What It Really Takes For Creatives to Become Successful Content Creators | with Sven Pape

Zack Arnold

So. Sven, this is a podcast conversation a long time in the making, is it not?

Sven Pape

It has been I mean, I don't know when did I email you, but I feel like six months ago or so, I was like, Hey, I think we should do a podcast about what's going on in the industry, whether it's like doom and gloom, or whether there's opportunity here

Zack Arnold

Exactly, and we're going to talk a whole lot more about probably both of those things, both doom and gloom and opportunity. But I don't even remember how long ago it was. It would be measured in years, maybe not quite a decade, or maybe it has been. But you and I just kind of kept showing up in the same places where we be, whether it was Lassie pug or some other industry event, either in person, but online is really where we both kind of started to show up in a lot of the same places. We're going to go a lot more into both your journey as a filmmaker and a craftsperson, but also a content creator. But you and I have very, very similar journeys. I don't know if your timeline is the same, but my longtime listeners know that I was an editor for, you know, over 20 years of my career, and then started to juggle the difference between being an editor to becoming a content creator. Took me about 10 years to start using that term, by the way, but you have a really, really similar journey as well. So just kind of give us the what would be the brief version of the Sven origin story, both being a craftsperson in the filmmaking industry and then becoming a content creator with over 500,000 YouTube subscribers.

Sven Pape

Yeah, so I probably had to pivot in my career three times, at least, where to, like, start over, reinvent great. So I went to film school at AFI. After that, I got a job doing a webcast for James Cameron on the Titanic expedition. I became the night assistant. I cut a scene, I showed it to Jim, and I got hired to become the editor on Ghost of the abyss. Then worked for Jim for about three years, and got completely bored, just like burned out and bored.

Zack Arnold

Bored working for James Cameron. Is that possible? I can understand burned out, but bored?

Sven Pape

Yeah, it was really the boredom, because it was just not my story. It was underwater footage, and it just was one expedition after another. So I went to film school to be a director, so I ended up directing my own movie. Spent all the money I made and were completely broke, and then I had to, like, find my way back into making some kind of money, starting off just cutting, like actors reels for 300 bucks, that kind of stuff. Luckily, somebody remembered me and was like the PA on a production office for a reality show Company introduced me to a new company, or fairly new free mental media. Back then, they just had a show on the air called American Idol, and I've heard of that I cut sizzles for them. Like day one, I had to cut the sizzle for a show from the UK called The I don't even know what it's called in the UK, but it ended up being America's Got Talent. So I kept that sizzle in one day, the next day, it got sold to NBC, and it became the biggest rated show on for NBC that summer. And suddenly I had an opportunity to, like, just keep working with Fremantle media, working with those first generation vice presidents that kind of really for many, many years. I think for five years, I was doing all the top sizzles, all the pilots for Fremantle media. And made great money again, got completely burned out and said, I hate editing. I don't want to do this anymore, and

Zack Arnold

That's going to be some so ironic as we continue.

Sven Pape

Yeah, luckily, my friend from film school, who shot my student film, he's a cameraman, he gave me the opportunity to interview for an indie director called Mark Webber. He was about to shoot his second film, and he was already considering to hire an editor, which was Jay robinovitz, who, luckily wasn't available. Jay cut his his first feature. He's the guy who cuts Requiem for a Dream. And so I had an opportunity. I talked him into the idea that he should really do this with me, because I'm a reality show editor, and what he's doing is very improvised, and I would bring a completely new angle to how to work with improvised performances. He luckily trusted me. I cut the film. It went to Sundance, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, got into theaters, and nothing happened to the film, but that relationship endured. So I've cut maybe four or five films for Mark, and we were in all kinds of festivals, always in the low budget grassroots, and really figured out along. The way that I enjoyed that relationship with a director, with a filmmaker that has a vision that is trying something new, and it wasn't actually editing that I hated. It was more like what I was editing. And so I really sort of concentrated for a while and just doing indie films and documentaries, where I felt like I can really work with interesting filmmakers on interesting topics, and yeah, worked on on a bunch of those. While this was happening, my little daughter started YouTube. She did my little pony on YouTube, and I helped her out. I taught her final cut, and she ended up just learning so much more than I ever did in film school by just popping out a video every week and making money. And I realized, Oh, this is an opportunity that I should pay attention to. So I started my own channel first. It was about chickens. First video I did had like, 100,000 views and made 200 bucks. And I'm like, Okay, I understand this. This is, this is an opportunity. And I was like, in 2016 back then it was now it's a little tougher, I think. But then, then I sort of convinced mark on the next film, why don't we show the editing process? So I started a new channel just about editing, which is the one you mentioned, with the 500,000 subscribers. So that first year was all about that film that he was cutting, and the process showing it, not so much software and all that stuff, but really creative storytelling, how to engage an audience with scene work, drama, character, motivation, all that stuff. And then once I was done, I sort of tackled bigger topics, like video essays became a big deal. And so I made one on Christopher Nolan Stan Kirk on Interstellar, and that's when the channel really took off for a while. And it's only been like in the last year, year and a half, that that type of content just doesn't seem to really get favored by the algorithm anymore. And I think it has to do with the fact that it's like, I'm only posting a video maybe once a month, and YouTube really move towards content that happens almost daily, or if not daily, that every couple of days. And having that relationship with your community has completely changed. It used to be like you had 100,000 subscribers, 100,000 people would see your video in the feed. I have 500,000 subscribers now, and maybe 2000 will get to see it in their feed.

Zack Arnold

Wow. And those are staggering numbers.

Sven Pape

Yeah. So you that relationship is completely gone, and luckily, I was able to prepare for that in the sense that I had some good advice from bigger YouTubers who said, don't rely on YouTube for your business. Find all kinds of ways to get your audience off the platform. So I was able to create newsletters and a course and all this stuff. And so the business has been still sustainable, but definitely at a point where it kind of needs to not rely on YouTube anymore. Luckily, in the last year or two, it's been really good with editing, so I could actually take a step away from YouTube and just focus on a kind of feature with Mark again, and then now I'm working on a documentary that's pretty big about the sort of political system here in America and what's happening? Yeah. So that's a that's a big project right now, and this is where we are today.

Zack Arnold

So then for anybody that's interested in transitioning out of whatever you're doing career pivoting into becoming a YouTube content creator, two takeaways. Number one, My Little Pony. Takeaway number two, don't do it all right. Short episode today. Sven, it was so wonderful to have you with us. Glad that we could catch up.

Sven Pape

You know, the don't do it actually applies to filmmaking as well. Like that first advice to anyone that like ask us, should you do filmmaking? You should say, No, yeah.

Zack Arnold

But it's so crazy because we do it anyways, right? And it's actually one of the things that's kind of my core thesis of all the work that I'm doing right now, is I really believe that our way through this chaos and this uncertainty, we have to separate the siloization. I don't even know if that's a word, but where we have these two silos, where we're the creatives, we make Hollywood movies, we are filmmakers, and they're the creators. We can't do that anymore. That didn't work before, but now there's no surviving if we don't see that, we're going to need to work together. And you know, the content creator space a lot better than I do. I just kind of do my own thing, and like I don't consider myself a content creator nearly, nearly as much as an educator. My entity identity is that now I am an educator. I create content so I can use that as a way to a discoverability platform, so I can find my students. But I do not wear the hat of I am a content creator, but I think that we, and I've had multiple people now in the Creator space. They've called me legacy Hollywood, ooh, like that. That one hurts, like man, that really dates me. But if we just use this terminology, if you take legacy Hollywood, literally, the best storytellers in the world, content creators, some of the most brilliant entrepreneurs in the world, creatives and legendary you know, like legacy Hollywood, not good at running a business. They don't understand how we turn ourselves into a business. How do we sell our products and services? How do we build an audience? Entrepreneurs and in the Creator space, not very good storytellers. There are some. I'm not going to say that none of them are good storytellers, but by and large, it's all about pleasing the algorithm. It's all about how do I capture attention? But very rarely do I see something on YouTube, even with hundreds of 1000s of views, where I say, wow, like I need to bookmark this. I want to watch it again. I want to really break it down. It made me feel something. It just feels more like a transaction. So I'm I'm curious, because you really straddle this line Well, between these two worlds, where do you see the value in the overlap of bringing legacy Hollywood and the creator space together?

Sven Pape

Well, I think the value is, obviously that we are classically trained storytellers, so we may know a couple more things about how to engage an audience and keep them watching or providing something that is maybe more sustainable or balancing, like, what is it really, what's the purpose that we bring as an artist to our work, and what we want to convey to the audience, as opposed to just trying to, like, get more views and get keep the business alive of being a content creator. But I mean, if I think about how I use YouTube, and I watch YouTube a lot like it's probably the number one medium that I consume, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I need to like keep up with things. It's just I really enjoy certain creators, not so much because of how they tell their story, but how they share their life experience, where they are in their life, what journey they are on, and sort of that daily, being able to check in and see how things are going with them, where they really make this really strong connection with them. And that is certainly something that's different from my channel. Like, when I do channel, it's like, it's kind of a meditation on a theme. Maybe there's some education there, but ultimately it's some form of mix of entertainment and and education. But it's not really providing a community platform where we're sharing an experience, necessarily. And I that's, I think what is so great about content creation that I watch is I have three or four people that I check in once, twice a week or even daily, because that's the type of content they make, and they're able to to pop it out consistently. It's still a lot of work to them, but they figured out a format that it's manageable, and that's something that I have to think about whether I like once I return to YouTube, do I really want to build a community, or do I just want to make videos that excite me and hopefully somebody else gets excited by that as well, which used to be the business model that worked very well on YouTube.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, so I want to start getting a little bit deeper into the nuances of the business model. And the business model is changing so rapidly that, I mean, by the time we release this in a week, it could be different, but I want to go back to kind of before everything shifted. And I want to really kind of get into the fundamentals of, let's call it like pre Hollywood, burning down YouTube, and now this present version of YouTube that we have right now. What you said that I think is so important for people to understand when they're like, Oh, well, I guess I need to pivot, and I need some passive income. I guess I'll start a YouTube channel like it doesn't work that way, like it's so much more complex than that. So what I want to understand first, if we're in again, this is kind of looking at before everything shifted. You don't have to give away any specific numbers, but if you were looking at your business model, where you have the YouTube channel versus you have a newsletter, versus you have courses, all the other ancillary things, what percentage of your revenue was monetization on YouTube versus YouTube being the discovery platform where people found you and then you were able to offer your products and services? What was the general percentage breakdown?

Sven Pape

Well, it used to be low, before it used maybe 10, 15% of the revenue mix. And it's, it was big. And, I mean, it was still a six, six figure income. So like 100,000 roughly, that would be like, Oh, I have a real full time job, kind of if I would just be doing that I have a full time job, need to crank out content, and I would get paid, and if I could make a living, but that would just be replacing the editing business with more hours and more uncertainty. So but it has gone. On dramatically, like it has gone it's almost, it's like, I don't know, less than 1000 bucks a month in terms of ad revenue.

Zack Arnold

But now is that, is that with you creating the same amount of content, or that's also because you have less new content?

Sven Pape

I think it's both. I definitely have slowed down, but it's also the ad dollars that you're getting for views has gone down. The views have gone down as well. And then the amount of videos that I pop out has gone down as well. But it has, it has changed quite significantly in the last year and a half. Now, the great thing is, it is, it was a great platform as of discovery, as you were saying, and it leveraged all the other opportunities for revenue. And then that made it really, really interesting where I could, I could launch a course, and within a week, I would have a yearly salary, and I could just say, Okay, now I can just breathe easy, and I can really just do the things that I want to do, and it's it was fairly the it was good times for quite a while, and it's gotten a little harder, and we needed to really make sure that the course that I'm offering, the editing course, is providing all the the needs, is like satisfying all the needs, which is like feedback, getting feedback from other people, getting feedback from us, opportunities to actually land a job, bridging the gap to the industry. And we've developed all these kind of things on top of coaching, where they can coach with like, I don't do any of the coaching. I just provide the coaching, and then I hire actually really high end editors, like, for example, Josh Beal, who's an ace member, is running maybe one coaching program a year where he just teaches people avid plus creative storytelling. From his point of view, he's cutting Netflix shows, big TV shows. And so they have, they have that experience, and that provides that value for them to still make that investment. And that's great because then YouTube doesn't have to, it has it doesn't have to make sense financially for me, but it still would be nice to have views, so because you need to find a bigger and an ever growing audience to then hopefully get them interested in the sort of more refined, more involved programs that we that we offer.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and one of the jokes that I always make about this world of passive income is, I always say that passive income is where you work for 20 hours a day so you can make money while you're not sleeping. And I just, I want to continue to emphasize, because there are so many people right now, especially in my community, well, I guess I need to start a YouTube channel. And if it's about I'm going to start a YouTube channel, I'm going to get a bunch of views, and I'm going to create an ancillary passive income stream, even if it's 500 bucks a month, 1,000 dollars a month, whatever it is the amount of effort it takes to say I'm going to monetize just the channel. I'm going to count on YouTube revenue and make a living off of it. That's not the play I but I think that YouTube is a tremendous opportunity if you want to build an audience and a community and you have something that you can send them to. So my core business model, and it really sounds like you made the same decision, was my email list. I said my business is my email list. And I've experimented with Instagram. I've totally failed on YouTube, completely just massive failure. It's put so much money into YouTube, I literally got 0 dollars from it in return, but it was but it allows me to put myself out there so people discover me. So as soon as they're on the email list, that's where I start building a relationship. And what most people don't understand. And I want to go a little bit more into why you made the decisions that you did. When you have your subscribers on YouTube, when you have your followers on Instagram, you don't own that. You don't know who those people are, but I have email addresses of 1000s of people that said I want to hear from you, and if I don't, I'm going to click the unsubscribe button. But I have 1000s and 1000s of people that want to hear from me. I can move that anywhere I want, and as long as I have that audience, oh, maybe I can launch a course, or maybe I'll try this. Maybe I'll try that. That's what's allowed me to sustain. Like I'm not thriving right now. It's been a really, really difficult couple of years, but I've been able to sustain because I can bring my audience with me, and I built a relationship with them. Did you make a similar decision when you said, if I'm going to build the business model for this guy edits or anything else? Did you see the email list as a core part of your business from day one? Or did you say, Oh yeah, I guess I should start an email list too, because most people are somewhere in between.

Sven Pape

Yeah, I pretty much knew within the first month what the end game is. Because I don't know how it happened, but I got an email from a YouTuber that just started kind of a mentorship program for other people that are interested in YouTube, and it was like 20 bucks a month. And I'm like, I'm doing this right now. I'm just going to do this. And it ended up being probably the most valuable thing I ever did, because immediately it was called the viral Academy. I think the jump cut Academy, and they had these lessons that immediately told to you, you the end goal is not to get subscribers. The end goal is not to get views. The end goal is that you build a business somehow find ways to get your audience over to your platform, whatever that is, and they had really like step by step, this is what you need to do to get views. This is how you send out these kind of emails to blogs to get people to notice you all the way up to how to make a sponsorship deal and what's at the end of this whole thing that you're building. So within a month, I kind of already knew why I'm doing this in terms of a business. So even though I was always a little behind and delayed, like it took me a while to get a newsletter going. It took me forever to build a course, but the course alone, I think I spent six months thinking about it and six months doing it. So when it finally hit, it was still a pretty good time. But everything should have happened a year earlier, and it would have been 10 times more valuable just in terms of the timing. So, yeah, to answer your question, I kind of knew what the what the end game is. I didn't think it was ever going to change. And this is definitely one of the rules, is nothing stays the same. Everything, whatever you build, that passive income, that course, whatever it has a life, and then there's something else. And you need to be able to recognize that you can't just keep doing the same thing, expecting the same result. You need to, like, sort of have your antennas up, connect the dots and understand when change is coming, and hopefully you catch it early enough that you can prepare, learn and adapt?

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I would agree with all that, except one part, yeah, the piece that, and I'm not even going to say I disagree with that, I just, I want to add a layer to it, is the idea that everything changes and nothing stays the same. I believe that there's one core thing that stays the same, which is right within the conversation we're having now. Yeah, well, we seek out as human beings as as a survival mechanism is relationships. It is wired into our DNA that we need to be connected to other human beings. We are a tribal species, and put that in conjunction with email lists. At least as of recording this, everybody needs an email inbox. Nobody wants an email inbox, but you can't function in society without an email inbox. I can function without a Tiktok account. I can function without Instagram. It annoys people like, oh, what's your Instagram handle? I don't have Instagram. What like they give me this look like I'm an alien. I don't have it anymore. I discontinued it. I'm fine with that everybody must have an email inbox because it's how we communicate digitally, and that in conjunction with our need to have relationships and connect to other human beings. I'm sure you've heard it over the last 1015, years, email marketing is dead. Email is dead. Go to this platform. Go to that platform. What does everybody always come back to when the shit hits the fan on a platform email. So I would argue that's the one thing that, at least for now, until there's some new mode of long form communication to function, email is not going anywhere. I believe that for the last decade, if I didn't choose Email as my business, I'd be screwed. Right now, I wouldn't have a business. It'd be gone.

Sven Pape

Yeah, no. I mean, I 100% agree. I mean, email is important, and relationships is really the key to success in the industry. I mean, it could be that relationship you have with somebody that reads your emails, but even more so, it's the relationships that you have with people that are working with you, below you and above you, that 100% decides your career, those relationships, and being able to keep those relationships alive and having really meaningful relationships with people is what, what I mean the last two jobs that I had, I just came off cutting a feature. I'm cutting documentary now. It's all through referrals. It's all through who knew me, who made a recommendation, and I would be not working if it wasn't for the relationships that I have.

Zack Arnold

Well, this is where you and I can really start to talk shop at a very detailed level, because both you and I have a multitude of networking resources, relationship building resources. So if you don't mind, I'd like to reach out and maybe have some coffee and pick your brain for the next few minutes. So we're gonna, we're gonna have a, you know, picking Sven's brain segment here. Let's just start from scratch. I'm brand new to the industry or transitioning, making a career pivot. I hate Network. I hate relationship building. Where do you usually start people? My guess is there's a lot of overlap between the things that I talk about and the things that you talk about. But let's just start from scratch. I have no idea how to build my network. I have no idea how to connect with people. Sven, teach me.

Sven Pape

Well, first of all, this is what worked for me, and I think it still should work for everybody is you got to start somewhere. You got to find a job, whatever that job is that is industry related. So I when I was starting over, I cut reels for actors for 300 bucks. I wanted to cut feature films. I knew I just worked with James Cameron. Why shouldn't I be cutting the next whatever? It just doesn't you have to start somewhere, and you need to find a way to be working. Always be working, because work attracts work. If you're working, you're more likely to get a job than if you're not working. And the great thing is, once you're working, you can already kind of get a sense of how valuable you are, and value you can define by four factors. This is actually from Alex and mosey. Value is you're making things faster, value is you're reducing risk. Value is you're making things easier, or value is you're doing them at a really cheap price. The things you want to really provide value on, as you can probably guess, it is to reduce risk and make things really easy, and you want to stay away from competing on price or speed. And how do you know whether you're valuable enough for a client is you can kind of really gage how busy you become once you get your first job and you get your second job, once you run out of free time because you're so busy, then you you kind of know that you're valuable to people because they keep on calling on you. And it might actually be that you are undervaluing yourself at that point, and that's when you start raising your prices, because you want to find that. You want to find that perfect balance where you're busy but not too busy, or not busy at all. And if you figure out the right rate, you can get to a point where you're just busy enough and making good money. And so I always felt like when I started, if I'm not getting any leads, I'm not getting any jobs, i Yes, I will reduce my rate, I will cut any deal just to get back into working mode. But once I'm there, usually something new happens, like that guy that I'm working with right now knows somebody who's working on something else, and they're looking for somebody now, at that point you get a referral, and as soon as you get a referral, you they want to pay. They tend to want to pay more. They expect to pay more because a person that trusts, that they trust, referred you. So they expect that you are a quality person based on that relationship that they already have. And that has worked for me all the time when I needed to, like, just get back into it and find new clients, find new opportunities, is to just start at the bottom again, maybe touch base with all the old relationships that I haven't really touched base with, and as soon as I have a job, usually I was back in the game and the next job would be rolling along. So if you're starting off and you don't know anybody, you don't know nothing, you just need to find that first job. Maybe it's for free, maybe it's not the most exciting project, but hopefully that will get you in the mix with some people, and then you continue leveraging up. But you need to be able to provide value, because as soon as you provide value, people want to take advantage of that value.

Zack Arnold

And I appreciate you defining what it means to provide value, because anytime I talk about that and I look at it from a slightly different perspective, mine is more, how do I provide value just to begin the conversation and begin the relationship? Because I've literally built my entire career from my inbox via cold email. Because I avoid in person networking like the plague. The fact that you see me in person at last see pug events, it's like spotting Big Foot like, Oh my God, he's out in the wild. What literally built my entire career via cold outreach emails. But if we're looking at what I will call the delineation the before times and now that gap between, well, I don't really have any work yet, and I'm just breaking into I have to get that first gig. I don't think that that really has changed much, other than the fact that there's just less work. But if we're looking at those now that rather than they're just starting out, they're established. And I would argue that, based on the demographics of my audience, most people that listen to me and follow me, they already have a fairly significant level of success in their careers. And. Yoink rug pulled out from under them. Everything has gone away, and now it's a matter of, well, yeah, your advice is, I just I need to be working so I can get more work. There is no work there. I mean, how you've been able to sustain the work that you're doing, clearly, is a testament to your quality and also the networking that you've done. Because most of the people that I talk to, they're like, there's nothing out there. I know people that are multiple Emmy winners, that are delivering DoorDash and that are working at Trader Joe's, like, it's ugly out there. So let's go a little bit deeper into how do we help people in this present state, when they have exhausted all of their resources and they really are starting to think, maybe I pivot into the content creation world. I don't know.

Sven Pape

That could be one one way. I'm a little suspicious when people that have for them, it has worked for a while now, it's not working anymore, and they're like, Okay, the jobs aren't there. That has happened before. That has happened to me several times where the jobs weren't there, I think it kind of does require you to just get humble and find work that you wouldn't even think of doing before you were in that situation, and start over again. Yes, there's maybe less work on the studio side, but there's a ton of there's more content being created now than ever in the history of mankind, and there's going to be 10 times more content being created in the next five years. And some of that content is done, most of that content is done at a very low budget, but there's going to be some really exciting opportunities, some big things that are already emerging from this, where there's so many opportunities for you to grow now, if you are seasoned and you have a mortgage, it's a little bit harder for you to start over again than somebody who's like brand new, hungry and has a runway of whatever, six months, 12 months, and can do whatever. So I would say somebody that is really starting fresh maybe has an advantage to somebody who's kind of somewhere in the middle. But I'm I find it at least for myself and seeing it also with my kids, there are no excuses for not finding work. And if it means that I have to take a pay cut, a drastic pay cut, or I have to take some shit from somebody who doesn't know what they're doing because their first time filmmaker, then that's, that's what I would be willing to do. Because I feel like you have to, you have to always be working and something else will come out of it.

Zack Arnold

I would say that that is probably a very hard reality for some people to accept. It's a very bitter pill to swallow. And I also think this is, it's a very this is a tightrope to walk, because I've I see this from a lot of different perspectives, and I'm sure that with your community, you do as well, where I genuinely know people that are literally doing everything they're doing all the things they're setting all the meetings like I've got a client of mine that I'm working with privately. I'm pretty sure that either she, or the two of us, has scheduled a meeting with the head of post production at every single studio, all of them, like all the major studios she's done, all the meetings she knows, all the right people in our network, and everybody says you're the first on our list when work comes up. So there is a group of people that I know they're doing everything and the work isn't there. But then I also have a group of people that come to me, not so much my students, but people that will come to me in like an introductory call, where they'll say, oh, there's just no work anymore. I'm like, All right, well, tell me a little bit more. Well, I used to, I used to go from one job to the next, and I would get a phone call, or I'd get a text message, and I would finish the job on Friday and go to the next one Monday, all the calls dried up. Okay, so what else have you been doing? Well, what do you mean, like, have you been, have you reached out to your old Network? Have you been reaching out to new people. Are you going to networking events? Well, no, not yet. Like those, to me, are the people that can't say there is no work. But I will say that for the first time in the 10 years that I've done career coaching, There literally is, for some people in whatever their sector might be, there's nothing. But they're also being very specific about what they're going after they're not saying, Well, you know what? I guess I could do this kind of work, or this kind of work, which then I guess, brings up a conversation that I've had multiple times, specifically in the five day virtual summit that I'm going to have, talking all about how we navigate the future of entertainment, the gigantic pay disparity where the expectation is. Well, I am a legacy Hollywood editor, and if you want me to be your editor, my rate is 5,000 dollars a week, and they just look at you and they laugh you in the face because they're like, Do you realize what people get cut to? Not even just like cat videos, kind of the YouTube that we remember from the earlier days, but really, really high quality. Content on YouTube. Nobody's making that kind of money. What kind of money are you seeing in the YouTube space? That isn't that we're going to get somebody to edit 50 videos for 10 bucks, but like the the legit, these are decent productions. Do you know, in general, kind of what these these rates, and what this world looks like is, this is a world that I'm not intimately involved with, but I've heard some numbers thrown around.

Sven Pape

I mean, it's all there. If you have the bigger YouTubers that have a million plus subscribers, they can pay decent rates. They can pay editors of rates that make sense, but most of the kind of middle tier, and that kind of includes myself as well, we can pay an okay rate, but it wouldn't be a rate that a TV editor would even look at and would even consider, again, I'm saying you should consider it. If you have nothing to do and somebody is paying you 750 bucks a week, you should do it while you're still looking or while you're thinking about what else you could be doing. But you could be working for, obviously, Mr. Beast, and you would be getting 100,000 dollars a year job, if you wanted to. And they're looking like they're interviewing, having and they are dying to find good editors, and it's it's hard for them to find them. So I guess that's my that's my answer there. I wanted to respond you said, you know these people, and I get it. I get it. There are people out there that do everything and they just say, Nothing is popping up. They're taking the meetings, and they're just hearing there's nothing there. You're the first one to call. I just had a meeting with my assistant on the feature that I've wrapped up, and she hasn't worked in the last two, three months. So she's doing her checking she's really good about, like, doing all the right things to just stay in the top of mind and being in the mix. And she is on the board of the Union, and she's reporting to me like it's dead out there. It's really hard. The other editors that she's worked with, no none of them are working right now. And I wish I would have known earlier, because I actually got two other people a job on this particular production, high paying, great rates on this, and I kind of offered her the job earlier, but she was on another show, and now we have two other assistants working on this, but that is, I think, Just one way of attacking the problem like these old relationships, these old contacts, it's important to touch base with them and and staying on their radar. But don't shy away from doing all the new things that these opportunities that are coming up. Don't shy away of approaching a YouTuber with a million plus subscribers and say, Hey, I'm a I'm a classically trained TV editor. I have all these great credits. I love your channel because I watch it all the time. Be genuine. Be authentic about why you picked this particular YouTuber. Would you be interested of me cutting one of your videos, just to I would love to learn what it's like to tell that, but I also want to show you what what is an editor of my with my experience can do? Why wouldn't that YouTuber say, yeah, go ahead here. Cut this video. I'll see you in a week and doing a couple of those, and you're immediately in a completely new corner of the industry, and you're right there where things are happening.

Zack Arnold

Well, not only is it a new corner of the industry, I would argue that it's, by and large, going to be the industry, because if you look at the numbers, YouTube is eating everybody's lunch. Literally, I found it fascinating that over the last, I don't know, maybe six months to a year when I have this conversation with either students, or when I've been on other podcasts, and we talk about the number one streaming channel, and like the streaming boom and then the streaming bust. And I'll say, well, which, which streaming service do you think is the biggest one? Everybody says, Well, what do you mean? It's Netflix. Netflix is killing everybody. I'm like, you want to see the numbers. Like, Netflix is a distant, distant, dwarfed second to YouTube. It's not even close. It's not even a conversation. When you look at the numbers like you, you put the graphs together, YouTube is the whole graph, and then there's this blip of color at the bottom of the graph, and then the other non Netflix streaming platforms are a joke compared to YouTube, like talking about subscriber numbers on max versus YouTube, like it's it's not even the same conversation. So it's not we need to be a part of the corner of this industry. It is the future of the industry.

Sven Pape

Yeah. I mean, I don't know if people are really know this. Probably they do. But Netflix not worried about Max. Netflix is worried about you too. This is what they're competing with, and this is why they're spending two, 3 billion dollars in content to where YouTube is spending zero on content. It's all being generated for them, trying to, trying to somehow catch up with them and take over, get into that space that YouTube is actually like. When do you watch YouTube? You watch. Should every time you're not on a TV or whatever, you're watching something like YouTube or Tiktok, and that's a lot more hours. It's a lot more time that people consume media.

Zack Arnold

Here's the really interesting thing, and you may know this as well, but for me, when I realized it's game over, I can't remember exactly when it was. I think it was less than a year ago, but don't quote me on stats or dates, but I know that the stat is true. But somewhere in the recent history, the statistic came out that more people watch YouTube on their televisions than they do their devices. And when I saw that, I said, game over. It is absolute game over. Because before the barrier was, well, I'm not gonna, like, watch a long form thing on my phone, and now people do it anyways, like, oh, vertical video's never gonna take off, and then vertical video takes off. But now more. And this is not old people, by the way. This is not me, Mr. You know midlife crisis, 45 years old. This is all people that use YouTube watch it on their TVs more than they do their devices GAME OVER especially now that it's on smart TVs.

Sven Pape

Yeah, I watch it on TV. If I like at home, I'd want to chill out, and I turn my TV on. The first thing I turn on is YouTube. It's like, once I'm done with YouTube, then maybe I look at Netflix or whatever, if I still want to, but that first hour is all YouTube.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and it's funny, because that's just starting to happen to me, and I am a late adopter in every sense of the word. Like, I think I own an iPhone 13, and that's only because my iPhone 11 broke. I've always been a late adopter to anything. So for me, when I found myself doing the same thing, and it's been in the last six months or so, I turn on the Smart TV, the first thing I do is go to YouTube. And I remember at one point thinking, Whoa, I just went to YouTube first. Like, when did that happen? I wasn't even aware of it. The only thing that I found, and this is going to maybe be a little bit of a tangent, I just found this interesting as well, is that because I'm of a slightly older generation, especially when I just want to completely decompress and disconnect, I don't want to have to make decisions, then I go to one of the streaming platforms where I can just literally flip through channels. Because when I go to YouTube and I have to make a decision, I'm like, I don't know what I want to watch. There's so many good thumbnails, and I could learn about four by four off roading, but oh, now wants me to watch Saturday Night Live skit. My brain's like, Ah, no, I just want to flip channels. So I don't know if that's something you experience or not. Maybe the younger people are like, what does it mean to flip a channel? But I still, I still kind of enjoy the flipping channels every once in a while.

Sven Pape

Well, there's, there's two things I can say. One is, first of all, YouTube knows what I want to watch at what time of day, so it's offering me a different type of content, whether I'm whether it's in the evening or it's in the morning. It's so crazy because it has learned from my patterns. That's number one. Number two is, I don't think my kids watch YouTube.

Zack Arnold

I think they really that's interesting. It's the only thing that my kids watch.

Sven Pape

Yeah, I think they watch Tiktok and Instagram. So it is a little bit of a, there's a risk for YouTube, and there's a there's a difference between the generations. I feel like

Zack Arnold

Well, at least in our household, it's not about generations. It's about my kids aren't allowed to use any social media whatsoever, so maybe they found a way to, you know, crack it, or they're using somebody else's password like they're teenagers, so God only knows what they're doing. Like, my kids aren't doing that and they're listening to the podcast being like, Dad, you're such an idiot. But at least as far as I know, like every time that my son is around when he's not doing homework or whatever, he's always watching YouTube. And my my daughter always watches YouTube shorts. And it's I really started to see this during the pandemic, when we were in lockdown, and my kids were I guess it would have been 10 and eight at that point, all they did was watch YouTube. This was when I was introduced to Mr. Beast, by the way, because I didn't like, Who's this Mr. Beast guy. And of course, the pandemic is when everybody was introduced to him. And I remember sitting with my son watching a YouTube video, and I don't say this as well. Maybe a little bit of detriment to the way that they do this. But essentially, watching a Mr. Beast video, the best way I can describe the experience for me, it's like the sound of putting razor blades in a blender. That's what it's like watching Mr. Beast. It literally breaks my brain. But I would watch that, and I was fascinated. I'm like, my son is so into this. It was so bombastic and it was so fast. And I said, this is our future of media creation, not that I like it, not that I want to go in this direction, but this is the future of content creation. And now I mean he literally, I think he just crossed 500 million subscribers. That's more than the population of this country.

Sven Pape

Have you watched beast games on Amazon?

Zack Arnold

I watched some of it. Yes, he and I sat down and watched it. And Beast games, to me, is the perfect representation of where I think we're going. I don't think they figured it out yet, but what I found really interesting about beast games is, you take this concept of Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. B says, I'm going to do the crazy as shit, right? And you look at his earlier videos, it's like, oh, it's people putting their hand on a car to see who wins it. And, you know, they're, you know, going to the back. Bathroom in their pants. But now the stuff he does is so outlandishly crazy, he turns it into a survival level spectacle with production design and scope that is just unfathomable what he was able to accomplish. But, and this is where my thesis stands firm, the storytelling on that show sucked. Really. I thought the storytelling was terrible. They had so many interesting people, and it was all about the spectacle. Basically every five minutes, it was Mr. B saying, look at this amazing thing that I've done. I've broken all these records. I'm giving away more money than anybody. And I'm like, Just tell me the story about that person that has a disabled kid that's in this competition to win money for their kid, and I felt like throughout the season, they started to figure it out. But they're not good storytellers yet, and this is where I see the value we as the legacy Hollywood storytellers. And I love the way that you say it the classically trained storytellers. It's a much better way to put it. You bring more classically strained storytellers to an entrepreneur like Mr. Beast, that, to me, is the future of entertainment.

Sven Pape

I have to I have to say, I thought the storytelling was fantastic.

Zack Arnold

Really, yes. Could not disagree more. I could not get into the story at all.

Sven Pape

We were sucked in from episode one. I thought that really Ernst and also kind of the human interest side of the story had had for us perfect balance. I thought they put every other game show to shame, where they're like.

Zack Arnold

Wow, that's so interesting that we interpret it so differently, because all they wanted was more story. I felt like it was all spectacle. Yeah, like he's great at the spectacle, the twists and turns. Like, Oh, you thought I was gonna do this thing. Nope, I'm doing this to you instead. And I kept thinking, just settle in the story. I want to know more about these people. And I think part of it was just there were so many people. I think it started with what, 1500 contestants, then whittled down to 1000 for the first episode. I felt like it found itself in like, episodes eight, nine and 10, where eventually I did find myself finally rooting for like, Oh, this is the person I want to win, but at least for the first few episodes. And in the middle I just, I was like, I just wanted just let me feel something. You're not giving me the space to feel anything.

Sven Pape

Yeah, well, they're shooting the next season right now. I think until June.

Zack Arnold

I actually have a few clients that are working on it right now, so I'm hearing all the behind the scenes about it,

Sven Pape

Yeah, so it'll be exciting to see.

Zack Arnold

But for anybody that's that's curious about some of the kind of the nuts and bolts of it, it's a union project. It's real money. So it's not like, Oh, this is a YouTube thing. And granted, you could say, well, yeah, that's because it's Amazon, but this is the direction, like, it's not like, Mr. Beast is an anomaly, from what I understand, and I'm not, you know, privy to all the things that are happening in development, but from what I understand, Netflix is now very actively pursuing influencers and thinking about shorter form content for influencers. So whether we like it or not, this is the direction that we're going. But I'm going to throw a caveat on here, and I'm going to see what you think of this being a classically trained storyteller. I don't think the future is just we, the Hollywood storytellers, are going to be cutting Mr. Beast videos. I think there's going to be a lot of that. But I also think that long form storytelling, like really good, deep, rich stories about the human experience, whether it's a full length feature film, whether that feature film is on Netflix or in this in the theater, whether we're talking about long form, episodic storytelling, I don't see that going away. I think we're still going to need it, because I even even watching something like beast games, at least for me. And sounds like you disagree, but watching beast games, it's not helping me make sense of my experience as a human being. So I really think that we're always going to need that great, long form storytelling.

Sven Pape

Yeah, I think it will always be there, and there will always be great stories being told, hopefully in at the movies. It's a little harder to get that at the movies right now. I was just watching Mission Impossible two days ago, and I thought it was the newest one. Yeah, it was a really good movie. Really enjoyed. It's a good movie one.

Zack Arnold

That airplane sequence, by the way, holy shit. Even if you hate Tom Cruise, if you hate mission, impossible, just go and see that 20 minute airplane sequence. Oh my god.

Sven Pape

Yeah, just knowing that it's all kind of real, I mean, that it's not fake. CGI, I mean, he's on wires or whatever, but he's it's him doing everything. It's good for that. But also the storytelling, I thought it was very well the balance between human interest versus the action. Well done. The but the point I wanted to make is seeing all the trailers before there. There was not one original story. It was all part a sequel of something 20 stories, all just regurgitating what they've been doing. And so it's really hard to find really interesting films in the theaters. They're out there, but it's not the mainstream, for sure. So it's gonna it's gonna happen somewhere else. It's gonna happen on Netflix. I thought adolescence was really interesting storytelling and and playing with with the format, while really just being very good about the sort of character development and everything, it's gonna happen on YouTube. I think at some point, or it is happening, maybe in a very niche way, for certain people that are interested in very specific things, but I think it's going to become more and more mainstream also to do interesting work. I wanted to ask you, does your son have a specific interest while he's watching YouTube, or is he just going for, like, the Mr. Beast?

Zack Arnold

He doesn't do any the kind of the Mr. Beast shock stuff anymore, like I know that the the three names, and, my God, I sound like I'm 100 years old when I say this, because even the words don't make sense in my brain. But the three that he used to watch were Mr. Beast Faze, rug and air rack. And for any, for anybody that's older than 15, they're like, What is Zack talking about? You talk to boys that are 15 years old or younger, that's like saying Brad Pitt Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks, like they have just consumed the whole internet, these three people. Again, it's all just, we're gonna eat the biggest pizza in the world. Like it's just, it's shock value. But what he watches now more than anything, he watches walk throughs of amusement parks, because he wants to be an Imagineer. He loves live events. He loves live stages. So he loves watching walk throughs of like, if they're doing remodeling on like a Disney ride or building a new ride of universal he knows more about theme parks. He knows their budgets. He knows their schedules. Like he just consumes all like, literally, there are people whose entire livelihoods is they just take their little selfie stick, which I don't think they're allowed to do anymore, but they take their camera, they just walk around Disneyland every day. That's their job. And people watch them walk around Disneyland. My son is one of their customers.

Sven Pape

And that's, I think that's really interesting about YouTube, is you have these niches where you can go just really deep on something. You're really interested in, poker, you're really interested in, I don't know, homesteading, whatever it is, you can go so deep, and you would never be able to do that on Netflix or somewhere. You always will get the surface of something. And that's, I think, what's really, really interesting and exciting about that medium.

Zack Arnold

And I think that's another one of the exciting opportunities for people that are great storytellers. It doesn't have to be I'm going to work as an editor or a composer, or whatever it is for a Mr. Beast or all these other content creators. We can create our own content, and it can be things that we have a lot of interest in. An example being that this isn't something I would pursue given that I doing the educational business, but I this would be like the perfect representative example of what I'm talking about. I chose about, I guess it was a few months ago I decided that I wanted to get a pickup truck. The reason I got a pickup truck is because we got evacuated for a week during the fires, and I did not feel like I was in a position to make sure that my family was safe. We could all be in the car. I made sure we had our pictures and our valuables. It was, it was just kind of a mess. And I said, I just want something where I feel like, whatever happens we're going to get we're going to be taken care of. Have never really been a pickup truck guy. However, as soon as I bought it, somebody that knows me really well, she's like, you're a pickup truck guy? I'm like, All right, I guess I'm a truck guy, here's the point. The point is that I started going on YouTube because I wanted to learn a little bit more about off roading, learn a little bit more about this thing called over landing that I'd never heard of. And all of a sudden I'm totally sucked into this world. And now I'm watching all these videos of people driving all over California and Arizona and Death Valley, like doing these excursions, and I watch them, and I say, This is so cool, but the storytelling sucks. They're so poorly edited. They're like graphics out of 1999 and if I were looking for an opportunity right now, I would say, You know what, I'm going to shoot my own over landing videos, but I'm going to add cinematic Hollywood storytelling to it. So somebody's learning how to Overland and drive for days in camp in the desert, but making it feel like they're following me in a Hollywood film. That, to me, is an opportunity that I would pursue if I wasn't already pursuing all the educational opportunities. Because that, to me, is an outside the box version of it's something I have very unique interest in, but I'm bringing skills to the table that all of my competition doesn't have.

Sven Pape

Yeah, this is, I think that's the opportunity, because I just started watching, for example, a guy who decided he's going to move out of his apartment in Las Vegas, he's going to buy some land out in the desert, and he's going to go off grid, and he's going to document the process. I'm like, Oh, that's awesome. Subscribe. And yes, the storytelling is kind of not that great. Could be a lot better. Pacing could be better. But he's he's trying to get it well on his land that he just and he realizes he has to go. He doesn't know how many feet, but there's drama there. Dramatic question, how much money is he going to spend to drill this? Well, it's. Like 1,000 dollars a foot, or whatever it is, and he's so authentic. And within a week, or two weeks, that guy had 10,000 subscribers. And you can tell he's gonna pick up all the editing skills and all that. It's gonna come later. Right now he's just being himself, authentically, telling his story, and within a year, he's gonna have 100,000 plus subscribers, and he's gonna be okay actually financing the whole journey just through YouTube by doing what he loves to do. And I love that about YouTube. I love that you can really start somewhere, tell your story that you're really interested in, and potentially you as an editor who's in that same story, you could help that guy, and you could say, Hey, let me help you right now. Get there faster, and we'll figure out something how we're gonna, like, make this work in the long run. But I see the potential here.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. So not only can you help that guy, you can also be that guy. And I think that, to me, is one of the really interesting opportunities, which kind of brings us back to where we started in this conversation. I want to go back to the origin story, maybe a little bit further than my little pony, but I want to go maybe a quarter step further, because there's an inflection point, and this is the inflection point where I believe most people stop, which is, why am I the guy that edits? It should be somebody else, that guy edits, not This Guy Edits, or gal. And for whomever is listening, how did you surpass the it's going to be me that's teaching editing, versus no, no, no. Other people should be teaching this. I don't know enough, or I don't know what I'm doing, or nobody wants to learn. For me, why were you this guy editing? Rather than saying no, no, that guy edits.

Sven Pape

Yeah, maybe I'm a little vain in the sense that I didn't mind being on camera, even though it was like the first couple of videos I got awful, but I didn't mind that it was about me in the sense, but I very quickly realized it doesn't matter who I like. I shouldn't be putting on a show. I should just be me. And I had a I had a very authentic reason why I should be the person doing this unique position, editor who actually cuts films on YouTube. Nobody's had that opportunity. Nobody's doing it. Nobody has done it. Nobody would think about doing it. So I felt like it was just the right timing and it was the right fit for me. So yeah, if I would be building, if I would be going off grid in the desert, drilling a well, I'd be making those videos about it, and would have a blast. So it's just like figuring out, what is it, what is it that makes you you? What are you passionate about? What you're really curious about? Like, I never felt like I needed to be an expert. I felt like the channel would become an opportunity to learn myself and people could witness the exploration of it, which is good, that's good drama, right? We don't want to just present information. We want to have people be part of an experience or a process where you kind of formulate a goal and then the dramatic question is, will it happen? That's my thinking that I had back then.

Zack Arnold

Well, I would say that, first of all, you're the anomaly, because most people, especially over the last couple of years, that have come to me, they don't want to just come to me to learn. Well, how did you get your job in editing? Can you help me get a job in Hollywood? Is talk to me more about why you're doing the podcast, why you decided to be an educator. Why do you teach on LinkedIn learning? They wanted to learn more about the content creator side and the barrier 98% of the time the non svens of the world was well, but, but that wouldn't be me. I'm not an expert. I don't know enough about this thing and what I loved about what you said, it was about authentically making part of your story. I don't know either, and I'm figuring it out. And you get to watch me figure it out. Yeah, that once I cracked that code, and it took me a while to figure that out, this became so much simpler. Yeah, so if I were to go back for a second, I don't know if you and I knew each other back in the fitness and post days, I think we might have connected somewhere around there. Maybe

Sven Pape

followed your emails and you had like a Facebook group.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I had a Facebook Okay, so then, yeah, you go back an entire decade where I still had my fake dear alert when I had Facebook groups as a long time ago. But I made the mistake when I first started was I have all this knowledge. There are all these things that I've been obsessed about for years, better health and supplementation and standing desks, like I was always that weirdo, like I literally, my first day on my first season of empire, carried a treadmill into my office. They're like, What the hell is going on? So I had all these knowledge, all this knowledge, and all these things that I was learning, and I thought everybody needs to know about this. So let me get on my high horse, on top of my pedestal, on my ivory tower, and say, Why are you all sitting at your desks? Why are you all eating donuts in the break room? Why are you all working through the night? You should be sleeping better, eating better, moving better. That doesn't work. So Well, when you're a content creator, hmm, right?

Sven Pape

I just, you know, there's another reason why I thought this would make sense, and it's actually, I actually have a problem with the fact that editors don't get enough recognition. I was always feeling like I did all this amazing work and nobody knows. The audience has no idea, no clue what editing is. They can't see it. They can see camera, they can hear music. They think it's all the director. And so I was like, this channel is going to celebrate editing, and I loved it when people were making comments in my videos here, yeah, but isn't the director? Shouldn't we? You should be talking more about Christopher Nolan doing this, and that I'm like, no this channel, we're celebrating the editor. We're looking at what the editor did and what they probably contributed to making this film work, and giving editors celebrating them and giving them recognition, was a huge motivation for me, and I think it was a very strong mission statement for the channel where people could like, yeah, I feel the same way, like I feel I'm an editor and nobody knows what I'm doing.

Zack Arnold

I'm so glad that you brought that up, because I was going to get to that next, which is number one, if you think, Well, I have to know everything, and I have to be the expert number one. You don't, but you also shouldn't, because that's not really what people want to listen to anymore or follow. We love to follow authenticity. So the fact that you're willing to say, You know what? I don't know everything about YouTube. My first videos, total crap, didn't look great on camera. The editing probably wasn't great. I hadn't figured out my storytelling formula, but you just put it out there, because the sooner you put it out there, you get a positive feedback loop. You can learn, you can iterate. You can get better, faster. But to me, the only thing that gets us through how God, awfully hard this process is when you're a content creator, when you're an educator, if you don't have a Why, you're gonna give up, you were, you're there's just no way you're gonna power through. And what you pointed out is not the what of This Guy Edits, or even the how it was, the why. So my guess is you having this kind of inner expressive need, like people have to know what we do, we don't get recognized. I bet that is what kept the channel going more than likes and subscribes,

Sven Pape

Yeah, for sure. And it's the reason why I would still make videos when, if I had the time right now, I'd be like, what's the next video I would make that sort of aligns with that mission, like, what can we learn about editing? What can we discover about the editors that did the work?

Zack Arnold

So this is going to be a really random in the weeds question, how can you just edit a video about Christopher Nolan films and put it on YouTube and monetize it.

Sven Pape

Well, it's this couple of tricks. First of all, it's fair use. So can have that argument with a student.

Zack Arnold

What are the fair use rules? Like this is something I've always because I I see so many everything, not everything, but there are so many things that are clip based, where it says all these great films, all this great music. I'm like, how are they doing this and generating ad revenue?

Sven Pape

Yeah, well, some people just just use visuals from the trailer, which usually are safe because the the algorithm, the content match, will not get triggered. There's some other tricks how you can, like, hide from the the content match. But I usually don't really care about that. I'm like, I'm I'm making a really good case that this is actually fair use. So what is fair use? Fair use is when I make a commentary, when I make fun of Christopher Nolan's scene work, when I educate people about this. Is this why I think he they did it that way? Well, Lee Smith, the editor at the time, I have the right to show this. It's my right. It's it's something that I would need to defend, because they can dispute it. They can say, No, we disagree. This is not You're not making a commentary enough, or it's not, it's a replacement of the existing product. Is what they usually say. People don't have to watch a Christopher Nolan movie after watching my video anymore, because I'm spoiling the film, for example. And then we can go through a dispute process where I usually would back off pretty fast, because it could lead to a lawsuit, and I don't want to spend 900,000 dollars in court. 1,000 dollars in court fighting a studio. There are some studios that have, they understand and they're willing to acknowledge fair use. There are certain studios that will not one studio that is fine or will acknowledge Fair Use is Netflix, for example, they're pretty cool most of the time. Actually, when I do a Netflix one, they actually give me the footage. I actually have a direct relationship with somebody. But there are other studios who won't mention that. Will just not it doesn't matter what you do. They will just not entertain the idea that this is fair use. And hopefully at some point somebody is going to take them so. To court, but it's, unfortunately, not going to be me. But if it does, if they, if they do, take the monetization away, it doesn't matter to me. I mean, as we know, it's not that much money anyway. It's just an opportunity to connect to an audience. And what's more important is that this video exists and that people see it and hopefully do something with it.

Zack Arnold

Well, not only that, but what you're doing in educating in the video, is you're educating the people that find you on the platform that you are an educator, and you have educational products. So there's synergy between all those, those things, rather than, well, I'm just going to do, you know, whatever this crazy thing is, or this or that. No, by the way, I sell an editing course. You're like, wait what? But there's that you've done such a good job of how all these different areas where somebody could discover you, it always has that central theme, which is understanding the craft and the storytelling of editing. So now that I better understand this idea that we have fair use, both for commentary, for the sake of education, for talking through something, I think this is just yet another reason to go back to what you said, where there's no excuse to not be working. Because the other excuse that somebody could come up with, which is one that I often like to use, is, but I don't want to shoot anything like I've never I know that there are people that love to go out and shoot and love the cameras like I'm just allergic to the production process, even when it's me, even when it's my own thing, I just want the footage on my computer and I want to cut it. But if we had this fair use, I could literally build an entire business of doing nothing more than educating people on how Netflix movies are cut. Now that I know what you know, I could build an entire business based on that idea alone.

Sven Pape

Yeah, or you could even do it with some of the other studios that will take the money away. The good news is they probably won't block your video because they want, they want people to engage with your video because it is actually helping them in terms of self.

Zack Arnold

It's free advertising for them. Why would they fight that? It's I mean, if you're saying I want to monetize me uploading a clean copy of your movie. Like, yeah, obviously that's copyright infringement, but if you're literally advertising for them and creating awareness, they'd be stupid to pull you down.

Sven Pape

Yeah. And then do you make your money another way, like you get 100,000 views every time you post a video, you're gonna have sponsors knocking down your door, and they're willing to pay you 5,000 dollars and then you you don't care about that AdSense money. You could do it that way, or you just build a community, do an email newsletter, and then, if you have a runway of a year, then you sell your course at that point, or whatever else you think you can offer to your audience that already likes you, and you're giving them an opportunity to provide more value to them that they're willing to invest in.

Zack Arnold

All right? So the last place that I want to end is I always do a little, not always, but often, do a little bit of a time traveling game. And this one's going to be a little bit there's going to be a unique one. So you're going to time travel to right now where we are, except your Sven, right before you discovered YouTube, via My Little Pony, if you were in today's times, would you start a YouTube channel? Would you start an educational platform, or would you start an email list? And how would you do it with the knowledge that you have?

Sven Pape

Okay, so I gotta make sure I understand this correctly, so I'm basically starting over. I haven't done YouTube, but I know I've learned everything about YouTube, but I haven't done any.

Zack Arnold

So you have all of your knowledge, yes, but you are where you were right before you're like, oh, YouTube, what's that? Oh, that's something that can monetize. So that's the period of your life before you started anything, yeah, you have all the knowledge that you do about YouTube, online business, online courses, email lists and otherwise, with the knowledge that you have now, how would you start in 2025 or in 2016 No, literally, right now, right as we're you're starting literally in the middle of our podcast conversation.

Sven Pape

Okay, so I know all this. I know that the opportunity is there, and clearly people are still succeeding on youtube today, and they started a month ago, and they're succeeding today. So I would try and figure out, I would connect the dots, what is it that makes them succeed today? Because it was different back then. It's what it is today, and I think it has to do with consistent content that is about somebody's journey. They have a passion, and they are going on a journey to learn more, to achieve a certain goal, to get somewhere, and they're bringing everybody along that just sort of stumbles into their channel that would be my strategy is to figure out, what am I really, really curious about, potentially passionate about, that I would want to spend the next two years of my life doing and then being interested to document. Once I figured that part out what that is, then I would just go ahead. Do it?

Zack Arnold

Hmm. So really new, interesting, novel, unique concept. You have a person, they're in this ordinary world, yes, they then accept a call to adventure, yes, to go on this journey. And through this journey, they encounter obstacles. They bring others along the way on this journey, something about this sounds familiar. This sound familiar. This doesn't sound as novel as maybe we think it does. Are you referring to a certain book I think we're talking about, I don't know, the hero's journey. That's basically the foundation for all modern storytelling. Yeah, exactly. I keep coming back to this story is what sells. So now, now I want to get, at least, kind of get into the nuances in the weeds a little bit. And I realized this is a constantly moving target, but if we're talking about, we want character driven stories people that are on journeys for the present state of the market. Would you say that this is, well, we're just going to put a 90 minute film on YouTube, versus this is going to be a bunch of five minute webisodes. Versus these are 20 minutes, you know, deep dives on a concept like again, this is going to change in seven days, so by the time somebody listens to it, it might be wrong, but right now, what do you see are the trends. If somebody wanted to start and they wanted to take their storytelling skills and tell stories on YouTube.

Sven Pape

I would say 10 to 20 minutes is where you want to land. You gotta get over the eight minutes so that you get multiple ads in your video like you won't be monetized right away, but YouTube will monetize your video right away, and they can only put more than one ad in if the video is longer than eight minutes. But it'll help you to be even longer than that, because you want to actually have people be watching 50% retention rate. So if you have a 20 minute video, you got to get your audience to watch on average, 10 minutes of that. If you can do that, you will blow up on YouTube and or if you do a 30 minute video, 50 minutes, whatever it is, but you gotta get 50% or better retention rate on your videos. So that would be my answer.

Zack Arnold

And is that something that you feel has one of those things that have changed, or do you feel what's changed is the number of views and the monetization?

Sven Pape

For me, obviously, the views have gone down, and with it, the monetization and monetization in general has gone down, but I think that rule is still very much true and alive to to get that every now and then I did like a video a couple of months ago about Taylor Swift, like a reaction video, just for fun, and the retention rate was just out of this world because all the Swifties were watching it. Oh, sure, the unique angle, like an person that knows nothing about Taylor Swift, that is a film manager looking at a music video of Taylor Swift was kind of a unique angle. So the algorithm within, I think within an hour or two hours, just jumped on it. And so I don't know. My point is it had a really good retention rate, and it immediately kind of forged its own path because of that.

Zack Arnold

The other thing that I would argue as well knowing nothing about the YouTube algorithm, or at least knowing nothing about how to successfully use the YouTube algorithm, because I can never crack the code, but really, all I ever did with YouTube was just publish my video podcast. And my understanding is that the video podcast space is so overly saturated that if you're not the Joe rogans or the Andrew hubermans, the algorithms like no, we're not going to feed somebody your 90 minute video of talking heads. But what I found is that, and I think this would you could really say this across multiple platforms, not just YouTube. If it's all about the likes, it's all about smashing the subscribe button and it's all about getting people's attention. You can't build relationships via attention. What I'm interested in is building an audience. You can't build an audience via just YouTube shorts. You need that 10 to 15 to 20 minutes so people get to know you, like they're going back to this random I don't know why I'm talking about over landing so much, but it's just where my head is. With YouTube. There's a guy that, if I ever saw him out on the trail, dude, thanks so much for teaching me about how to air down my tires and which tent to buy. Like, it's the dumbest thing, but you just build a relationship with people. I'm not going to get that on Instagram or Tiktok or YouTube shorts,

Sven Pape

Yeah. And I think, I mean, if you have a community, your podcast should be doing fine. It's just it's going to have a very organic growth rate. It's not going to be the algorithm that's going to help you a whole lot unless, like, people that don't know you, that stumble upon your podcast and they're just listening through all the way. If YouTube realizes that very predictably, these kinds of people will do that, then the algorithm will jump on it. But if it's just people that are already your audience, people that kind of need to get to know you for a while before they become your audience. So you can still kind of build a niche there and grow small, steady on YouTube or whatever else. I mean. What is your number one medium for your podcast? Is it Spotify? Or where it's

Zack Arnold

Apple podcast? By far, Apple podcast, it's not even close. I can't remember that. It's not quite 8020 but it's like 70 plus percent. Is Apple podcast Spotify, I think is number three. Overcast is number two. But the simplified version of it is that my entire discovery platform is audio only podcast, because I stopped publishing to YouTube. Yeah, and also to add on to this, not to interrupt, but I think it's really important for people to hear this, because most people don't talk about it. I've been doing a podcast for 10 years, it still doesn't make me money the podcast itself, I'm not saying the business, but the podcast itself is still not profitable, but it's how people discover me. It's how I bring them from listening their earbuds to being on an email list. The email list is where I build the audience. That's where I build the business. So to this day, I still don't make money on my podcast, and I'm fine with that.

Sven Pape

Does Apple help with finding your audience on their platform?

Zack Arnold

I don't think so. I mean, I I think the for the most part, and part of this is just because my inability to properly market myself, because I just, I like the content creation, I hate the marketing. I think that I There are some ebbs and flows, like I had one episode that was just like a giant spike, and there was no explanation to it. So I think it was probably new and noteworthy, or it was like in the recommended next episodes for some big podcast. Because when I reached out to the guest, I was like, Hey, do you like have an influencer or somebody that you share this with? Is like, I haven't put this anywhere. And it was, I think it was 20x what all my other episodes were. So I've had anomalies, but by and large, I think it's all organic growth. That's word of mouth. That's what it's been for 10 years. Just word of mouth.

Sven Pape

And do they have a way to engage with your content on that platform or then ultimately, they'll sort of trickle into your email list?

Zack Arnold

Yeah, there's, there's no way with an audio podcast to engage directly. There's not, like, a commenting, you know, platform, or anything like that. So I bring them to the email list, and then from the email list, bring them into the community atmosphere, with multiple levels of how the community functions. But what I have, one of the things that I've discovered over the years, and maybe this is something that you know, you've looked into, maybe you've found the same thing, is that you and I kind of both have a head start to this where, now everybody's trying to figure out, how do I diversify? How do I become a generalist? You and I think you started around the same time as me, you know, around the fitness and post days. We've got about a decade long head start. And when we were doing it like all you had to do is sell an online course. Here's four modules, teaches you how to do X, Y, Z, boom. 99 dollars, 197, there you go. And in doing that, I realized that number one that you can be very successful selling an online course, but you're not successful in getting people results, because it's really difficult to get a high percentage of people to go through a self guided online course when all they have is information. So that's when I started to bring coaching into the picture. And then all of a sudden I realized that my product was my community, the coaching and the, you know, the having the self guided courses, workshops on networking, time management, career pivots, right? That was all secondary. People wanted to join the community. So basically, my biggest pivot is, oh, my product is, I sell community. I sell connections. I just happen to have a lot of other kick ass education associated with it. And it sounds like you made a similar discovery.

Sven Pape

Yeah, 100% the same. I mean, within the first month, I think we implemented discord to the course, and it was a game changer, because you can talk to your students and the students can talk to me. It's, it's what, yeah, I think that's the that's the success factor. It's not the lessons. It's the the idea that you are in this together.

Zack Arnold

Well, speaking of in this together, I'm going to wrap it up today by saying that just very much appreciate the fact that you have taken the time to be here on this conversation. You and I have kind of, you know, inadvertently be in it together, in a whole host of ways. I'll make sure to also not only send them to you, but send them to the video that you and I collaborated on. I think it was all talking about networking, if I remember, but the place that I would like to leave, especially those that are listening today, that are just in the messy middle of I have to figure out what to do next. Is there anything that we haven't talked about where you're like, I'm going to get off this podcast. And if I'm like, Oh, I can't believe I didn't say this, I'm going to regret it. Anything we haven't covered that you think people need to hear?

Sven Pape

Figure out what you're passionate about. Sometimes you don't know what you're passionate about, figure out what you're curious about, and start playing with that. If you are curious about editing, I hope it's okay to plug secret please.

Zack Arnold

This is, yes, this is the shameless self promotion portion of my.

Sven Pape

Go to secreteditinghacks.com there's a free mini course that teaches you one of the things that I've developed myself in terms of how to. Make it become a better editor because it's selecting. There's a certain way that I do it. There are many ways other people do it, but it sets you up for success in editing. And most novice editors don't select. They just start cutting and cutting themselves into a corner. So if you're curious about editing, go to secret editing hacks.com and just figure it out. I mean, the advice is, don't do it. In terms of filmmaking, career editing, you should never do this, because it's too risky, it's too hard. But if this is what you want, if this is something you're really passionate about, just to follow that curiosity and go deep on it.

Zack Arnold

I love that couldn't have wrapped it up any better than that. So Sven, once again, really appreciate you taking the time, and I'm sure that our paths are going to cross again many times in the future.

Sven Pape

All right, have a good one. Thanks so much. This was fun.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai