what I'm doing, I just go to YouTube. Somebody knows or I've got a couple buddies where I know some tricks and they know some tricks and we compare notes. What's something that you wish you would have known sooner about growing a channel and just YouTube in general? See, Dusty, now we come to the fork in the road, don't we? This is the part where it's like, well, do you just give away the secret sauce? Come on now, we need that secret sauce. Or do you get to change the about it, right? Yeah. Look, here's the secret sauce for the internet,

10:13for running a business, for running a church, for being a friend, for being a good parent, give value to other people for free because you love them and you want their lives to be well. And if they're unlovable, try to love them anyway. And if they're disagreeable, fine, disagree with them, but still try to serve them. There are two theories for how an economy works. One is stupid and one is true. One is a dream that people like to have when they're in college because it's a fashionable way to think when you're in college. The other one is reality, demonstrated by all of human history. Wealth is created when people make things that make other people's lives better. Reality financially incentivizes us to think about the needs of other people and meet them. And I think that is a beautiful thing about reality. If you exploit people, you will kill the Golden Goose. Now, I think it's just morally wrong to exploit people because of religious convictions. When I say I always get that right,

11:14but I hope I'm not exploiting anybody. But the market, I think, backs up the value, what I would call the values of the kingdom of God, which is if you want to be great, become a servant. If you want to be the first, be the last. If you go into a big fancy banquet and there's a fancy seat up at the front or a lowly seat at the back, take the one at the back. If you get invited to the front, fine, if not, fine. The trick is think about other people. The problem with YouTube right now, and I don't care how much I sound like I get off my lawn old timer here. I've been doing this a long time. The problem right now is it got gamified and it got turned into a way to exploit and hack an audience instead of serving an audience. Now, the algorithm has been catered to temporarily play along with YouTube hacks. But it doesn't work. Go look, long term, name a creator

12:14who has had a meaningful long term career whose life isn't ruined, whose reputation isn't in shambles for treating people that way. But look at all of the people in any kind of business or YouTube or podcasting or media or anything. Look at the people who are celebrated and loved. Dolly Parton just passed away yesterday as you and I are recording this. Why does everybody love Dolly Parton? Because she serves everybody else. Because she cares about everybody else's doing. The number one piece of advice that I could ever give, and I just wish I had it so concisely right from the beginning is it is not about you. It is about the audience. It is about the people on the other side. Think about what someone might need for their lives to be better, what questions they're asking. Make a crystal clear value proposition as you've done here, Dusty. And then deliver on it to make their lives better. You might get a lot of views. You might not get very many, but if you're serving other people, it'll go to plan.

13:14And if you don't get all the views you want, you'll put your head on the pillow when you're old and be like, I treated people well. I did something that was honest and that's cool. It's interesting because exactly what you said is the premise of a lot of what we talk about in marketing or in this case, specifically YouTube and growing a brand and an audience of, what is your thing? Are you going to entertain or are you going to educate? But it all circles back to, like you said, you said it very well, serving the audience or serving the person that you're trying to target. If there's someone listening to this and they're kind of waffling about in terms of, they know what their niche is or maybe they don't. But how would you, if you could go back and talk to yourself years ago and you mentioned you wish you kind of would have known this sooner, how would you tell those people listening of, this is how you can find, you know, how you can serve your audience better. What would you say to them? Okay, first, make the metric, make the thing you think about the most, how served and how benefited

14:17the people who trusted you with their precious time are. Do not make the primary metric, YouTube numbers. I mean, literally today YouTube changed the way they count. So today, YouTubers everywhere, like I'm popular, my thing is great because now one second of hovering counts as a view, whereas last week, the same YouTubers were like, I'm miserable, my numbers are down, everything's terrible. That's been the vibe for two years for established YouTubers. They changed the counting a while back and all got worse. Now they changed the counting and all got better. Who cares? Are you serving your audience? The primary metric, the primary answer you should be trying to get to is, am I hearing what people need? Did I make a good value proposition and did I deliver on making people's lives better? Do they feel cared about by me? And is this stuff I said true? The other stuff is gonna come into focus if you're doing that well. I have more thoughts, but I'll be honest. Yeah, that translates to, I've mentioned before

15:20on the show, my dad is a big fan of a guy called Zig Zigler. And basically his Zig Zigler was a big proponent of, okay, you give everyone else what they want and you're gonna get 10x. Basically, it's kind of the premise of what he would say. And my dad, as I was growing up, he would always tell me as a good father and my mom was right there with him, hey, listen, you know, care about other people. And on YouTube, it's the same way that if you want to be a part of the YouTube partner program, which is a big milestone, it's a big thing people are trying to reach. And I don't blame people for wanting that goal, but you have to figure out number one who your audience is and then how to serve those people. And what you're freebies, which is what I call them, Matt, you may call them something else, whatever your freebie is, whether it's a YouTube video and email newsletter, a course, a book like what Matt has as well, whatever your offering needs to answer those questions or serve that audience. And so now I completely agree with what you're saying. In YouTube, unfortunately, your right has been muddied

16:23up a bit with not only artificial intelligence, but the way that things are kind of going. So I think that it has been, it's more important than ever to find your audience and serve those people. The money will come, the views will come, right? Yeah. You've, no doubt, Dusty, you have seen, you not washed up, used up celebrities over the course of your life, right? Like I remember when I was a kid, Brittany Spears was the big thing. And she was so pretty and all the boys had a crush on Brittany Spears. Well now she's a punchline, right? Like she's someone to be worried about and she's the kind of person you look at and it raises questions about mental wellbeing and the cost of fame. She's a cautionary tale. But she was the it girl for five years. Okay. How many times do, I mean, how many of these cautionary tales, could we just brainstorm on stuff? Or head hundreds, thousands of people who got what they wanted, they got the audience, they served the audience,

17:26but they got the wrong audience and it had the wrong influence. They created the wrong feedback loop on them and then when it was over and it will be over. If I stop publishing my book or run for a while because I got Harper Collins behind it, but like everything else would just fall out of the algorithm and I'll be gone and forgotten. And that's kind of comforting in a way to know that we really can just go away when we step off of the treadmill. That's a good thing. But how many people do we know who when it's over, they're miserable. They don't, like life doesn't have meaning, they don't, all the relationships that mattered and that were moored went away and they got obsessed with the sum metric, whatever it was in our line of work, you know, downloads or retention or click-through rate or whatever. And you just lose your voice, you lose your mind and we've seen this from others. Well, it happens to people like us too. So this is the next cautionary thing that I would throw out, but it's not just a cautionary thing.

18:27This can go either way. If you get this right, it's one of the best things in the world. If you get it wrong, it will destroy you. Okay. The audience you make will be who you become. I'm gonna say it again, because I care about the people we're talking to and I'm just talking to the people we're talking to. I care about you and I care about your soul. Some of you are ahead of me in this game. Probably a lot of you are just getting started on this. I am telling you, the audience you cultivate is what you will become. So if you just care about the stupid numbers, you will figure out hacks for how to get those numbers where you wanna be, but not all numbers are created equal. And you will have a feedback loop with your audience. They will be the most influential people in your life. So cultivate an audience full of virtuous people who are going in life where you wanna go and you'll go there together. If you cut corners and you cultivate a bad audience, you will get numbers.

19:28People won't even be that impressed. They'll pretend to be, because socially they're obligated to, but they'll probably just be envious of you. But you won't get anything for the numbers. It doesn't really matter that much, but you will lose your voice. You will forget who you are and you will become that corrupt audience. So be careful with it. It's a monkey's paw. If you use this thing the right way, you will be a magnet that draws virtuous people to yourselves and you will create a feedback loop with them and your life will be rich. If you cut corners because you love numbers, you'll hurt. And when it's all over and you step away from it, you will hurt and I don't want that for you. I interrupt this conversation just for a few seconds to tell you a few things that we offer to creators. If you're someone looking to take your channel to the next level, I think we have something for you. We have a creator mastermind group, five, 10 bucks, get you in. We do mastermind calls every month, sometimes two to three times a month. We also have channel reviews where you pay a very small amount for me to take a look at your channel.

20:29And then I record a six to seven minute video around your channel of where I think you can spend your time to improve your channel. And then if you want to go even farther than that, I offer one-on-one creator coaching where you get to sit down with me 30 minutes all the way up to 90 minutes and we break down your channel. We talk about things that you think you need to work on and more. And so if you're looking to take your YouTube channel to the next level, check the show notes and I think you're gonna find a service for you. Now back to the show. Yeah, this platform in general, not just YouTube, but just the internet as a whole, whether it's TikTok, Facebook, YouTube. It is a responsibility and it can be a drug to some people and they can search for the wrong things as you mentioned, but if you serve your audience well and you give them what they've, they're seeking when they found you or discovered you, you're generally going to have the results you want and some. And so I hope that people take away from this that what Matt and I are speaking of

21:30is that listen, your audience is important. The people that you cultivate around your brand and community, that's important. How you do it is important. But once you kind of find that golden goose per se or the sauce that Matt talked about in the beginning of that answer, you will see the power in, hey, listen, yes, it's important to look at numbers. And we're not saying that that's not important. These things are all auxiliary. You need to look at the watch time and the things that matter and the things that I talk about on the show. But if you really want to get to the backbone of what a creator that is successful does for the most part, it is serving their audience well and knowing who that audience is. That those are the two big important things. Now you mentioned numbers, Matt. Can we talk about money and how you make money? So let's talk about, let's break that down. You have a book, you have the YouTube channel. What are the different buckets that you as a creator are able to make money and provide for your family? Yeah. And what you just said, like that's the magic word for me. I'm lucky enough to be a husband and a dad. And it is, I had no idea this part of me would awaken

22:32when I got married and we started to have kids. But I met my first kid, my little girl. Like she's still like a goop on her and my heart changed, my priority. In that moment, trying not to drop my baby who doesn't even understand the world yet, it's like, it just hit me right then. I, this will never end. This is what I will be doing for the rest of my life. I will be caring for this new human who I'm about to bestow a name upon. And then to more came along. I mean, yeah, it is such a privilege to get to lay down my youth in part to serve my family. So I care about this very, very much. Beyond that, we don't need much, we don't have great ambitions. So everybody should take that into account. Everybody has different financial goals. Things you're trying to accomplish. I want my debts to be paid. I want to be able to pay to help my kids get a good education. I want to be healthy and I want to be with them

23:33for a long time. I want to love my wife. Well, these are my goals. I want to be generous. I want to give money away. So with that in mind, I kind of built it this way. Maybe five buckets that produce income. The first one was a Patreon on my YouTube channel. YouTube channel was the original thing. Right now it is the second biggest thing I do. My daily podcast is much larger than the YouTube channel in terms of audience and, you know, listen time and all of that stuff. Which is the 10 minute Bible hour. That's the daily podcast that you do. Okay. Yeah. And we should talk more about why that works. I think that would be interesting for your audience as well. The value proposition on that one is the strongest of my three internet things. So I started a Patreon. I don't know. It grew pretty well. The reason it worked is because the audience liked my vision for the world.

24:34I think there were a whole lot of people and still are a whole lot of people in my audience who like I was saying earlier, they have one foot on each side of the historical divide that is the internet. And I would say myspace.com is that dividing line in history. I think historians from the future will look back and say like at 2005, that right there is where history, that's where the postmodern era ended. And the early internet age of thought, the AI age of thought. I don't know what they'll end up calling it. But our brains and our relationships became different after 2005. Well, there's a whole bunch of people who think there's a God who like my content. They also think that the way we did it and language it before myspace was already a problem. It wasn't making sense. The language was broken. Then myspace happened and it exposed that and it became more evident. And that made some people very religiously angry at other people. Like take over the government kind of angry.

25:37It made other people be like, just get rid of all the stuff the Bible says and let's just go hard, hard, hard, hard, left and the values of like leftism will just be our new ethics. Okay, that's another way to do it. I don't do either of those. Then there were other people who were like, let's just go back to traditional orthodox Catholic stuff. Maybe that'll feel better. Other people were like, yeah, but theologically, I like kind of the Protestant version. I just don't like how we language it. Okay, well, this is very scattering. So what people read between the lines and saw in my content was a dude who was wrestling through the exact same questions they were. And I had a few constructive proposals. I think if we do it this way, I think if we talk about it this way, I think if we think about people we might disagree with in this way, that would be a way forward and this could work. And so then what happened was people jumped on that Patreon to support me number one and number two, to invest in a vision for the world

26:39or the discourse or faith that they wanted to see win. Is it perfect? No, no. I mean, I'm always thinking, and it's a hard not to crack. I'm working on it, you know? But a bunch of people who believed in the approach that I was taking wanted to invest in that. That was the value proposition of the Patreon. What I never did on Patreon was a mistake, and I think it is a mistake, no disrespect to all of your audience members. You see this different? Don't make it transactional. I never made it transactional. Destin and I have both always used the language. This is a goodwill engine. We will under promise and over deliver. So the under promise is, I make this content on the internet. If you support me, you will then be supporting me and I will still make this content on the internet. So basically, if you want to give me money, thank you. I'm not going to send you some dumb hat. I'm not going to obligate myself to make a bunch of, you know, additional bonus material. Like what?

27:40I'm going to hold back stuff that should go to the larger audience, but it's going to go to the smaller audience. Like I'm not going to make my best stuff for the smaller audience. If I do that, I'm going to make my best stuff for the bigger audience. It's not a good model. It's not the right strategy. And go everybody, just go run a poll. See how much your people actually care about the gimmicks. They don't. If your Patreon is working well, it's because there is something you do, an artistic vision, a vision for the world, an ethical vision that they love and understand and they want to invest in you and they want to invest in that. If you turn Patreon into a transactional gimmick, you get customers instead of benefactors. And those customers are going to want customer service. And when they don't get the customer service, they will be unhappy and they will complain. And those complaints will happen publicly and it will sour other patrons. And all of a sudden, your home base becomes a place that is not at peace, so just don't offer it.

28:42Make five tiers and be like 20 bucks a month is great. 40 bucks a month is also great. Right. And that's it. And then every now and then be like, yeah, this is something cool I could send everybody. I'm just going to do it because I thought of them and I love them and they make my life better. So surprise, I mailed you all a thing. That's it. That's the secret sauce on Patreon. If you, I'm talking straight into the camera again here, if you folks in the audience are noticing that your Patreon is not getting traction, I don't think it's because your gimmick isn't clever enough. I think it's because your vision of the world or the artistic value that you're asking people to invest in has not been clearly articulated enough either in your brain or out loud and communicated to your people. Show them a vision of the world that they can invest in and invite them to invest in it and then deliver on it by being somebody who's representative of that. And that, I know a whole lot of people's Patreon numbers. I'm intimately familiar with a whole bunch of fancy people.

29:44You probably know from the internet we talk and the people who are coming at it the way I'm talking about, it works. The people who are trying to get customers, they're always battling, uphill battle all the time. Dude, I barely even got through the bucket. I got through like one half of one bucket. Well, that's all right. So quickly, you're about to get the rest of the model. So what are the other ways that you're monetizing? Okay, I got preachy, that was bad form. I'm not gonna do that again, I'm stopping. No, I like it. I like it, that's good. I agree with you. Okay, after that, we launch Notum questions. That's a two-dude talk and podcast. Look at Destin's stuff. He's wildly successful. Of course, that podcast is doing great. I would like to think I'm very helpful on that, but you're not idiots. If Destin makes a podcast, someone with that level of audience, it's gonna go well. And don't tell him I said this because I don't want him to get weird, but he's just enormously talented and he's funny

30:46and he's good at stuff. It's on an accident that his YouTube channel has done very, very well. It's a reflection of his talent and it's a reflection of him literally being the most gifted person I've ever met at the art of audience empathy. That dude is empathetic toward people he's never met and can understand who they are and what they need and refuses to exploit them, but sees them as people. And that's the secret sauce behind his channel. He loves his audience and wants wonderful things for their lives. It comes through in what he makes. And so they love him back. He deserves everything that he's built. Well, I learned a ton from him making this podcast together and pretty quickly we launched a Patreon on that. Again, certain people could see what we were going for that the show is ostensibly about a rocket scientist and a humanities guy picking a topic, giving each other a hard time,

31:47but really doing educational on the fly work in a funny, entertaining way. Some members of the audience figured out this is about adult friendship. Like this is about the ups and downs and ins and outs of how you do that in a very weird time where friendship is hard to come by and they wanted to invest in that. So our Patreon, we've sent out like some stickers and stuff but our Patreon is just basically a place for inside jokes. There's not a lot of discussion there. Not much really happens there at all. It is just destined's words, not mine, a goodwill engine. If you like this and you think it's redemptive and you wanna kick in, cool. If you don't, we will still do it until it makes zero money and we can't afford to anymore. That's the plan. Right. Then we started running ads on that program and we were running ads in the golden age when the money was flowing.

32:48Not like yacht money or anything crazy like that but man, pay off school debt money. The reason I finally paid off our family's student loans was because hello fresh. I don't rake on earbuds. Like just a handful of products that we could genuinely believe in came along and they wanted to work with us and we never, we refused to do ad reads. We integrated, truly integrated everything into the flow of the show. So if you skip the ad, like you are skipping what you're here for, the jokes are gonna keep going. It's gonna be woven right together with whatever the subject matter is. We didn't episode about guns one time. Yep, that was problematic with that sponsor. We worked through it, whatever we were like, look. Do you know what you're signing up for? We talk about everything. And so people don't skip the ads, which is just, you're wonderful. And so back when there've kind of been two generations of ad buyers, people in charge of the integration thing,

33:50there was kind of an old school group and the philosophy used to be, you wanna sell the product. I know that seems obvious, but it's not obvious anymore. Then I observed kind of an influx of folks who studied something else, didn't find jobs in it in college and kind of got into the content creator ad space. And that generation of ad buyers and ad reps just totally lost the plot. And it became about, like I get in trouble if we don't say this sentence. We'd come back and say things like, if I say that sentence, my audience will hate your brand. You just simply don't, this is gonna sound patronizing and I don't care. You simply don't get it, young man. If I say the sentence, you want me to say, my audience will smell fraud, they'll like me less and they'll hate your product

34:51because your product in their mind will be the thing that ruined the show they like. So we can't say that. If we act like humans and talk about why we actually like the product because we only advertise things, we actually like and we reject 85% of what comes in. They'll know we mean it. You just need, you're gonna have to trust us on this. And we lost clients over it. Others loved us for that. What I know is this. One of the comments we get the most on our show is best ads on the internet. Never, never, ever skip an ad on no dumb questions. Stupid skits, dopey sound effects. Like it's just, we made them unskippable. And it was, it was frustrating to me when I saw that kind of shift around 2021 toward like people who just fundamentally don't understand the exercise, dictating these stupid terms and they made ads worse. That's bad for everyone, gradually,

35:52you know, right at the height of, you know, before things kind of flipped politically, you know, people might not remember, but in the 20 teens, you got punished for thinking more traditional conservative things. Like punished pretty hard socially. And then it flipped around 21. And then some of the more anti-social unpleasant types from the other side who had felt persecuted, they kind of had the upper hand for a while and weren't super pleasant to people who now had the lower hand. I don't know when this tip for tat thing will end. I think it's cruel and no way to do a society. Hopefully at some point things like, you know, forgiveness will kick in. We can like each other more. But for now, that flip happened. The iceberg, the cultural iceberg rolled over, right? And so we kind of caught the end right before the iceberg rolled. And we felt like we were being told,

36:54we felt pressure to just signal things that we were like, I don't know, not for against, that's just not, I'm not doing that. So not what we do here, it's not what this is about. So we started turning down ads for that reason. Now there's kind of pressure to signal things. The other way a little bit, I'm not doing that either. So for me, there's still money in ads, but there are so few products that I believe in that haven't graduated to kind of being real products. Now that don't really need us or that don't come with weird baggage. So there's ads, but that's a monkey's paw too. The show's better without them. And there are strings. So that paid off my student loans, and then we quit running them. And now it's just, it's mostly all Patreon. I think you may have mentioned so many good points in regards to the monetization options that you've chosen.

37:54The Patreon thing is intriguing. I love the statement you made about making your ads unskippable. I think that's really important in most of the podcasts that I listen to insert ads to make, just to make ends meet, right? Like you can tell they're not passionate about the product. They don't probably use the product in their day to day. And so it becomes a thing of just, this is a transaction of, hey, I'm putting in all of this work. We have to have some way of making money from putting all this time in the research and the effort that the show takes, right? So I think for you, it's really interesting. I think you can apply the same thing to your call to action. And what I mean by that is in this podcast that you're listening to right now, if you're listening to this conversation, I offer YouTube coaching and consulting and we have a mastermind group. All of these things are my items that I want my call to action to lead to. And what I want these conversations to do is to provide enough free information and enough value that the person says to themselves,

38:56I trust Dusty, he's having these conversations and I listen to him every week. And I want those times that I come in and mention these things to be unskippable. I don't want it to be just something that is so static and stiff. I want it to be real. I want people to know that I care about them. I want their YouTube channel to succeed. And if you never hire me, that's fine. It's completely fine. And I think that's when you're mentioning what you're talking about with your Patreon, it's a really good point. I think I've made some mistakes leaning on the other end in my journey as a creator. So it's interesting to hear you talk about the journey that you've been on. Now, I want to ask you this as we're approaching the 40 minute mark, I keep these around 30 to 35 minutes and I don't want to rush this conversation. I know, I apologize. But I want to, I want to ask you this, not really a question, but more of kind of a statement. To succeed on YouTube in 2026, like a creator listening to this, they're struggling, you know, YouTube's throwing up all kinds of mixed signals. I just recorded an episode that's going out tomorrow about the new thing that YouTube's doing

39:57of every time you click on a video, they're going to count it from frame one. But really that's not the whole picture. Like you got to go into the advanced, you know, analytics now to see that there's another kind of views that people may not even know about called engaged viewers and then unique viewers and there's so many things that YouTube is kind of hiding behind people are going to think instantly, well, that means I'm making more money. That's not the case. So I think YouTube can be a confusing and convoluted place. Can you just maybe leave us with what you would say to those people who are kind of in that spot? Yeah. YouTube is tough. Think of it like foreign currency, right? Make it any given point. There's a dominant currency in the world. That's one unit of currency X is the best. And everybody measures their currency relative to that. Like, I hope, you know, USD is worth 0.75 of the best currency in the world. YouTube is the third strongest click currency right now.

41:00I mean, the garbage currencies, the penny stocks, you have to mix the metaphor a little bit, would be a Twitter engagement, Facebook view, these things, you don't get anything for them. You can get them, I guess you get prestige, you can tell your mom, I got a million views, it doesn't matter, you don't get anything for that. YouTube is still a pretty high value currency of all the video formats, other than a movie theater view or a Netflix stream. It is the top normal person video creative currency. So it's very valuable. And I'm very interested to see what these new changes do to YouTube's currency rating in that regard. Above that would be an engaged podcast listen. That is better than a YouTube view. And above that, if you can count as a currency would be like a sub stack or a book. If you can get books never go away, that's a pretty cool thing, it's a privilege. If you can do something like that. So YouTube is pretty valuable.

42:01And understanding that currency exchange is important for knowing relatively speaking, what is your level of success compared to this other stuff. There are shortcuts to just getting numbers on a screen on some website. Don't think about any of that. If you're going to deal in YouTube, these are the things you got to do. Crystal clear value proposition. You need to demonstrate that you are an actual human being who actually has some sort of qualification by either training or sheer effort to actually serve your audience. And with the AI cluttering age, I think that's the most important thing that's going right now. Be an actual person. You can even be wrong about things. Every time you're wrong, it's an opportunity to demonstrate that you're a human who can be wrong about things. You don't have to edit out every single mistake. You can correct yourself on camera. It's fine. It'd give anything, if anything, your weaknesses and frailties as a person right now

43:03benefit you because we're so sick of all the polish on everything. And think about yourself. Do you mind that other people have flaws? Do you mind that other people don't know everything? Or do you find people who pretend to know everything by googling stuff between every jump cut insufferable? Nobody wants to be around the person who knows everything. They want to be around the intrepid explorer who is trying and who has a certain set of principles that go along with what they're doing. And they want to be around people that they think care about them. So throwing your energy at that stuff is always right, even though the YouTube algorithm is a moving target. If I tell you what to do right now is we're recording this on August 27th, 2026. And you watch this in 2028. I will have, I will have zone chaos in your life because you'll be listening to stuff that is outdated. The algo will change. Hacks are temporary. They just come and go.

44:04Loving other people, being forgiving toward yourself and toward others, being gracious toward other people on the internet. Not wasting people's time and trying to give them value and make their lives better. That transcends every iteration of all these currencies I'm talking about. It transcends political divides. It transcends all of the changes to the algorithm and what's hot and what's not and all of the trending stuff. If you do those things, you can figure out the little tricks that work for six months here and there to figure out how to get some traction. You're smart, you can do that. But principle, principle, principle. People don't care about what you know until they know that you care. Serve other people. That's timeless. Yeah, it really is about the audience and giving them what they're coming there for. I think you've done a really good job and a lot of kind of angles in this episode talking about that. So Matt, I really appreciate your time. Again, if you want to see what Matt's got going on,

45:05I'm going to have all of his links in the show notes of this week's episode. It's Matt Whitman, WHITM, and his main YouTube channel that he has the 10 minute Bible Hour podcast as well as some other stuff that he's doing with his friend Destin. He also has a physical book, The Lightning Fast Fill Guide to the Bible. It's behind him right now. If you're watching the video there on his bookshelf, but Matt, we just appreciate your time. And hopefully we can have you on again in a couple of years. And when you're about half a million or a million subscribers and do this all over again. Yeah, I'd love that. Great job, great questions. Thanks for your patience with me going a little long. No worries. Thanks Matt. And that's a wrap on this week's podcast. I'm so thankful that you stayed to the end. Don't forget to check out all the services that we offer for creators. Everything from our mastermind group, channel reviews and audits, one-on-one coaching. If you're looking for something, we have it. Check the show notes for all of the things that we offer creators. With that said, don't forget to subscribe to the show wherever and however you are listening

46:05or watching to the podcast. That way every Friday when we go live with a new episode, you will be notified. And with that said, we'll see you guys next week.