The Stew & The Soup: Lessons From a Year on YouTube

I’m going to do this post a little differently. You may know about this Substack because you subscribe to me on YouTube. Today, I’m going to use this space to talk about what I’ve learned in the past year, mainly on that platform.¹

I want to write this for a few reasons. First and most straightforwardly, the year is a time to reflect on what you’ve done and look to the future. Second, I’m not sure where my video career is going, but I think it’s important to mark where it is right now as a record of this point in my life. Third, I want to share with you some of the unglamorous details of what I’ve learned in becoming a video content creator. 

Let’s start with the biggest one:

Getting My Eggs Out of Elon’s Basket Was the Right Call

On November 8th, 2023, I released my first ever on-camera video on Instagram (here it is!). 

That date marked both a beginning and an end in my professional life. It’s kind of wild to think about now, but there was a time when I almost exclusively tweeted. When in 2022 it became clear that Elon was going to buy Twitter and – in all likelihood – ruin it, I decided I had to diversify to other platforms. Becoming a video creator a year later represented the culmination of that strategic decision and the start of a new creative phase of my life. Below, I’ve included some key data points on my content pivot this year:

In the past year, my following online has grown almost fivefold, from 181k to 841k, mainly by expanding into video and diversifying to other platforms.

People viewed content created by me – be it a tweet, a post, or a video – more than a half billion times in 2024. While a majority of these views still come from Twitter, I expect my presence on other platforms collectively to overtake Twitter next year.

Learning How to YouTube

Undoubtedly the area where I experienced the most professional growth was content creation on YouTube. I don’t really mean in the size of my following there, though that certainly was a byproduct. I mean that I learned how to YouTube. I’ve broken these up into several pieces below.

Quality > Quickness

First, I learned that unlike Instagram and Twitter, where going viral with political content often means being first, content quality drives virality on YouTube. Focusing on quality doesn’t just mean exerting more effort. High quality political videos layer other events and trends on top of the latest viral moment to explain why it matters to interested audiences. In other words, you are giving your viewers analysis.

This difference in strategy on YouTube comes down in large part to what audiences are primed and looking for on the platform. Creating political content on Twitter is a bit like microwaving soup: The quality might be lower but fast is best here because the people are hungry now. YouTube is more like preparing a stew: It takes longer to cook, has more meat, and the intended customers expect it to be satisfying yet digestible.

Lastly, taking time also lets your video idea ripen, in which time you can observe not only how events develop but also how others react to them. This again enhances your ability to contextualize the development – event, news, or trend – for your audience. 

T&T: Titles and Thumbnails

One paradox of YouTube video creation is how important your video’s thumbnail and titles are to its success. It doesn’t matter whether your video combines the choicest analysis with top-tier production value, if the thumbnail doesn’t immediately grab your reader’s attention, your video will underperform.

Thumbnail creation injects a lot of angst in the creative process for me. The thumbnail used to be something I only thought about only after creating a video, usually spending 5 minutes creating it. Now If I can’t think of the thumbnail for a video, the video’s not getting made. Luckily, the need to be pithy is one area where I can call on my years of experience on Twitter, and I often catch myself brainstorming engaging thumbnail designs and titles. 

You may also notice that my thumbnails have something of a standard look, with yellow text and arrows overlaying screengrabs from my videos. This is not because the color yellow is particularly attention grabbing (though it is²). It’s actually a signaling device. For whatever reason, I noticed left-of-center political creators have chosen yellow as the standard font color – along with yellow arrows – for their thumbnails. Despite my minimalist sensibilities³, I follow this convention because it helps my content reach people who want to see it.

Know Your Niche

Good artists copy; great artists steal 

-Steve Jobs, stealing from Pablo Picasso

This thumbnail-as-signal lesson is part of a much larger one: know your niche. Study what works for other people you admire who do what you want to do. This is a bit like virtual mentoring. When I started making videos, I pictured myself as a disrupter who could achieve success by defying conventional wisdom. This belief lasted about as long as it took to make my first video.

It turns out (unsurprisingly) you don’t have to reinvent the wheel; emulating people who came before you actually saves you a lot of work. For me this meant asking very tactical-level questions: What do other creators’ thumbnails look like? How long are their videos? What colors are they using? It also meant asking more substantive questions: How do they present their idea? What topics are they talking about? What topics are they not talking about? It was only when I had mentally mapped out the left-of-center political content niche that I felt confident enough to stake out my own space within it.

Quick Hits: What Else Worked

• Engagement Hacking: Putting “WOW!” in front of a post – on any platform – can literally be the difference between going viral or a flop post.

• Hatmongering not Hatemogering: During election season I wanted to reclaim wearing hats from MAGA, so I designed a simple blue baseball cap with the word “Democracy” on it. It turned out people loved them: To date I have sold 2,100⁴! I even bumped into someone I didn’t know wearing one on the street in Washington, DC. (Get yours here!)

• Sometimes I Still Break News: After the first assassination attempt on Trump, I was the first account to post the would-be assassin’s – decidedly not-liberal – political affiliation on YouTube. This was also the video that would finally grab the YouTube algorithim’s attention.

Quick Hits: What Didn’t Work

Oh my gosh, so much:

• Being Disagreeable: Saying things your audience disagrees with is a surefire way to incur backlash on social media. I’m going to refuse to learn from this one however: I don’t intend to censor myself for fear of losing followers. I think it’s important to say what I feel, even if it cuts against the grain, because the Democratic Party was and must continue to be a big-tent party that fosters dialogue, promotes plurality, and accepts diversity of opinion. To do otherwise would also belittle my audience: What is the point of having subscribers and followers if you just tell them what they want to hear all the time? 

• Always Be Creating: For a week after the election, I took a break from video creation (as I have mentioned before). When I came back it felt like the YouTube algorithm had put me in the doghouse: Though other liberal creators’ numbers were holding up, it took me over a month for my views to recover. 

• Not My Thread-and-Butter: I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re never going to break news on Threads. Despite some initial exciting moments on that app, it’s never going to replace Twitter for breaking news. Twitter simply has so much inertia as the place to be when events on the ground are moving fast. That isn’t to say Threads doesn’t have a role to play: It is an important tool for reaching liberal audiences, and engagement is much better that Twitter.

What I Want to Do in 2025

I want to continue this Substack experiment. I don’t think Substack will ever be my main platform, but it’s a good hedge against algorithms: Substack gives me a direct line to people who want to hear from me. Elsewhere, Alphabet, Meta, or Elon decide who hears my message. I don’t want anyone standing between me and my audience other than me if I can help it.

I want to do interviews: with candidates, with politicians, people on the street. I used to do interviews in my old life and I want to do more of them. I think they’re fun! Here’s one I did with Pete Buttigieg at the DNC. Comms people reading this: let’s get in touch!

I want to make a better studio space: I like my current setup because the at-home aesthetic retains an underground media feel, but I want to refine it, starting with a new backdrop. By investing in my videos’ looks (besides the g*ddamn thumbnails), I want to broaden my potential audience. While content matters in disseminating your message, the packaging does too, and the right is eating the left’s lunch in this regard. Rightwing creators right now are better at presenting themselves with the right balance of professionalism (say, with high-quality filming equipment) and authenticity (there aren’t lights from every angle annihilating every possible shadow). Liberals need to reclaim this personal touch!

Lastly, I want to continue to consult with candidates and help get Democrats elected.

Thank You

The past year, especially on YouTube, has been incredibly rewarding: setting out to do something, planting it, and watching it grow brings a profound sense of accomplishment. When people reach out and talk about how my content impacted them never fails to choke me up.⁵

Part of growing my channel has been through meeting people. It’s the oldest piece of advice in any business book, but it hasn’t ceased being true: Always take the meeting. I traveled around the U.S. a fair amount this year – Florida, Tennessee, New York, Ohio, Minnesota, among others – and in each place I always tried to connect with local Democrats, creators, or just people whose opinion I respected. 

In any profession, relationships are force multipliers, and this is especially true for professions that rely on audience reach. The brothers at MeidasTouch, for example, very generously collaborated with me when I was just starting my video era on Instagram, granting me access to their audience and giving me a head start on building my own. 

This contact also keeps you motivated. Ironically, the content creator world can be very insular, with even the most successful creators doing their own production, content, and editing. In those rare times where you come in contact with others – at one-on-one meetings, creator events, other cool stuff – it’s a bit like touching a magical motivation stone. You feel your inner drive to create, innovate, and explore stoked again. Making contact like this several times a year helped me achieve the consistency that so much of success depends upon. 

No matter what your calling is, seek out relationships with people you admire and who are generous enough to help you. If you have a dream, there are people out there waiting for you to come to them and teach you.

It’s just a matter of starting.

1. Next year, with a year on this platform under my belt, I plan to do a similar review for Substack.

2. Apparently the normal human eye is most sensitive to light at a wavelength of 555 nm, which corresponds to yellowish-green light of the visible spectrum.

3.  I’m a minimalist at heart: The comforter on my bed is plain white; my closet is entirely composed of neutral colors; I have four pieces of furniture in my living room. Lol. The total opposite of the painful maximalism required to get someone to click on YouTube videos.

4.  A portion of the proceeds of which went to the Harris-Walz campaign!

5. If you watch me on YouTube, you know I’m a crier.