19 Minutes Inside The Mind of A Top 1% YouTube Strategist

**Richard** (0:00)
All right, so I'm with Jacob Bryant, LA born. He's worked with tons of creators from LA., so we're gonna understand how you got them 1.5 billion views. First question is, so who are the biggest creators you've worked with in LA.?

**Jacob Bryant** (0:14)
I worked with the royalty family. They have 33 million subs. When I started working with them, they're at 100 million views per month. Now they're at like 200 million, and I'm not gonna take all the credit or anything, but I was definitely like a contributor to them kind of growing over time.
So 200 million views, and mostly long-form. They almost never post shorts, which has been really awesome to see. Super cool, super rewarding to work with them. I love working with our team.

**Richard** (0:35)
All right, so that channel, for example, they have 33 million subscribers, right? 100 million.
What do you think made them stand out more than the thousands or hundreds of thousands of family channels out there? How does that one specifically get to zero to 100 million views per month, and now 200 million?

**Jacob Bryant** (0:53)
Yeah, they really understand storytelling. I know it's overstated and almost cringed to say, but for them, I think it's actually true. If you look at their thumbnails, they always tell a story. It's never just one-dimensional. And so you'll see the designs are like, they have really good designs, but they're not reinventing the wheel there. It's always with the way they work with depth of field, where you see something in the background that's really far, and then they add something in the mid-ground, in the foreground, and that gives you this depth of field of looking through the whole design. But the whole thing is meant to tell a story. It's not meant to just be one thing, right? And so that, combined with their storytelling and the vlogs themselves, they never treat it like it's just a casual vlog to them. It always has a beginning, middle, and end. I think those two things combined, once that obviously gets paid off in content, that's really the thing to me that makes them stand out the most.

**Richard** (1:41)
What's a common trait you see amongst all those YouTubers that are crushing?

**Jacob Bryant** (1:46)
The thing that they always get is they understand how to juxtapose their packaging with their intro.
Even people who have been doing it for a decade, they still forget how important the matching the intro with the packaging really is. Something that I see consistently with bad packaging is sometimes people just put texts like, this is huge, or million dollars, expecting that to be enough. But the truth is that text, it's not enough to flex a million dollars or a million views. You have to really capture people with the juxtaposition of the information you're showing them. So for example, instead of saying a million views, what's better being like they got their channel deleted, but then they grew it again to a million views. And so if you can find a way to tell a story with minimal text, then you can get way farther than most people, especially when you combine that with the intro, then it's game over.

**Richard** (2:36)
What's one piece of advice you tell someone wanting to blow up on YouTube in 2026?

**Jacob Bryant** (2:42)
That depends. Where are they starting from? Are they starting from zero, or do they already have a channel?

**Richard** (2:45)
They already have a channel.

**Jacob Bryant** (2:47)
Okay.
If someone's already, they already have a channel, let's say they're unsatisfied with where they currently are. The biggest thing that I would focus on is simplicity with packaging. Like it's almost always packaging is the issue. Like sometimes people make bad content, but they get a million views on it. That's because they understand the idea, they understand how to package it. And so whenever you're packaging anything, just like whatever you have, like delete something, you have too much in it, just delete something out of it and make it as simple as possible. And the text like you add is like, again, this needs to be as simple as possible, but like conveying the biggest idea you have in your back pocket. So the convey the biggest idea in the most simplest way possible.

**Richard** (3:25)
What's a common misconception creators have?

**Jacob Bryant** (3:28)
Thinking that their click-through rate is really important. The thing that I always see over and over and over again, people keep saying like how like, oh, what's a good click-through rate? Everyone asks, every single person, some of the biggest people ever to people who just started.