I've been hanging out here for almost a year. During that time, I've contributed a few threads, and learned a ton from some of the big names here. MJ's book changed everything for me, I'm now jobless and have had some minor passive income success, and am now excited to really swing for the fence with something. If you don't know me, some you might recognize these threads:
I bought a Supercar and Got a Lot of Slowlane Lessons
The Final Solution To All "I Have Some Money What Should I Do?" Threads
An Amazing Thing Happened To My INCOME When I Traded My Rusty Honda For A Viper
So I've tried to add value to this community via social commentary, but this will be my first business related thread on the outside.
I've decided to create an automotive YouTube channel, sort of in the vain of something like ChrisHarrisOnCars or MightyCarMods or MotorTrendWOT. I have absolutely no experience in photography or video production, web design or any kind of internet marketing. I've been figuring things out as I go. We've been shooting footage for about six months, had numerous mishaps I related on the inside, spent thousands of dollars, made mistakes, got messy, but after grossly over-estimating how easy things would be, we finally have enough stuff to go into post-production. I put together a teaser last weekend and set a hard start date that I'm all set for, but I wanted to wait and show it here first before I tweet it and share it on social media since you've been so instrumental in this whole thing.
So far as I know, I'm the first fastlaner here to try and create a channel as a fastlane plan. I know @DennisDuty has CastleForge and several other Fastlaners have YT channels (MJ, Pejman, etc.), but that seems to be more of a media production/marketing/engineering/Vloging focused thing to sell books or services or ideas, not an enterprise designed to begin and end with YT itself. As such, I feel an analysis of the plan might be helpful to others. Let's look at it using MJ's CENTS criteria:
Need: Automotive related channels receive millions of unique viewers every month. The market is actually fairly saturated with them. So why would anyone want another one, especially shot by armatures? My channel has a number of unique features (discussed below) that do meet a need no other channel is currently filling.
Entry: Shooting car videos of good quality requires a minimum of probably $2,500-5,000 worth of equipment and software, as well as two cars and two people willing to work long hours. Adsense payouts are woefully small, depending on the adblock saturation of your audience. As such, the barrier to entry is much higher than a video game review, vlogging, music, etc. channel.
Control: YouTube ultimately is the final arbiter of adsense revenues, so inasmuch as you depend on them, your control is limited. YT is like Amazon for videos, and their capricious behavior can be a problem. Secondary revenue streams will have to be sought. Also, the final play in this game is one that eliminates YT's exclusive control completely. More on that in the future. As it stands right now, this is the commandment which this idea comes the closest to defying.
Scale: Videos generate passive revenue forever and libraries of videos build on each-other, especially with links to older videos promoted in newer ones. Although there are not many options to scale this aspect of the business, the fact that the product is once-and-done-forever builds some scalability over time.
Time: The videos take a few dozen to a hundred hours to make, and last years. This commandment is the one which is most deftly met by a YT channel.
So, onto the actual project. The Channel is called TitleMine and has at least four features that should make us stand out among other channels:
1. We own every car on the channel. As such, reporting includes a lot of cost to operate, DIY, and situational reporting that you don't regularly get from more traditional review-and-return journalism.
2. Every car on the channel is involved in a flip that is at least cost-neutral, so we don't ultimately pay for any of them. Driving high-end cars for free (and not involving tax write-offs from large successful businesses or other means of subsidizing the price) is something a lot of people are interested in, and so we plan to make a number of videos discussing this topic.
3. We have a plan to gain sponsors that 90+% of automotive channels can't follow. This is the "need" mentioned above.
4. My wife is heavily involved with the project, so we have one presenter who is a woman. YT channels fronted by women vastly outperform those fronted by men on a per-capita basis.
Anyway, here is the teaser we made with an appropriately slidewalk-interest-raising title. Again, it hasn't been released anywhere else yet:
What I'd love from the FF community is any comments on the trailer. Likes and subscriptions to the channel would also be super helpful. I intend to try and secure my first channel sponsor next week, and will do it on the strength of a compelling content pitch, but having subscriptions to back that up won't hurt. As many as we can get would be awesome.
Over the last eight months, we released several videos to test the strength of different social advertising techniques. This one first, the success of which caught us by surprise (it was supposed to be a quick fun thing that would eventually be taken down after a few days of measuring its success):
And this one later, which more directly related to the channel, released using different aspects of social media for promotion:
Thus far, we have zero paid traffic. Once we get 2-3 episodes up, we are definitely going to start advertising to get views, @JasonR completely sold me on the idea.
Also, boats have been burned, so I'm on this full time and going to be reporting in pretty regularly. Should be exciting.
I bought a Supercar and Got a Lot of Slowlane Lessons
The Final Solution To All "I Have Some Money What Should I Do?" Threads
An Amazing Thing Happened To My INCOME When I Traded My Rusty Honda For A Viper
So I've tried to add value to this community via social commentary, but this will be my first business related thread on the outside.
I've decided to create an automotive YouTube channel, sort of in the vain of something like ChrisHarrisOnCars or MightyCarMods or MotorTrendWOT. I have absolutely no experience in photography or video production, web design or any kind of internet marketing. I've been figuring things out as I go. We've been shooting footage for about six months, had numerous mishaps I related on the inside, spent thousands of dollars, made mistakes, got messy, but after grossly over-estimating how easy things would be, we finally have enough stuff to go into post-production. I put together a teaser last weekend and set a hard start date that I'm all set for, but I wanted to wait and show it here first before I tweet it and share it on social media since you've been so instrumental in this whole thing.
So far as I know, I'm the first fastlaner here to try and create a channel as a fastlane plan. I know @DennisDuty has CastleForge and several other Fastlaners have YT channels (MJ, Pejman, etc.), but that seems to be more of a media production/marketing/engineering/Vloging focused thing to sell books or services or ideas, not an enterprise designed to begin and end with YT itself. As such, I feel an analysis of the plan might be helpful to others. Let's look at it using MJ's CENTS criteria:
Need: Automotive related channels receive millions of unique viewers every month. The market is actually fairly saturated with them. So why would anyone want another one, especially shot by armatures? My channel has a number of unique features (discussed below) that do meet a need no other channel is currently filling.
Entry: Shooting car videos of good quality requires a minimum of probably $2,500-5,000 worth of equipment and software, as well as two cars and two people willing to work long hours. Adsense payouts are woefully small, depending on the adblock saturation of your audience. As such, the barrier to entry is much higher than a video game review, vlogging, music, etc. channel.
Control: YouTube ultimately is the final arbiter of adsense revenues, so inasmuch as you depend on them, your control is limited. YT is like Amazon for videos, and their capricious behavior can be a problem. Secondary revenue streams will have to be sought. Also, the final play in this game is one that eliminates YT's exclusive control completely. More on that in the future. As it stands right now, this is the commandment which this idea comes the closest to defying.
Scale: Videos generate passive revenue forever and libraries of videos build on each-other, especially with links to older videos promoted in newer ones. Although there are not many options to scale this aspect of the business, the fact that the product is once-and-done-forever builds some scalability over time.
Time: The videos take a few dozen to a hundred hours to make, and last years. This commandment is the one which is most deftly met by a YT channel.
So, onto the actual project. The Channel is called TitleMine and has at least four features that should make us stand out among other channels:
1. We own every car on the channel. As such, reporting includes a lot of cost to operate, DIY, and situational reporting that you don't regularly get from more traditional review-and-return journalism.
2. Every car on the channel is involved in a flip that is at least cost-neutral, so we don't ultimately pay for any of them. Driving high-end cars for free (and not involving tax write-offs from large successful businesses or other means of subsidizing the price) is something a lot of people are interested in, and so we plan to make a number of videos discussing this topic.
3. We have a plan to gain sponsors that 90+% of automotive channels can't follow. This is the "need" mentioned above.
4. My wife is heavily involved with the project, so we have one presenter who is a woman. YT channels fronted by women vastly outperform those fronted by men on a per-capita basis.
Anyway, here is the teaser we made with an appropriately slidewalk-interest-raising title. Again, it hasn't been released anywhere else yet:
What I'd love from the FF community is any comments on the trailer. Likes and subscriptions to the channel would also be super helpful. I intend to try and secure my first channel sponsor next week, and will do it on the strength of a compelling content pitch, but having subscriptions to back that up won't hurt. As many as we can get would be awesome.
Over the last eight months, we released several videos to test the strength of different social advertising techniques. This one first, the success of which caught us by surprise (it was supposed to be a quick fun thing that would eventually be taken down after a few days of measuring its success):
And this one later, which more directly related to the channel, released using different aspects of social media for promotion:
Thus far, we have zero paid traffic. Once we get 2-3 episodes up, we are definitely going to start advertising to get views, @JasonR completely sold me on the idea.
Also, boats have been burned, so I'm on this full time and going to be reporting in pretty regularly. Should be exciting.
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