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Why you should use formats
(2 min read) How Tiffany Yu landed over $100,000 in brand deals and a 6 figure book deal with less than 200,000 followers through the use of formats.
Avi Gandhi
October 08, 2024
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Tiffany Yu is not in a popular niche, and she knows it.
I'm a content creator who makes disability advocacy content…I'm not going to grow as quickly as someone else.
With less than 200,000 followers across all her socials, you might be forgiven for thinking she doesn’t make much…
But in 2022, she made $105,000 in brand deals before signing a six-figure book deal in 2023!
(By the way - that book, The Anti-Ableist Manifesto, comes out today! Get it here.)
How did she earn so much income without a million-scale audience?
She created a format.
A format is a Hollywood term; below, I’m going to tell you what it is, and how it helped Tiffany make more money than her audience size might suggest.
You too can create and leverage formats.
But first…Lickd is back as our sponsor! If you make YouTube content and you haven’t at least checked out their library of trending and popular music, I’d be curious to know why.
.Sponsored.
YouTubers: get 14% more video views with viral music
This shouldn’t shock anyone: A recent study showed that YouTubers using mainstream music vs stock music got…
14% more views
21% more Likes, 51% more Comments
35% more watch time
Any one of those metrics could get you over the line on a sponsorship renewal or another few dozen product sales–real impact!
That said, using mainstream music is risky because rights holders will claim your video revenue; you can get around that if you use a platform that has licensed the music for you.
Lickd is the only platform that does that for mainstream music, allowing you to use 1.4 million songs from top artists like Justin Bieber, Dua Lipa, and Coldplay in your YouTube videos.
I love this because you don’t have to be a millionaire Creator to get the benefit–anyone can use mainstream music to make better content and grow reach + revenue.
If you create long-form content on YouTube:
The Power of Formats
There isn’t a great formal definition for a show format, so here’s how I would describe it:
A format is the unique arrangement and composition of a show’s elements, including its genre, concept, structure, branding, narrative style, and production techniques.
Consider shows nearly everyone has seen - Jeopardy, Law & Order, Survivor - the most successful shows on Earth all have formats anyone would recognize.
Formats don’t just apply to TV - or even to video. Many successful Creators have formats as well! Previous guests with formats include:
Chenell Basilio’s Growth in Reverse - deep breakdowns of successful newsletters’ growth tactics
Justin Moore’s Creator Debates - Topical debates between two Creators, moderated by Justin and broken into 3 rounds with different angles / topics per round
Nathan Kennedy’s Employee-Employer Convos - dramatic short-form conversations between employees and employers, where Nathan acts as both
Tiffany’s Anti-Ableism Series format is simple:
The Anti-Ableism Series is a short form video series to highlight the ways that we can better show up for the disability community. There's no one way to show up, so that's why there are so many parts.
- The definition of disability.
- The definition of ableism.
- Did you know that there are over 60 million disabled people in the US and a billion globally?
Those were three different pieces of content, so I knew I had a lot of room to make a lot of videos.
She did make a lot of videos:
The Anti-Ableism Series has 280 parts and over 5 million views.
Consistently creating a format over several years enabled her to make over $100,000 in brand deals and a six-figure book deal for a few reasons:
Momentum
The Anti-Ableism Series has 280 parts and over 5 million views maybe more)...I wanted something that could anchor me to continue creating short form video content if I had my way.
We’ve all had Creator’s block; wasn’t it hard to get going again after a few days of not creating? By having a series with a simple set format, Tiffany knows roughly what she needs to make, has a narrower window in which to ideate, and can more easily build momentum by consistently releasing content over a longer time horizon.
Opportunity
December 2020, I start the first of The Anti-Ableism Series…March of 2021, I got a random inbound through my website from a literary agent, and he says, “Hey, I'm friends with Dr. Jenny Wang, who’s the creator behind Asians for Mental Health. I've been seeing some of what you're doing…Have you thought about writing a book?”
If you release lots of content under the same format, your odds of reaching someone who will like you, your voice, or your content increase. Any brand looking to work with the disabled community, for example, is likely to run across a video in Tiffany’s series and immediately understand exactly what they will get if they work with her. Often, companies are willing to pay a premium for knowing what to expect.
With 285 fairly consistent and similar “episodes” live on TikTok, each has a closer to equal shot of converting a viewer than they would if they were all different formats.
Intellectual Property
My TikTok series is called The Anti-Ableism Series. The book is called the Anti-Ableist Manifesto. In a lot of ways, the book is the TikTok series in book form.
Formats are IP, and they can be monetized as IP across a bunch of different products and media. If Tiffany made a bunch of random videos about disability advocacy, it would have been much harder to pitch her book.
Since all her content was bundled under the same concept, brand, and structure (The Anti-Ableist Series of short videos about how people can show up for those with disabilities) it made it much easier to pitch and close the deal for her book (The Anti-Ableist Manifesto book about how people can show up for those with disabilities).
The easier something is to understand, the more valuable it is because the more people are likely to want it - and formats make creative projects easier to understand.
The biggest beauty of these benefits? Size didn’t really matter.
The Anti-Ableism Series has 280 parts and over 5 million views.
280 videos have 5 million views - that’s roughly 17,800 views per short-form video - not small by any means, but considering that the vast majority of them weren’t sponsored, the implication is that the ones that were had considerably higher value than the $250-$500 or so a performance marketer might pay for a post with that reach.
That would have been far less likely if they weren’t part of a format.
Poll
Which artist would you most like to use in your YouTube videos? (Sponsored by Lickd) |
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Written by Avi Gandhi, edited by Melody Song,
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