How Jeff Bezos would run a YouTube channel
Quantity > Quality?
Before I started this YouTube channel, I watched several videos that gave some great advice on how to start and grow a channel, but one question I had that I couldn’t get a proper answer to is should I be focusing on quality or quantity when it comes to YouTube videos. Of course in an ideal world, you’d produce lots of videos that were all of the highest quality possible but our time is finite and a balance needs to be struck.
There are advantages to each approach. A larger quantity of videos will mean that your channel will appear more in search results and therefore will be more likely to be discovered. It also means that as a side effect you’ll be posting regularly, which will encourage people to check your channel frequently so they don’t miss anything.
On the other hand, increasing the quality of your content will make people more likely to subscribe and more likely to come back and watch more of your videos as they know they’re great. Also, high quality videos are far more likely to be shared, increasing the chance that they’ll go viral. So which method should you concentrate on?
Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon also owns the Washington Post, an American daily newspaper that focuses on politics. He’s implemented a strategy at the newspaper that has increased visitors to its website by 28% from April 2015 to April 2016. So how has he achieved this? One of the main factors is due to a “long tail approach” that he also employed previously at Amazon. This method has worked on other sites as well such as BuzzFeed and I believe Bezos would employ the same tactic were he to start a YouTube channel today.
The Washington Post now publishes more than one piece of content every two minutes, that’s over 1,200 posts a day. This high volume strategy aims at engaging a long tail of more specific interests. A company that adopts the long tail theory will mean they will focus less on the small amount of really popular products and instead focus on the much larger amount of less popular, more niche products that exist.
Amazon managed to do this as the costs of storage and distribution of products fell and the profits from the huge long tail was larger than the profit from the relatively few extremely popular products. The Washington Post has focused on producing large amounts of content to attract viewers of more niche subjects which has resulted in a larger amount of total traffic to their website. Despite not producing as many high value, big articles, the growth in smaller pieces of content has driven traffic growth.
The same approach could be used on YouTube. With the ever decreasing cost in producing video, the ability to produce more content increases significantly. However, there are two considerations before going down this route.
1. The content produced still needs to be of a standard where people want to watch it
2. The high volume strategy works best if you are already an established brand that has produced high quality content previously.
A high volume tactic would result in meeting many traits that are encouraged when uploading to YouTube and many other aspects that are enjoyed by subscribers. These would include consistency and higher amount of views, shares and traffic to your channel.
