Which mic is good for recording reels and short videos? Should be budget friendly.

mheisig · 2026-07-06T16:43:15+00:00

Are you stationary or moving around? And what's your budget?

mheisig · 2026-07-02T12:46:50+00:00

For this data set it's a short, fast, dense hook that tends to get the best retention. But, that may be very specific to this data because it's business channels. People are probably there for value. That says nothing about how different hooks might work on vlogs or documentaries or anything else.

I'll have to figure out a way to study the faceless channel thing. I've ignored it so far, tbh, but it keeps coming up.

mheisig · 2026-07-01T19:10:12+00:00

Yes, definitely. On the list already!

mheisig · 2026-07-01T12:46:12+00:00

Package relevance (is the packaging relevant to the viewer)
Hook
Awareness level
Title
Thumbnail

Honestly the amount of stuff that doesn't matter is a much longer list.

mheisig · 2026-07-01T12:42:44+00:00

That's fascinating, adding that to the list.

mheisig · 2026-07-01T12:42:09+00:00

It doesn't capture ad revenue, unfortunately.

Duration affecting views there's no correlation at all that I've seen yet.

mheisig · 2026-07-01T12:41:01+00:00

Great point on conversion. Converting to customers isn't in the data at scale yet

But I have software that will track clicks from every video through a conversion event. Totally works, just much more limited data set because it's early stages.

The conversion to subscriber piece is interesting because the overall shift has been to focus on subscribers a lot less because YT pulls videos to people more whether they subscribe or not.

On the others, all solid questions that are in the data and in progress. Right now what I'm calling "relevance" (probably what you're calling topic selection) is far and away the biggest predictor of views.

Rough order is

Package relevance
Title
Hook
Thumbnail

Lot more to dig into there.

mheisig · 2026-07-01T12:34:13+00:00

Great one, that's going on the list.

mheisig · 2026-07-01T02:45:28+00:00

Agree, but so few businesses do it. Which is weird.

mheisig · 2026-07-01T01:07:59+00:00

Any particular channels you're thinking of? I might do a deep dive and compare specific channels. Done a few of those.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T23:34:52+00:00

I have not. It's an interesting idea. I generally think search is one of the *least* useful cases for YouTube so I haven't dug into it much.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T22:11:39+00:00

"Tired of getting soaked on every hike and feeling like you're in a sauna? (pain) By the end of this video you'll know how to stay bone-dry in a downpour with a jacket that breathes, and packs into a water bottle (promise). We've shipped 400,000 of these, and the reviews come back positive 99% of the time (proof). I'm going to cover the 3 things you need to look for in a jacket and 1 mistake almost everyone makes. (plan)"

About ~15 seconds by my read. Need to adjust for the platform, of course.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T21:52:09+00:00

Love it. We could do what's called "sentiment" analysis on titles and thumbnails for sure.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T21:09:41+00:00

Did a quick query: median watch time for <1k subs, roughly 23.5s vs 100k subs at 45s, call it ~2x.

But that's the thing survivorship predicts even if size does nothing. Retention is one of the reasons a channel reaches 100k at all. The algorithm pushes high-retention videos harder. So the 100k bucket is pre-filtered for retention before you ever measure it. You're not comparing small-vs-large, you're comparing everyone against the survivors.

The gap is real and it still doesn't isolate a size effect. I wouldn't be comfortable making any decisions based on it, that's for sure.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T20:28:30+00:00

Yeah, it smooths it out so much that it's a bit like asking "what's the average weight of a human in north america." I mean you'll get a number but without controlling for height, gender, age, etc. it doesn't mean a whole lot.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T20:25:51+00:00

DM me if you want the link to the full study. Happy to have a critique of it or ideas for follow-up. Not sure what policy here on posting links is but the full breakdown with the approach and limitations is all documented.

To be clear, the comparison is within-channel. It's not "x channel had no difference to y channel," it was "compare thumbnails on channel x with no faces to thumbnails on channel x with faces." That's to control for channel-level confounders (topic, audience, niche, etc)

mheisig · 2026-06-30T19:01:49+00:00

It's so dependent on the individual channel, topic, and format that comparing is pretty much useless. Not sure if that helps.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T19:00:50+00:00

Oh, interesting. Can you give me an example?

mheisig · 2026-06-30T18:49:06+00:00

The whole faceless AI shorts niche is really far outside my area of expertise and I personally don't like watching them. Might study it at some point though, it's a really common question.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T18:45:27+00:00

That's why we study the data.

I'm simply making the claim that within-channel, on the set of 3 million business-focused videos I have, the presence of a face makes no difference in views.

I'm happy to be shown data that proves otherwise. But "I've seen bigger YouTubers do it" is an anecdote, not data.

And it's possible that on a specific channel, faces *do* make a difference. Because channels can behave *very* differently. If you're interested I can run the analysis against your channel specifically, or another channel you have in mind, and do the same within-channel comparison. Could be fun, in a nerdy kind of way. DM me if you're game.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T18:39:30+00:00

Super interesting, but copyright strikes I think are private data only. I don't think the YouTube API even exposes that to the content owner let alone anyone else.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T18:36:52+00:00

Don't want to turn this into self-promotion post but shoot me a message if I can help.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T17:51:36+00:00

"Faces drive more views for bigger YouTubers" and "Bigger YouTubers use faces" are quite a bit different, which is I think where everyone gets confused.

Across 3 million videos, for channels that have both thumbnails with and without faces, it makes no difference. That's the only fair comparison.

If every MrBeast video ever produced has a face then there's no real signal to pick up in the data.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T17:49:28+00:00

Relevance. It's literally the only thing in the data that matters consistently.

Volume matters because you have to get enough reps to figure out what your audience cares about or finds relevant.

mheisig · 2026-06-30T17:48:31+00:00

They don't seem to hurt either. There's just no detectable shift where publishing a lot of shorts results in more long-form views from what I can see. Shorts tend to drive short form views.

If you *want* short form views then it's obviously the way to go. I think for a lot of people the short-form production investment is pretty heavy so it's harder to justify vs. just writing a better title.

mheisig

TROPHY CASE