Four (4) simple ways to 10x ad revshare

(5 min read) TechGoggles on increasing CPMs, low-quality thumbnails, valuing watch time, and dragging out a video. Featuring WhatsApp, Wordpress, Bluehost, Google Sheets, Final Cut, and Da Vinci Resolve.

TechGoggles

We don’t do it for the money - we love creating content, and we want to make money so that we can keep doing it.

But at the end of the day, money does matter.

Most gaming Creators these days play games so they can make money.

Angad and Harkaran Singh make money so they can play games.

This past year, their TechGoggles family of channels made over $300,000, so they’ve got quite a bit of gaming ahead of them…

Let’s get into it!

Links

The Business

Breakdown

Observations

Angad and Harkaran didn’t initially prioritize revenue.

We were averaging millions of views every week, but we weren’t making enough money, and that was leading us to burn out….

Part of the reason they weren’t doing well is that they lived in India, and were producing their videos in Hindi.

The max average revenue for a comedy video for Hindi content is 90 cents. The CPM. Max like, we've never seen any video at $1.

Then they switched to English, and things changed.

We had a video on Facebook that went viral recently - it got 7.3 million views. That averaged a $5 CPM…

The CPM is the amount the advertisers pay and Facebook takes its cuts. So, we got like 50% of that…We made, I would say, $15,000 to $17,000.

Switching to English enabled them to reach audiences in the US, UK, Australia, and other high-CPM markets.

The best part? They retained their Indian audiences.

India is the world's biggest English-speaking population.

Retaining their Indian audience gives them an edge on a platform that has largely been sidelined in the competition between video game livestreaming platforms: Facebook.

Nearly 500 million Indians use Facebook, out of their 2.9 billion total users.

By views, we were among the top 1% of gaming content creators on [Facebook’s] platform last year.

As a result, they have a platform deal with Facebook akin to what megastreamers on Twitch and YouTube - despite Facebook otherwise downsizing its gaming video business.

We just renewed this year, in July, I guess…They cut almost 90% of the partners, so we're in the lucky 10%.

That deal accounts for 10% of their revenue, on top of what they make from Facebook ads, and is structured in one of three ways (which way is confidential):

Different creators have different deals. Some need to do a minimum number of videos, some have to do a minimum number of hours of livestreaming, and some have a minimum number of minutes of video…

We’re one of the three.

Platform revenue accounts for 85% of their business. In an effort to diversify, they’ve put effort into to other revenue streams.

Their brand deal business is very small, because they were only getting Indian brands. Angad recently moved to Canada with the goal of building relationships with more lucrative Western brands.

Now we are starting to network with PC brands and gaming brands here in North America…because as you know, there is only so much you can do online, only so much networking. You have to be at events like VidCon, and PAX, and gaming events.

Their other growing revenue stream is an channel management “agency”, where they manage the channels of other gaming Creators in exchange for a portion of revenue.

When I see some channels that have the potential of generating like $10,000 a month - they have the audience but they are not using the right titles and thumbnails, or they are not working on the clickthrough rate or the watch time - we have them optimize these parameters.

Just by optimizing these parameters, you can easily go from $500 to $5,000 in like one month.

They’re very sophisticated about how they think about optimization, and as a result, they’re working on a low-cost ($50-$100) course that will be available later this year.

I’ll leave you with 3 takeaways from their optimization expertise - a teaser to the course - before we jump into their Stack:

  1. Lower “quality” thumbnails are often better.

The thumbnail needs to be clickable.

…you know when you re-upload a meme, the quality starts to go down? And that's how you know that it's a good meme video, because the quality is down, because everybody's re-uploading it?

We applied that to our thumbnails. We realized that people have this psychological thing where they think, “Oh, lower quality means it's a viral video.”

So we use that in our thumbnails.

  1. Drag it out.

They'll show something that happens in the first 60 seconds, you're like, what happens next? And then they'll drag it out for 20 minutes.

For example - a guy would have a structure of 100,000 matches, and he's like, “Now I'm gonna light it on fire,” and then he doesn't light it on fire for 18 minutes.

  1. Watch Time = Revenue

If the watch time is over one minute, it's viral.

If it's over three minutes, it's $30-$40 thousand dollars. Yeah.

And if it's eight minutes, then you're making a million dollars.

The Stack

Website - WordPress

We're not running ads on it…it keeps the game developers happy because they're getting reviews and we get to have a good relationship with them.

Hosting - BlueHost

Yahoo had the worst customer service, like ever. And Bluehost has one of the best - in India, especially. They have a 24 seven call center. You can just call them.

Affiliates - YouTube

There's a new feature in YouTube where you can add products, so we are just testing it and maybe it works out…Everybody's in experimenting stage with that. I haven't heard of anybody generating good revenue from the YouTube affiliate program.

Communication - WhatsApp

Representation - None

Brand Deals - Internal

Video Production:

  • 5 PCs - Custom with AMD graphics and CPU

  • Logitech C920 camera - good starting, decent camera for streaming

  • Video Cam - Sony A73 for video recording

  • Editing - Mac suite - Final Cut Pro + Da Vinci Resolve

  • Mic - Behringer mic and mixer + the team has their own setups

  • All gaming consoles and VR headsets

Video Distribution - Native on platform

Operations - Freelance team

  • 2-3 people writing articles on the blog.

  • Team that plays the games and edits videos and streams, mostly project-based and freelance

    • 5 people close to full-time plus a stable of part-timers

  • They produce a TON of content

    • 7-8 streams + 4-5 videos per day across all channels

Project Management - WhatsApp + Google Sheets

At the start of almost every month, we'll sit together and plan out what we need to do for this month.

We'll study what did good last month, and what we need to optimize for next month - like for Facebook, let's say Batman is doing very well, so we need more Batman content on Facebook….So me and my brother will go through the game, find out what's good, what can go viral on Facebook, and then make an Excel sheet of what everybody has to do.

And then we send one Excel sheet per person - “Hey, this is what you need to do this month. These are the number of streams. This is what you need to stream.”

Thanks for reading!

My mission is to enable a million people to find freedom in the Creator Economy.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and/or Instagram for actionable insights.

Reach out anytime - [email protected].

If you liked this, please subscribe (free).

If you LOVED this, please leave me a testimonial!

If you refer a new reader, I’ll send you Mrs Poindexter’s Guide to Marketing on Reddit. She makes a few hundred grand a month of Reddit promotion, so…it works.

See you next week!

Reply

or to participate.