Attention Expert: “16 Seconds Made Me $250,000!” How to Design VIRAL Videos That Print Millions

Today's guest has averaged a billion views a month for the past five years. I think personal brand is going to be more valuable than Bitcoin by 2030, because Bitcoin may 100x, but your personal brand can 1000x. And aspiring singer on the voice, she was forced into bankruptcy after a record label legally stole her name. By at her lowest point, she grabbed her phone and filmed a video of her chickens in a bathtub that went viral overnight. And that video did 19 million views overnight and grew me over 100,000 followers. Today she's mastered the art of vertical content, gaining over 40 million followers and working with mainstream brands like Land Rover, Raising Cans, and Sharma. We would put $5 behind every piece of content, every variation. You can see between seconds 12 and 20, I lost 42 percent of people. Then you have an opportunity to go back and tweak it. The best part of this is, Jack, you don't have to do that anymore. In this episode, we'll dive into the techniques that work on any algorithm, right down the anatomy of a billion view video, and uncover how anyone can turn attention into a $20 million marketing machine. What's the most you've made from a single Facebook video? At least it's a piece of shit, and it took us maybe 45 minutes to make. Adley, Kinsman. Welcome to the Jack, you podcast. Thank you so much, and I would like you to write all of my introductions from this day forward. Thank you. I'll try my best. Yeah. You've mentioned that there are two non-negotiable factors to achieving virality. At what point did you decide to build your entire playbook around the first three seconds and the share button? That might be the first six seconds, but I'm not sure what's really more important. Great question. Well, we aim for six, but you can't get to six if you don't have three seconds first. There's two non-negotiables when it comes to mastering a hook. There's plenty of other things that you should do too, but the first non-negotiables are making the audience feel an emotion. If you don't stop them and compel an emotion, everybody knows this, right? But truly, if you don't make your audience feel something immediately, you're not going to have a shot on getting to educate them on whatever your goals are. So it's that and a curiosity gap. If you don't have a curiosity gap and a reason for them to keep watching, if your first sentence is a payoff and it's just a really strong bold sentence, there's no curiosity gap to keep me watching. And watch time is the biggest factor in how quickly you're going to grow an audience. Now, when you think about the curiosity gap, a previous guest had explained that the simplest way to think about this was a question. How many questions do you try to present in that three second hook? Are there too many things that someone can have questions for in their mind? Is there like a perfect amount? Is it two or three? Like how do you think about this? When it comes to crafting a hook, sensory overload is a very real thing where a confused brain will scroll, but a curious one will stick around. And sometimes that's a very thin line between what the heck is going on. I'm out of here and what the heck is going on, I have to see where this goes. And if you can learn to master the latter, that's where good creators cross the bridge into becoming the best creators in the world. So if you were going to film a video, give me an example of a hook you did in the past that performed well. And maybe like what things you were intentionally trying to make people curious about. Go to any video that you would actually watch and look at your own behavior, they all have a curiosity gap to answer some question in our brains. You and I could watch the exact same video and maybe the question is different for me than it is for you. If I'm taking a rack of ribs and I'm putting it on the engine of a car, that's going to raise a question of will that cook is that leaking onto the engine is this sanitary. These are all different questions that we're asking, but it's very clear what is happening. We're not confused about what's happening, but we are curious about where this is going to go. If I'm doing a talking head educational video about the best real estate to buy in Key West. And then I don't say what everybody thinks I'm going to say. And I actually contrast that completely. We might feel a little combative, especially if we live in Florida. Right. So you want to press on people's sensibilities that they're not even aware of. If I'm putting salmon in a dishwasher to make a really weird example, people are going to have feelings about that that they didn't even know they had. Right. And so you just want to create probably as many questions as possible, but while maintaining clarity. Because if you don't maintain clarity, just like it's with any, just like it is with any offer, then you're not going to hold that audience to stick around. Would you say like less is better or like that salmon dishwasher video? If the person behind the camera had, I don't know, a really crazy voice. And then there was a clown in the background. And then there was some really weird decoration that set a controversial phrase that you could see kind of in the background. Like what's like too much or do you just try to do as much as possible? That's too much. That'd be sensory overload. Because I don't know what I'm supposed to pay attention to. So if you have a really interesting visual and text on screen and a circle and a clown in the background, I don't know what I'm supposed to look at as the viewer. I have a confused brain so I will scroll rather than letting that very clear visual lead with maybe a strong text overlay that's pre-framing the audience what to believe. So would you say two or three things max? It's probably good. Max. You might have answered this, but what would you say most creators get wrong about the first three seconds of a video? I think honestly most creators undersell the curiosity gap and that may be played out, but truly if you don't have one, you are leaving so many views and money on the table. Because I don't have the opportunity to get into your expertise if you give me all the meet up fronts. And also if I just watched the first six seconds or 12 seconds because your first few sentences told me all I need to know and there is no retention opportunity then I've got it. Now you have lower watch time and if you're making videos and I'm making videos about the same thing, same industry, not that there's not room for everybody to win because forever and always there will be, but you are in competition as far as attention goes. We're not just in competition against other people in our industry for watch time. We're in competition against every other video on the platform. We're also in competition against every other platform and the videos that they're watching there. We're also in competition for attention with their email inbox with the kid tugging at their leg, right? So specifically if the algorithm has the opportunity to show them your videos versus my videos and we have the same avatar, the algorithm is going to show them whoever has more watch time because that shows them who is more value or offering more valuable because if we're both being seen and they're spending four seconds with me in a minute and 30 seconds with you, you make better content and these are interest signals and interest-based media now and so when there's only so much attention to divvy up, they're going to go with who gets the most watch time, who keeps them on the platform longer. How do you make content that gets shares? Shareable content all comes down to how you make the person feel and how you want to make other people feel. So we design every single comment section in reverse. We do not make a video without knowing exactly what we want people to be commenting whether we want them to agree with us, to disagree with us, to say you go girl, to share this with their sister, to share this with a husband, we know the exact outcome we want in every single video that we make. We call it our Missy Elliott method, which is you put that thing down, flip it and reverse it, right? Design every video in reverse or most creators, they're going to come at it and you might make a clip and you say I want to make a clip about how to save 50% on taxes. What you're describing is the payoff. That's the very end of the video. Even great videos might not have full retention until the end. If you have a good video and you don't give the sauce until the end, which is good for your retention, most people still aren't even going to make it there. But if you're going to pitch a video at viralish, we say I don't want to know the topic. I don't want to know anything about it. I want you to tell me the opening shot. What is the opening shot? And unbiasedly, if we say, oh, I like this, there's a curiosity gap. I feel something. I'm curious as to where this is going. What's the next three seconds? Then we're having more time to make people feel something. So by the time we get to hopefully the satisfying payoff, I am indebted, right? I kind of committed. I spent all this time with you and now I want somebody else to have that same feeling and emotion that I did if we resolve the video the right way. So I would say how to make the most shareable content is to make people feel something. But that's arbitrary if you just say it to say it. But is your content actually making people feel something? Why would you share that video if you came across it? Why would your mom share? Why would your best friend share it? If you can't very clearly answer that question, your video is probably not going to be shareable. And you really have to think about yourself and your content as a product. Not just do I think this is funny. But that's the beautiful thing about trial reels. That's a beautiful thing about testing content in advance to be able to predict its virality and its engagement rate is you can kind of know these things in advance. And then you'll start to see a very clear formula arise over time. Would you say it's similar for the new repost feature? It's kind of been a thing on TikTok for a while. I know Facebook likely has it. And then Instagram recently added it maybe a month ago. Would you say it's similar thing on repost or do you think that's different? It's more like a signaling representation of that person and you're trying to create content that makes people want to kind of identify with an identity. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think meta until they wait a repost over a share, I wouldn't suggest optimizing for it. I think it's a good signal. Like you said, for interest and you can start to it's one more metric for us to see look alike audiences. You know, not even for us, but for the algorithm to see look alike audiences. If they're like, oh, all of this type of person is who's reposting this that just gives you more data about the video to get people to share it. So again, as you're engineering your video, you want to think about these things. Is this more of a repost video or more of a share. People tend to repost things that they deeply believe in that they're okay publicly feeling like an extension of themselves, or I could share something a little more risque or a little bit more edgy that I wouldn't want the world to see I repost it in case you run for election in a few years, you know, reposts are public where shares are more private. And so I would wait shares over reposts. And the algorithm does too, but that could change at any point. Do you recall a video in particular that got a wild amount of shares? And how would you know why they're sharing it? Do you think about like what factor in the video is going to make them share it ahead of time? Is it similar to what the top two or three comments are on the video? Because the comments usually tell you why the video went viral, but do they tell you like why someone is sharing the video? I think the reason people share videos the most and the data would suggest this too is that we share things that are beliefs aligned with or we want them to. It's either something aspirational within us or something that we would say yes, I believe this to be true and I want this person to feel it too. Or it's something that entertained us and we want to share it with somebody that we know shares those same values and that would also be entertained by this. And this can be as silly as a cat video, a dog video, parrots saying funny things, but I know if it's parrots saying funny things, I'm going to send that to my brother because he would find it funnier than my dad, right? And so you kind of have these avatars in your mind that you would share certain things with and not others. We optimize for the widest relatable most shareable thing. And if you can pull your niche industry up to a top of funnel, widely relatable feature about the avatar that this concept pertains to, you're not going to have a problem getting massive amounts of views on the most niche product ever. The most common piece of advice I've heard from you is that a key focal point is getting 90% retention in the first six seconds. And I feel like you kind of explained it, but what's the simplest change you've made that's doubled retention? Okay, the first six seconds comes directly from our TikTok rep several years back. But then of course we took that and we split tested it against every other platform and it pretty much rings true that if you can get 90% retention on your first six seconds, you were going to be in the top one percent of content being served up to the algorithm. And this is why we stand on the very controversial hill of do not talk to your core avatar all of the time. You have been sold a lie that is keeping you small. If I am talking to and my ideal avatar is women going through Perry, Manipaus, who need to lose weight or want to lose weight. If I just say that, if you're a Perry, Manipausal woman and you can't fit into your jeans right now and you want to lose weight, here's what you do. If that video comes across my feed, I'm scrolling. You're scrolling. Everybody in this room is scrolling because it doesn't apply to us. So what does that tell the algorithm? It tells them that it's not very valuable. I always say, obviously there's an interest-based algorithm now. So it will find its avatars. But that is so niche that you're just hedging against a much lower pool versus widening that hook, showing and not telling, show somebody in a giant pair of jeans, wrap it into a challenge format of I challenged myself to lose 45 pounds in 70 days without doing XYZ. A much wider pool of people can now see themselves in that that is incredible. Same concept. We're going to niche that whole concept down as we keep going through the video. But that hook, that first six seconds, the first 12 seconds is going to stay wide enough to appeal to 90% of people. And then you can slowly niche the concept down as you go to talk directly to Perry, Manipausal women. But you're just giving yourself a much bigger callender for a lot more fish to funnel themselves into. And then you'll find your core avatar. You will find them even if you go wider. And I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions about going wide or unneeding yourself. But take somebody who unneashes themselves and speaks to the greater group of people versus somebody who just talks to the core avatar all the time, especially if it's super niche, the person who gets more attention will win in the long run. So if you were making, I don't know, if you were selling how to get six pack abs on the corner of our diet, let's say, and you did some challenge about that was very broad. What comes your mind? So there's a fitness coach. And we, so we, one of our most fun case studies comes from guy named Brian Mark. Brian Mark is a business coach for fitness trainers. So he has, he had a bunch of followers. He was doing about six million a year already, mostly through Instagram. He has a good product like many of you listening to this. You're an expert. You're really good at what you do. You have a great product. But if you're struggling with views, you're struggling with sales, you're struggling to get more attention on you. This is where I would say, brought in yourself. Brian came to us and he goes, I don't know what to do. My content is great. I'm getting great results. But I want to go bigger. What do I do? And we looked at his content and we just saw that it was pretty much one dimensional. He was the aggressive coach yelling at the camera saying, do this if you're fat, blah, blah. But Brian is a dynamic human once you get to know him. He's hilarious. He has an amazing relationship with his wife, but he wasn't showing any of that. So if I'm turned off by someone just yelling at me all the time, he's not going to be my guy. So all we did with Brian for six months, coached him for one hour a week. All we focused on tweaking was one thing, which was getting more attention, more attention and just storytelling him in a bigger way than he was storytelling himself currently. Because he had a good product. He wasn't expert and he had a good sales funnel. He had a good system to capture all of the attention. So that's very important. You're not going to get more leads from all the attention if your system's not in place. But if you are an expert, you have a good system. Most of the time you just need to turn the dial up on how much awareness you're getting, how much brand awareness people can't buy from you if they don't know you exist. So how do we let them know you exist? We crank up your top of funnel. We story tell you better. And in six months, changing one thing about his content, we took him from $6 million to $10 million. To force his $4 million more dollars, changing one thing. And he has had million dollar months ever since. Simply just being more seen, being more visible. So essentially, I'm guessing you increased the tam of the content, like the total addressable market by doing more challenge based, more viralized content. But what I'm curious of is say the thing we're selling is a course on six pack abs, carnivore diet you only eat meat. That's the thing. Liver King is probably the most viralized creator that could sell that course and it would do well. Why would someone like him do better getting a hundred million views a month on this broad appeal content as opposed to someone maybe just doing educational content? Like here's how to get six back abs of the carnivore diet in six months. And then you just tell a story about that and say Lincoln, by all like why does liver King make more money than the niche person? Because anybody can say here's how to get six pack abs in six months. Anybody can chat GPT head knowledge. There's nothing proprietary about that. Have you become it? Are you as spectacle to look at the way liver King is? He's a whole character. He's controversial. His shock value is high. His hooks are wild. They make you feel something. You either are so intrigued by what he's doing. You can't look away or you disagree with it or you're wondering if it is real because it hasn't been said in that way before. You can know about the carnivore diet. But he is the epitome of showing and not just telling you, here's some tips for the carnivore diet. He is living it out in the most drastic way. Right? One of Blakenized secret tips for how we broke through with our couples pranks was taking the most relatable couples dynamic ever and just 10 xing it. I wanted to go on vacation during COVID. You weren't supposed to do that. So I put hot tubs in our living room of an apartment, not on the first floor. If I want a dog and he doesn't want a dog, I turned our apartment into a barnyard for the day. So then a dog didn't feel so bad. But every comment section was, this is so me. I should so do this. What a great idea. It left space for people, for wives to see themselves in that comment or girlfriends and husbands to see themselves on the recipient end of that content. If people can see themselves in the outcome that you're storytelling and that you're showing not just telling those are the brands that are going to win. Not just the people sitting here perfectly posture behind a mic just giving advice. Do you stand on that undeniable stack of proof that you are what you're talking about? That's what liver king did. And also this kind of goes off what you're saying, but people buy from people they like, but also just people that spark emotion in them. And there's also some level of like, I think status is really big in sales and him getting those views and being well known in this comment section talking about them probably leads to more sales. But to go on hooks, you tested hooks with $5 dark post. And this is one of the most interesting things I've heard of and I haven't seen anyone else really do this or talk about this. But how do you make sure a video goes viral before posting it? And how do you test that? That's a great question. So this is really fun to talk about. I'm sure anybody who's a media buyer out there that's listening is like, we've done this for years, but no content creators were doing this. And I got this tip from a mentor where we would put $5 behind every piece of content, every variation. If I'm going to make a video, I would make seven to 12 variations of that video with music without music, different opening shots, different lengths, different text on screen, every combination you can imagine to know I'm going to put out the best version of this video every single time to make sure my efforts are worth it, right? And so I would spend $5 on each variation as a dark post. So any Facebook page like you're not using it, just run it to a random thousand people in the US. That was it. And once it hits a thousand views, you get a retention line and you can see, oh my gosh, between seconds 12 and 20, I lost 42% of people. What happened in that footage? Did I do a weird whip pan? Did I give an early payoff to where people didn't need to keep watching because they were like, ah, got it. What did I do there that lost 40% of people? Then you have an opportunity to go back and tweak it, run it again and see if you fixed the retention line. And we would keep fixing it until we had about 50 to 60% retention all the way to the end of the video. And that is how we maintained a billion views a month over the last five years. Unless you don't have trial real. But if you have trial reals or even just a testing account, you could do the same thing that we were doing before this existed, running all these different variations on trial reals or on your burner account to get that retention line through the edits app or through TikTok. You can see those retention lines through all the variations. And then put that that winner on your main page. Once you ironed out that retention graph and that's how you get page health really, really hot toward now your page doesn't miss and the oh my gosh, you can take this to the moon. And we just did that over and over again for every single page we ran. I hate talking about this stuff because it's not super helpful unless you already have content that's doing well. But there are like a lot of, there's people who are like, Oh, I'm shadow band or, oh, you can't post the same video on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, like whichever platform you post it on first is going to do the best. You can't post the same trial real twice. I disagree with all of what people are saying in that realm. We've reposed the same trial. But the same trial real has done over a hundred million views for me twice. The same one. When is that as of? Because I think like last week that changed it. Yeah, as of last week. And this is why you got to keep your finger on the pulse, right? Because as of last week, they did change it to where maybe it wouldn't have gotten a hundred twice, but maybe it would get 30 million twice. But now if you just post duplicate content all of the time, they're going to crank down the dial on you. But if you change the hook, you're fine. Yeah. If you change the hook, you're fine. And they encourage that to split test hooks. Now how much variance do we need? We're not very clear on that. But if you, I think they're just trying to get rid of the slop of just reposting banger after banger. So you have all this duplicate content going out into the ecosystem, which makes sense. So was you say that's the primary method you test before posting on all platforms is just seven or three to seven variations on trial reals. And then you go to like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook. We do. If we're testing, that's exactly what we do. But I would, I would disagree with a statement that wherever you post it first is going to do the best. I'll post something on TikTok and it'll tank and I'll post it on Instagram and it's source how it does on one platform isn't always indicative of how it's going to do on another. A lot of times it is. But that's why you can't be so precious about every single video that you make. You can't have all this emotional weight in this video because people do this all the time. They're like, this one has to hit. I spent so much time on it. This one's like a baby to me. And then it flops. Then you get discouraged. Then you slow down. You can't afford to slow down right now. So we would say be precious about nothing. And this is a reps game. This is not how long you've been doing this. It doesn't matter. The rules change constantly. So it is 1,000%. How many shots on goal are you taking? And the people who are doing that are winning. They're getting there faster. They're getting more attention. They're getting more eyeballs, more visibility. And this is an arms race now, especially with AI. If I'm putting out 27 pieces of content a day and somebody else is putting out one who is going to get more watch time unless that person is doing slam dunks out of the park every single time. And our watch time hour spent with each of us are the same with that person's one to my 27. That's possible too. Right now on my main page on Instagram, for example, I'm doing very low volume, but pretty much everything that we're doing is crossing 5 million views a post. So somebody else may have to make 30 posts to get 5 million views where I can do it in one. And that's just a time thing and testing behind the scenes. Right. But I've also been doing this. Don't compare my journey to yours. I've been doing this. Eat, sleep, and breathe it for the last 5 years. Right. But you still never know quality. There's still videos that I make that I really think are going to hit. And they don't for whatever reason. And so you can't be precious about it. Not if you want to be here for the long run. How important is a healthy page on a platform? 50% of the battle is having a healthy page. If you have a flagged page or a suppressed reach, you can make the best video in the world. And it's not going to be seen. And I do think we're going into an era where we're going to have a multi channel strategy where you have Jack Neil main podcast, Jack Neil bloopers, Jack Neil, this, Jack Neil, that because it is a liability, just have all your eggs in one basket on a platform that you don't control that could get flagged. We I've had so many pages banned for a profile picture. They thought I was selling drugs. It was just a picture of my face. But with the AI algorithm as they keep changing things, you can get flagged in your page taken away like this. I'm sure many of you guys have. We've had friends who have lost their pages for popping a balloon too loud because it was a community standards violation. We're building castles on sand because we don't own what these platforms are going to do. Right. But you can use them to get as much attention and notoriety as possible on your offer. And we're just trying to help people make better content at the end of the day so that they can get more attention, so that they can get more leads so they can make more sales. When you say page health, I know you're talking about like the restrictions on the account and like being banned potentially, but are you also talking about the concept of something that used to be known on TikTok as account authority and like like Instagram, if you have, let's say I have five videos that get 5,000 views and then I post a video and it gets a million. Theoretically, if those previous videos got 500K views, would that last video have gotten 5 million, you know, like do they push it based on your past performance? Yes. If that's another reason we advocate for going to the top of funnel because if I, if you're a mom and you make a parenting video, I'm not a parent yet, right? But if you go wider and do some funny diaper hack, that's going to go wider. It's going to be shown to tangential audiences, even though I'm not a mom, that parenting stuff comes with my feed all the time, just because some mom in a similar circle to me went viral. Guess what? Even though that does not apply to me, I share that to all of my mom friends. This is why it will find its core avatar if you go wider and not just that, but you ever watch a video from somebody that you don't follow. If you watch a good amount of that video, you're going to be shown another video from them and another video from them. So going wider is going to give your middle and bottom of the funnel expert in conversion content the opportunity to be seen by more and more people. So if you have that million view hit, the videos behind it and around it are also going to be elevated and get to more of that right audience. And that's not just because people are going to the page and watching it because they're getting it served more. Exactly. Would you say that's the case for every platform? I would say TikTok and YouTube, it's particularly important. Facebook seems really important for that. I've probably, I think two months ago, we got 50 million views on Facebook. And then last month, it was like every video was averaging a thousand views and we couldn't get out of that pocket. But if we have one that gets 200K, then the next 10 will do really well. I don't know. It's something weird like that. But that's, I mean, that sounds right. And you know YouTube way better than I do. We know Facebook really well and we know we know meta really, really well because they passed the most. So we know those platforms the best and TikTok can be very hit or miss. But I would agree with you. I would say this is platform wide, especially because it's interest based. They want to serve you what you engage with. So even if that was just watching for a long period of time, right, they're going to serve you more and more of that until you kind of stop showing that you're interested in that content and you're not engaging with it as much. And that is why I think every brand needs to be over indexing on top of funnel content. I think that's great advice. We were actually talking about this last night. I was explaining it to her that I was like, wow, these platforms are really like big on serving it to the same audience because if you map out at least top five videos, I think it was two or three of them had wine in them. And I'm like, but those aren't her top five videos on Facebook or YouTube, you know. So it's like, you had that one wine video do really well, which means the other wine video you have is going to be served that same audience. And it kind of pigeonholes your page in a way that like wine videos are just going to be outliers for you forever. Like if you go viral enough, you know, it's a good problem to have. But what you were saying about the clipping, do you think best practice in 2025 for social media is we have a podcast. So say I make finance content, say I make comedy content. Do I just have finance page, podcast page, comedy content page, you know, you think that's the best way to go? I think it depends on if the avatar is the same. Is your avat, are you a funny person and you teach finance? Great. Sounds like it could be all on one page. That's your unique angle to enter the marketplace. And yeah, it's how you're doing finance differently than others. If you're teaching about deep finance and then you're just doing unrelated couples' comedy skits, two wildly different avatars. I think those are two different pages. So I think it all comes down to the avatar. And if they could both live on the same page and get value, otherwise you're going to be totally skewed. So you don't do the Facebook ads like dark posts anymore. Would you say just the trial reals is the main thing? Just from trial reals. Yes. But I will say we're making still really good, good money on Facebook, but it's not what it was. 20, 20 through 2023 when the world was still in COVID and coming out of that. That is when the whole world was glued here, right? There's so much visibility in eyeballs. And so coupled with that on a global scale and Facebook's relationship and how they were paying creators was a different model back then. So that's where I could afford to spend $150 on every single video just to test the crap out of it, right? Because the gains were sometimes the difference in six figures for a single video. And we were making 18 videos a day at our height with 15 full time actors, right? So that was worth it. Now it depends on what you're aiming for. If you're just trying to make sure you get the best version of your video every time, trial reels is the most accessible way for people to do that. Did you ever try, this is just my curiosity, did you ever try doing like the $5 dark post on TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, like all as ads and seeing which one worked for each platform better? Or did you just do Facebook? I did not, but that's a great idea. If you're interesting to see if it's different because Snapchat is younger audience, predominantly and then YouTube is more males than Instagram, TikTok is more females than Instagram. I think that's a great idea. If somebody wants to get super nerdy with it, I would do it. What Jack is saying and just try that on all platforms and see the difference because it is not perfect every single time, but it is the best tool that we had at the time to be able to do predictive performance. How many views would you say you have across social media? Ooh. To be honest, it is hard to quantify. If I go conservative with it at the baseline of what I know we do, at least a billion views a month across all of our platforms, 100% organically. This January, February 2020, something like 63, 64 months, that would be 64 billion views conservatively. Would you say there are a lot of creators that have similar views as like individual people? I don't think so. Last somebody told me we were the most viewed, especially female publisher and Facebook in Snapchat history. And that doesn't mean my face is in every video. It's in less than 10% of the videos that we create and distribute from all of our actors. Or videos in our network or videos and creators that we manage that we distribute for. I mean, we're distributing everywhere from Facebook, all the main platforms, but even to Microsoft, to MSN. We're syndicating across news and television. Not to mention, because this is some of the most viewed content across social media every single week, it's getting stolen left and right. We could maybe double our numbers if we just add up how many stolen views or people or meme pages posting our content that we didn't give them permission to, right? You just gave me the idea. I was like, I should probably steal videos for MSN, the Microsoft thing, because it's probably making good money right now. But how many followers do you have across social media? I think close to 40 million followers, probably across our own network. We distribute to over 75 million on a regular basis and probably close to 800 million in our collective network worth of followership. 800 million followers. Is that everyone in your communities or is that people who you directly have a business relationship with? That's who we have a business relationship with, like a syndicate partner relationship, whether that's meme pages or MSN or just these different owned verticals that people don't always know are owned by the same person. So yeah, what kinds of niches do you have major ownership in at the moment? We have ownership and just entertainment based channels. So we don't own, wireless owns very little with our 40 million and they're mostly just entertainment based channels, couples channels, DIY channels, prank channels, food channels, couples, if I didn't say that already. But we syndicate to every niche imaginable. We have designed viral videos for every niche imaginable from logistics trucking to holistic trauma therapy, treatment to landscape photography to people who clean trash cans, to lawyers, to real estate, to people who teach Excel tactics. Like you name it, we've probably designed a viral video in that niche. Viral is subjective. So say viral is at least a million views. How many YouTube plots do you have? We have five gold. Some channels have three million, some have four, some have one. So five gold and then a silver for everything under that plus one more silver. Nice. So that's pretty comparable with Mr. Beast, I would say, with all the channels he owns on his involvement. Oh, that's great, but I don't even deserve to be on the same level. Because here's the difference, too. Our views and our ownership comes from being publishers, too, where he's built all of that around his identity, around his personal influence of all those or beast channels. I have 17 million followers under the Adley name or Adley brand, but those still aren't even dedicated followers. That's not 17 million people thinking Adley's coolest thing in the world. They just saw a video of ours once, probably a really silly one from back in the COVID days that they liked. So they happen to click follow, but Beast has 40 million or more followers from people loving him and everything that he does. Have you ever had a conversation with him? I haven't. Really? I'm shocked he hasn't reached, because he usually reaches out to people like who have something that he doesn't have. And I think you definitely have a content style and a master of retention that he doesn't have. So that'd be an interesting conversation. But that's a compliment. I don't know that I can accept. I think he probably has a wonderful insights on retention that I would love to be a fly on the wall for, but we come at it very differently. And I'm sure if we watched the same video, we were critiquing the same creator. His, I'd be curious actually to see if we would see the same things. It's very different in my opinion. I think you're, you've probably excelled at reaching an international audience, especially with the Facebook views that maybe he's just more recently tapped into. What is your international percentage? Our international percentage totally depends on the page. Some are built to just go international, right? But here's the thing is, Virals viral. When we want to make a certain content, organically go viral within a certain subset of people for targeting, as best you can on organic, we'll just do that with the style of content. If we wanted to say middle America will do pickup trucks, cooking, will have a country accent or something like that, that's probably not going to go international. So we'll just skew the content style. So it's just going to resonate with people who that resonates with if we kind of want it to stay more localized. But if we're just trying to make as much money as possible, we're going to go as wide and as global as possible and aim for a video that can do half a billion views or more. Got it. So if a Facebook page of you is one view, it doesn't matter if it's from a 60 year old in the US or really? It doesn't matter. So what's the most you've made from a single Facebook video? You know what? This is hard to tell because I can see there's one that's coming to mind where my husband broke open an ATM just to see how much money was inside. That video I know is then at least a quarter of a million dollars and it took us maybe 45 minutes to make. And these are assets like music royalties like we get paid royalties all the time from all of these viral videos in circulation, right? And they can have been flow. We can have videos from two years pop out of nowhere and make an extra seven grand or a 30 grand. They really are assets as long as they stay in circulation, right? And with people's temperaments and with supply of ad demand, right? In Q4, for example, when everybody's running ads because you got black Friday, you got Halloween, you've got Christmas, you've got Thanksgiving, you've got all of these holidays, new year, new you right in this time and everybody's dumping ad dollars. We as content suppliers that the ads go in make our most amount of money in Q4 every year, even from videos that we made four and five years ago. You know, so there's no way to really tell how much some of these videos have made overall because we also have rights managers. We have people with full times jobs just dedicated to taking down pirates that are monetizing our content. But the numbers I remember seeing from just Facebook alone were probably on that ATM video doing about a quarter million in a short amount of time. I believe that was your second most viral video on Facebook. Do you think that had higher RPMs or CPMs because it was money related with the ATF? 1000%. And we even shot different endings of finding money in it versus not finding money in it. And we would split test endings and the ending where we did not find money in it was way more satisfying for people. That's interesting. Because it's kind of like a reversal on what you would expect. People struggle to build the bridge between widely relatable content and what most people are doing social media for is to make conversions, right? But if you understand why something works, even though I made this ATM breaking video just for entertainment, just to get as many views as possible, I've used the same thing that works breaking an open ATM, to talk about hacking the algorithm, right? Where I'm taking a sledgehammer and I'm hitting an ATM saying growing on social media feels a lot like trying to break into an ATM. You know, there's great money on the other side of it. You know blah blah blah blah blah blah. But it'd be nice and a lot easier if someone just gave you the keys and then somebody hands me the keys and I open it really easily instead of trying to beat my way into it, which is a lot what content creation feels like for some people. And this is just having to beat open this ATM and try to get it to work for them versus somebody like Vyralish or myself giving you the keys. So once you understand what works about content, you can take any viral concept and twist it to be in your niche. Most people just struggle to build that mental bridge, which is the entire reason Vyralish exists, which is to show them that bridge and help show them how to cross it and how to make a viral video into a conversion video. a significant outlier for their channel. Do you repost that? Like do you post it to other plot? Do you post it on the same platform? Like what's your kind of rule of thumb for that? So if somebody's video goes viral on Instagram, should they repost it somewhere else? Or say you had that viral ATM video. Like when did you post it again on that page on that page with meta last news from our rep, depending on with the scores, it could chase the viral was 90 day. So on 90 day 91, sometimes we'll go repost that video. And then do you ever like post it to another page that you own all the time? We have been recycling the same catalog for we stopped making all the cringy rage bait videos that we were going for. There's still encyclaties, but we stopped making them almost two years ago now. And we are still reposting them, re editing a bit, twisting them, testing different lengths, but they're still in circulation, still making money because human behavior doesn't change that much. I'm excited for this answer personally because I've made a good amount of revenue from Snapchat myself in terms of like the Snapchat shows, and some stuff with spotlight. Our last guest had a video make him $700,000 on Snapchat. But what's the most amount of money you've made with a Snapchat video? That's amazing. Spotlight alone when there was that heyday early on, were you there for that heyday? When first I was lucky enough amazing. We were so blessed by that. I think we didn't near a million dollars on just spotlight in that short amount of time. Since our shows, I think we have about 22 shows still in circulation. Eight that are meaningful eight to 10 that are meaningful revenues still today. And I it'd be hard to tell you how much on a single show like a single Snapchat episode. Is that what you're asking a single? If you knew, do you know what the niche is of the biggest show? They're all our same stuff. Why entertainment focus couples couples and pranks will always do the best for us because people hurting themselves and cat videos will never get old. So entertainment for us is how we how we got our start how we got started. But it's got to be several hundred thousand dollars, but I don't think we had a single episode do 700,000. Yeah, that was pretty unheard of. Mine was mine was 70 after reposting it three times and like it getting a little less and a little less each time. Do you know these podcast clips? No, we did a celebrity drama. Yeah. Yeah, it was a pretty good niche. But I would guess that yours would do well on Snapchat too. So do you think we could even recommend to an audience member to try to get on Snapchat shows or is it just so get kept? I would not recommend that be the sole focus of any creators attention right now unless they are big on another platform can transfer that viewership. But I don't or somebody is willing to just go all in right now on Snapchat. Like that is your primary platform. I think it has to be for you to win on Snapchat right now and I'm a huge Snapchat fan. But unless you already have a big audience elsewhere and you can leverage that or you're willing to go all in on Snapchat being your primary platform and do think it's harder to grow. I would guess if you're someone who posts 100 stories a day and does 20 spotlights a day like they'll probably be like this is weird. Let's reach out to this person if you had some growth and did it over time. But I what would you say is the easiest platform to go viral on in 2025 and what would you say is the best platform to monetize on? Facebook and Facebook it is the most slept on platform but it was in the beginning and no creator was monetizing the way our crew was on Facebook 2020 to 2023 24 and they're still not but in viral as we teach people who are in viral as to monetize. Go to Facebook at the same time they're starting all of these other platforms they're getting monetized faster and they're making more money on Facebook than they are their other platforms. I'm sure there are some viewers of this that post on Instagram and don't get paid anything and I think that's because met us budget all goes to Facebook but like can you tell us why that is is just because. They see all these Tik Tok creators all these YouTube and scam creators and they're just like guys post on this platform. I think so like that's the flagship right it is the most global people use Facebook to log into websites right so it still is the flagship and it's lost so much of a younger audience people don't new audiences don't younger people don't have Facebook right. So if you keep the money over there there's no shortage of supply of people posting on Instagram right people are going to post on Instagram forever you know with no monetary support they always have and they're not pulling away from it anytime soon because they still have a decent monopoly over there as far as people's attention. But and they don't fly people as quickly as tiktok does. So if they put the money over here and people get word and they're trying to incentivize people over on Facebook you're going to keep that younger audience around on a global scale and there's still that's where the biggest advertising platform is to. And so they need the content supply to be there so that's where the incentive has to be like what do you know about Facebook that most creators don't realize aside from. All the money that's involved with it is how much money is on the table for the taking we had a neighbor down this street that does not make content. It is just a mom not just the mom but she is a mom not a content creator knows nothing about making content we should her a couple tips she's maxing out $35,000 a month like how many views. I don't know but a decent amount but it's also not tough it's not easy it is simple. We have creators who are making 15 videos a day still not monetizing well on Facebook where we're making 15 videos a day and are with a smaller page than them. That's where a formula and that's where psychology of why you think you're doing the same thing that we are you're missing small nuances that you could be cleaning up with that amount of work ethic of 15 videos a day. And if you just let us tweak a couple little things for you we can set you on another planet. But most people don't want to do the work and most people aren't willing to get in the weeds and study the data as much as we are and we know that which is again why should exist to compress the timeline so you don't have to figure this out for five years like we did we can just say hey fix that. Hey do it more like this and you're going to make 10 times the amount of money or just get 10 times the amount of views to go back to your funnel or whatever it is. But I would say people should not be sleeping on Facebook. And period it's very it's simple to use and there's nothing really that we know that other people don't then again I sit in the chair and I don't know how much I know to me it all seems very basic common knowledge but then we'll say it's other people and they're like oh no idea. And I'm like oh so I think I've lost a little bit of touch of what is common knowledge for Facebook and what is not what kind of videos make the most money is it three minutes plus like what are you aiming for not anymore. You ready for this 16.1 seconds 16.1 second videos are making the most money for us on Facebook. It used to be three minutes how much you get paid for a million views on a 16 second video totally depends was it a real was at a regular post or did it go international. CPMs are a lot lower if it goes international to where you can make a video that does 300 million views that might pay less than a video that did 25 million views but stayed in America. Or it could do more that's why you can't be precious with any piece of content being like it should have made this it should have made nothing we are blessed right we can never say anything should have made anything but it all depends on the type of content that's why volume for just the money play is where you're going to you're going to earn the most it's more than tick talk. I mean tick talk doesn't pay you for 16 second clips. No. I don't think you to really pays you for anything under 30 seconds. It's like. 50% the rate or 70% the rate or 20% the rate sorry but. Okay so 15 second videos and 16.1 16.1 sorry is it a post or real what's the best. Does it ask my husband about this actually I don't remember if it's a real or a post but will post the same video as a real and as a post because sometimes the post will take off sometimes the real take off but they're totally different algorithmic tracks. So you should post it as a video and as a real and give it double the chances. Well that's a gym for me because I just doubled my content for the month. That's really interesting what I like about Facebook the most is that you can post a link in the video and it's the only platform that you can do that so. This podcast clip right now can have the link to our full podcast and people can go watch it there's no other platform that you can do that without getting some type of restriction. I see here. Okay so this might be repetitive but just to summarize the virality aspect if you had to go from zero to a million followers in six months how would you do it. Do I care about the niche or am I just trying followers just trying to get followers any me if possible. I got to ask more clarifying questions because it totally depends on your tolerance some people are like I'll never be in front of a camera or if they were willing to be in front of a camera. Maybe they they shouldn't be because they look terrified right so there's totally different strategies for carousels then there would be for somebody who is charismatic. If are they willing to do man in the street style are they willing to do shock value cringe rage bait right that's going to get you there faster but most people don't want to touch that. But what I would do is I would do with what we call a five six 30 method to start so viral is just five six 30 method is you're going to take every type of content concept you think you could be interested in this is how we move people. through paralysis by analysis, where they're multi-passionate people and they don't know what to do and they could do man in the streets or they could do a carousel, they could do a series, they could do all of these different things and so they just don't start because they're so busy trying to figure it out in your head. You're not going to figure it out in your head. If you've ever started anything ever, you know that it never goes according to plan. I've had you think you're going to do it. The only way to figure this out is by doing. So the 56030 method is take five of the ideas you think you could go with, the ideas for your podcast or the format or the types of content that you want to make thematically. Pick five of these buckets, okay? Do six videos in each bucket, six in bucket one, six in bucket two, six in bucket three and you're going to post a video a day for 30 days, 1000% unattached to the outcome. And it doesn't matter if you post all five from this style first or from this style or you mix and match them. Just do a video every single day to get that momentum. And at the end of 30 days, you're going to have a beautiful bucket of data and you're going to have a lot of feelings. You may have been really excited about bucket number one and you were pumped about this. But at the end of it, you realize, wow, that was really unsustainable for my lifestyle and actually nobody really liked that either. I wasn't that excited about buckets three and four, but those really took off and that is sustainable for me and I can do that. So now if buckets three and four were your outliers, go in and double down on that on month two and let that compound and focus on getting really good now at buckets three and four and month two and just keep testing and finding like that. And that is how we push creators off of the sidelines and just get into action and let data and how they felt about making the content show in as little as 30 days. How about you yourself, Adley? How would you like, give me a step by step. If I said you have six months to get a million followers on Facebook, how would you go about it? On Facebook is different than on Instagram. So that's interesting that you clarified. If I was going to get a million followers on just Facebook, I would do the same thing that we're doing on Facebook today. It is volume, volume of the most widely relatable content possible. So how do you pick a video? We look at what else is what is working. We look at the best performing videos we've ever made or best performing videos out there and we twist them. We see why that worked. We analyze it and we don't change the framework of why it worked, but we tweak how we're going to be a little bit different inside of that. I would not change the hook because even if you copy a video exactly for the hook, but switch out your industry in it, it's going to feel different because I bring a different energy doing the bit than you bring, right? We're very different people. Our locations are different. That's why trends are a thing. And trends are very powerful. So I would trend hack. I would spend what works. I would make it as widely relatable as possible because if you entertain people, you can earn the right to educate them on whatever you want. So if you can entertain people within the niche that you're eventually going to sell to, that will get you as much brain or varieties possible. And you're going to have a much quicker breakthrough than just trying to sell right off the bat. A lot of people make that mistake right now. They're like, well, I'm not going to start going hard on socials till I have something to sell. No, you ever have a friend that's just trying to sell you all the time? That person sucks. We don't want to be around that person. So why would we be those people online? I would say start building value and growing an audience and being interesting before you have something to sell. People are not guarded around you then. Like, oh, he's just trying to sell me something or he's just doing this. We're so sensitive to that right now. We are in a trust recession. So if you can just grow without asking for anything, that human reciprocal behavior mechanism is so deep in us that will pay off dividends if you don't just try to sell people. It's funny that you have this advice about go as top of funnel as possible and don't sell anything consistently. I chatted with Hormozzi about this. This is the 10th time we brought him up on the podcast, but he's just so counter-advice to most people. He's like, yeah, you can sell every single video of the product's good. Or he's like, he used to make fitness content and nutrition content. A few pieces of those or more motivational content. Now he's just like, we only do business at a high level and it increased our CPMs and it hits our target customer better. Why do you think that's his philosophy versus yours? Because he did my philosophy first to break through and he would tell you the same thing. Now he's Hormozzi so we can say, we just do this. We are more niche because he's Hormozzi. He earned the right too. But in the beginning, he was in value-taming. He was in going as wide as possible. He built a name for himself. So now he can niche down. But he also doesn't sell in every post. He doesn't do that. He doesn't sell really at all in his post. Unless it's a giant launch, like a book or something, but still he never goes for the hard CTA. He goes for building brand and being as visible as possible. And he did that by doing massive amounts of volume in the beginning. He still does massive compared to most people, right? But that's how you break through. It was the best piece of advice I ever got from somebody. And listen, I can only speak from my experience. And so that's what I'll do. Other people they speak from theirs. Sure, there are people who break through, highly, highly niche down. But a lot more people break through when they entertain the masses first and then earn the right to educate people. If you had to make a million dollars on social media in six months, how would you do it? Step one, I would find the top 10 most relatable pages in your niche. We're looking for wide top of funnel content. And this is going to be a volume play. We're going on a sprint for six months straight. You're going to filter that using an app called Sort Feed and your Chrome extension to get the most viral videos. I would aim for anything over 10 million views. Step two, you're going to take all of those videos from all of those pages, put them into an Excel spreadsheet and set up your tripod because you're about to get to work. Step three, do 10 videos a day. It is not too much on a brand new channel. You are in reps mode. You're in high volume mode. You want to get as wide of an audience as possible. And remember that audience is above your niche. Audience encompasses your niche. So that brings us to step four. You're going to want to have something to sell. If you are mega viral, you're going to want to offer that is cheap. If you're more niche, you want to go a little bit more expensive. And then step five, you're going to run retargeting ads to that big beautiful warm bucket of people who have been seeing your face over and over and over again because you warmed them up. They trust you. They've seen you. And now you have earned the right to sell them something. And that is how I would, and half, made a million dollars in six months. They have a little gift for you. Kayla, can you hit me that plastic bag? Oh, actually, it's right behind me. I say it's a gift. Stuff is probably only about 20 bucks. So. And you wrapped it. So inside this bag are some mystery objects that you can just look through them if you want. And I want to see what viral videos you would have with any of this stuff. Oh, man, this was actually our first 100 million view video was with shaving cream. If you would like, maybe show me how you would do the hook for a viral video with any of this stuff for. Oh, man. I've got ideas for each of these. And I got to remember that it's nice when you make so many viral videos. You have these different buckets that you can pull from. All right. I'm going to show all of you how to go viral, which is a pin and a piece of paper in under 30 seconds. Jack, I'm going to read your mind. Okay. Tell me, what is your favorite animal? Just think it. All right. You got it? Thinking about it. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. I'm going to write it down right on this piece of paper. Now I've got it locked in on this piece of paper. You can tell me what is it? What's your monkey? A monkey? Yeah. A monkey. That's really cute. Okay. Now tell me, what is your favorite city to vacation to? Just think it. Got it. All right. You're thinking about it. All right. I'm thinking about that favorite city. I'm getting it. I'm downloading it. All right. I've locked it in. Okay. What was your favorite city to travel to? In YC. New York City. Very nice. Okay. And what's your favorite direction like North South East West? Just think it for me real quick. All right. I see that. Very good. Okay. All right. Now, don't say that one. I just want to show you that I got you locked in. You're pretty easy to read, Jack. There's no way she got these. Okay. So my first question was your favorite animal, right? And was it a monkey? That's what you said, isn't it? Yeah. You see, I had monkey written down right there on that piece of paper. You're quite transparent, Jack. That's good. Your favorite vacation city. I guess. In YC. How? Okay. This is all over your face, Jack. It's all over your face. In YC. And your favorite direction. You sent that to me telepathically too. What was your favorite direction North South East or West? East. East. And we are going to the East, Jack. So that is how you read anybody's mind in under 30 seconds. How did you come up with that idea originally? So we found this video that was 10 years old that had gone viral in Indonesia. And there was a twist on it. It wasn't those exacts and questions. It was different. We took the concept, rewrote our questions, and nobody in America, or most people, had not seen that yet. So we brought it over and introduced that. And then it kind of became a trend of people doing this to their girlfriend. or two other boyfriends. - Did you translate it? - Yes. - Like I understand how you found it, but like why were you looking in that place? - We have entire accounts trained for different algorithms. We have international accounts trained for international couples videos, for international cooking videos, but we don't just look at the video itself because that would be industry specific. We go industry agnostic, look underneath the niche, the fundamentals of why that video worked. That way we can use it for any niche, any vertical. We can translate that to any client, right? So most people are struggled to draw the bridge between why this video went viral and why it worked and how that would ever apply to something like their industry or niche. - So can you train an algorithm? Like obviously you can train an algorithm to be in your niche, like say podcasting and only get podcast clips. But how do you train it to get podcast clips only in Spanish from five years ago? Like is that possible or do you have to like set search parameters? How do you do that? - If you train it the same way you train it for podcasts, we would go find podcasts in other languages and then just start researching them. And if they're outliers in that side of the world, the same psychological principles apply, most people just aren't gonna do the work to do that type of research to break something into a new industry over here. - Is there a quick tool to translate videos quickly? - No, most of the apps can do it for you now, which is nice. But the nice part is actually we didn't even have to translate that because that is internationally understood. This you can understand without sound, you know? Like they were drawn. - And that's why why it's so well to begin with. - Yes. - Are there any platforms or any other ways that you research videos? Like a big one I used to do was go on Reddit and look for outliers in certain niches. And then I would even go to the Reddit comments to look at the top uploaded comments to kind of get ideas for research. But like what are some weird places you guys go? That's exactly what we do. We'll also go to Giffy. A lot of our best ideas have come from Gifts. There was a video that made us $80,000 of my husband and somebody else they were making a circle with their arms and I said, I'm gonna jump through your arms like this. Like legs first. In the brain, like nobody can understand how that would work. How would that possibly jump through legs first into the water. And I just kept promising I could do it. High stakes and their touching fingers like this making a circle for me. And then at the end of three minutes and one second, I just push them in. We drug this on for so long because those are the monetization requirements at the time. I deeply apologize to everybody who watched those three minute long videos. But as marketers, it gave us a master class and how to get anybody to watch anything. And now we just use our powers for good and make that industry agnostic so we can help other people design it. But that first was a gift of somebody just pushing somebody into the water. - Like can you go on Giffy and sort by like fire ones? - It was just, I think it was something on my homepage or it was literally just in my keyboard for whatever word I typed in. But that's the thing is once you understand viral content you understand the formula, you can start seeing it everywhere. And as a storyteller, you can see I see how this could be a prank. I see how I can turn this into an unboxing video. Right? Once you just understand the fundamentals of how it worked. For example, unboxing videos work great. People love watching them because they follow the formula perfectly. You know what you're waiting for? It's high suspense and you don't resolve it to the end. Prank video follows the same thing. Makeup, transformation videos, same thing. Lost puppy, finally having a happy ending. Same transformation, right? So once you understand these principles, you can make them move industries and niches. We bought a cop car once and started doing cops unboxing people. So a cop would pull over say a cute girl and she had something strapped to her leg and it looked like drugs or money or whatever. She's doing hiding something underneath her clothing or underneath all this duct tape or gauze. And because we know unboxing works because we know cop videos work because we know people love looking at the human body. Even though all of these videos are PG and PG 13 at most, we would merge those different verticals into one video of a cop unwrapping something on somebody he just pulled over to see if it was drugs or money or whatever it ended up being. You're one of the only people that I've met. This sounds self-aggrandizing. Besides myself that doesn't say steal from one video but it's like take two viral things from two viral videos. Like you take the cop thing and you take that thing and then I've heard you even talk about like using like dash cam or like door ring video. - Ring doorbell. - What is that ring doorbell videos to even make it more viral? That's such a good concept and it's the easiest way to not make content boring. 'Cause you just steal a few things. I would guess that Mr. Beast is at a point where he's not just statistically doing outliers for his thumbnail and title. Like I would guess it's every second of the video is based on some data trend that they saw that they can like make viral. And that's why they, I'm gonna go on attention about this but that's why they film so much content like with all these thousands of cameras is because they know that this thing is an outlier and they're looking for it when they're reviewing all this real footage. Like they don't have to script their videos because they know what an outlier is. They have all this footage and it's probably just gonna be in there anyway. - You just nailed it. You could take the same video you were gonna make change the format meaning if you were doing straight to cam instead capture that prank or whatever the video is from a ring camera footage and just give it a different vantage point and makes it feel if this were a prank more real. 'Cause who's gonna go through the work to do that? People don't even know that being an entertainer online is a job for the most part. So they certainly don't think that we put that ring overlay as a PNG on the footage to go that far to do it. They don't think that we're scripting entertainment on social media and that's why people can get so triggered and emotional about it is because they're used to watching scripted on television. You're used to watching WWE or reality TV that you know is scripted and you're just watching for entertainment but people aren't used to seeing that on social and then they feel like it's fake news even though they will watch it over and over and over again knowing it's scripted. You can watch your favorite couples do these pranks back and forth are they in on it? Yes and it steals the joy sometimes to know that and I understand but you will still see yourself in that content you will still watch for levity for entertainment and that's just meeting people where they're at and the data will show you over and over and over again that that's what they want to consume. There is a giant difference between what people say they want to watch and what they will actually pay attention to and so once we removed our own personal bias from it and I was willing to make content that I didn't necessarily care for but my avatar and other people cared for that's when we started making 10,000 times more money than I was making just making content for myself. I'm curious what you think the best niches are. I mean it's probably all the ones you do in terms of getting the mass amount of views. Would you say that accurate? Would you say relationships and couples is the most viral niche or is there something bigger than that? I think that's most tried and true because it is international. Everybody has been in for the most part a relationship to pull from some level of personal experience. So if you think about shared experience and what the most amount of people in the world have gone through relationships are pretty up there. Parenting is another big one, right? Money is another big one but really if you think of niche or industry as four main things any of your niches can go inside of four stages of a sales cycle or the four ways that you sell something to somebody which is how are we increasing your status in the world? Does your product increase status? Does your product save people time? Does it compress time for them to be successful? Does it save them money or make them money? And does it play on fear, right? Fear of staying the same. And so if you put your industry in one of those four verticals or even better if you can do three or all four of them your offer is going to be better, your content is going to be better, it's going to be more resonant and then you can truly get anybody to watch and even buy anything. What's the hardest product you've made go viral? The hardest product we've made go viral is actually a client of ours and there's very cool app called Reclip. There's an audio app that would be recording on our phones all of the time. But often you know when we'll say something but we weren't recording, we're like, oh I wish we had that a recording because it's recording all the time. You can go back for the last several minutes and clip something that happened. I saw this. Story telling that in viral video because it's strictly auditory and there's a giant education that has to happen about the product is not typically something that we would take on as a client because when we take on clients we guarantee tens of millions of views. And we've never not hit a guarantee. But for this one, how we story told this only audio app was. - Can I guess it? - Yeah. - Was it a relationship and there was an argument about something and it's like, no you said this, no you said this and then they went back into the clip. Was it something like that? - ours was, we did do that one but that was not the viral one. The viral one was my brother and a girl named Sammy and another actress sitting here and they're watching TV and the TV interrupts and starts playing an audio from her father who had just passed. And she's looking at the TV like, what is this audio? My brother gets up down on one knee as he about to propose to her and the audio was him asking for her now passed away father's permission that had been captured on the app and had captured that special moment that otherwise wouldn't have been possible without the app. And then she turns and she goes, how did you get this? And then sees, that he is actually proposing, which is the fulfillment of what was said in the voice clip, only made possible by the app. And that video did 62 million views. And it ended up on Goodmoring America. That's genius too, because I bet that sells, because people are thinking about that situation happening to them and they don't want to miss it. So it's like the FOMO. So you get those 63 million views. Does the brand ever pay you to like run a more like niche ad to retarget the viewers from that video? Absolutely. We have people joining Viralist just to learn how to make better content to lower their ad costs. We've had cut people's ad costs by 50%. That's what happens when you learn how to make good content. So if anybody out there is running ads or running paid media, you should master viral organic first, because you are going to save so much money in ads been testing on organic, because it is free. We're in the greatest wave of free advertising the world has ever seen. And if you're not mastering viral organic, your competitors are and you're going to be left in the dust. And it is the cheapest way to lower ad costs to get more followers, which become buyers and nurture them for free. I can't think of a better mechanism to do that. How do you negotiate brand deals as someone with 40 million followers? Do they want to guarantee or do they want to call the shots? What do you prefer usually? Let us call the shots, because then I can give you a guarantee. And if I tell you we can get you 40 million views or 10 million views in a month, we're going to get you that as a baseline. But we could humbly sneeze and get 10 million views in a month. So if this is why it's only for brands who have the right budget, which is why we launched the education company. Is that how you, because I've noticed this, the bigger my platforms have gotten, the more like sales I've been doing with these brands, is I find myself just asking what their budget is and then being like, I can do this to hit those deliverables. What's the budget? What are the KPIs? And then what do we do from there? I'm sure you're in a similar place, but most people are like, oh, it's just 5K brand deal offer, 7K brand deal offer. And they want this view guarantee. But what is your strategies, is your budget a million dollars? Or is that how you go with it? Our budget right now for us to do it for you starts at about 45,000 a month with a with a guarantee. But I could never offer you a guarantee if I was just using Adley pages. In anybody, an indie creator who says, I can guarantee your video will do this. I would run because they can't. I could never look somebody in the eye and say, on my Adley page, I guarantee this video will do this. The only way we were able to offer a guarantee is because we have so much digital real estate. We have so many pages and I have viral content creators, born and bred in our ecosystem that I know can deliver on our promise. So what do you do if someone is like, we have a million dollar budget? We need a billion views. Like, is it just multi video campaigns? Like, how do you negotiate this type of thing? Totally depends on their goal. And is it a product that can go viral? Because not every product, I'd say if anybody can make a boring product viral, it is us, but still not every person can go viral. You have to have an effector. And it's going to be more expensive if we have to contrive it for you because now we're your marketing team. You know, now we're your marketers. And you eventually become their product team too. It's like, hey, can you make this adjustment on your app so I can market it better? You know, it's totally, that's a slippery slope for us. And why we only take on so few, but for us, the price really varies on how viral is it naturally? Is it for a wide group of people? Like, is it online betting or is it floss? So if Apple comes to you, they want you to do the campaign for these new airpods that translate in real time. How are you guys handling that negotiation? Just for like aspiring creators out there, they say, what's your rates? Like, what do you respond to that email? Creators have never really talked in CPM before, but WAP is actually making that more mainstream, because we've been quoting on CPM for a while, which is only pay for how viral you go, which is just a fancy way of saying CPM, right? WAP is educating and doing a great job of educating creators and how to speak in CPM, which is going to start offering brands the guarantees that we've only been able to do because we have so much digital real estate. But now, if creators can keep creating until they hit the minimum that's promised or the financial goals, now creators can charge on a CPM basis. And we can go back to what we were talking about with this multi-channel strategy that I think is going to be extremely important for the creators of the future and the brands. I never even thought of WAP like that. I thought of it more as, oh, I have a $10,000 clipping budget. Let me get my views. But this democratizes the ability for brands to pay. You know? It's the exact word it does. Brands can finally ensure they're going to get what the creator says that they can get and they control the quantity and the quality of it. That is huge control, back in the brand's hands, from being burned by the creator economy. It influencers demanding their worth like they have been for the last couple of years and don't get me wrong. I advocate for creators to charge what they're worth. I am one myself and I teach creators to charge what they're worth. But unless you are very consistent and very predictable, you can't, and even if you are, you can't really guarantee a brand anything based on your real estate alone unless you're doing volume. So this multi-channel strategy is amazing for brands being able to work with creators and both of them controlling their own future and what they want to get paid and what they're willing to pay for that attention. Let me ask you this. As a creator with so many followers and a lot of leverage, if there was an Apple campaign on WAP and the budget's $10 million, are you just dropping everything and telling all of your creators to go for it and be like, we're the people that are going to get the views for this? Or are you waiting for those guaranteed deals for yourself? Speaking for myself, we're going to do the the guarantee deals. But also, if you have that type of budget, you need to be letting us set you up your own clip farm. You know, you don't need to be going through love, WAP. And that is the best mass market play. But at that level, you need to be setting up your own clip farm the way Andrew Tate did. Love him or hate him. He couldn't post to his own platforms. So he hired armies to post for him. And so he was everywhere. And he really, clipping was huge back in the day with shout out campaigns. And that's how you broke all these big gurus that we know of today. They were doing OG clipping. They were doing these farms, these shout out campaigns. We were a part of a lot of them and helping people grow, right? Now, it's much more normalized and clipping is going to be way of the future for those who are worth clipping less about clipping. So I don't think this is public. Maybe they already have this before. So it's clipping or UGC. Do you know what I'm saying? So you can do a UGC $1 million campaign for Apple AirPods that translate. Would you guys attack something like that? Say it one more time. Would we do a UGC campaign? So like if WAP had $10 million dollar budget, Apple, would you guys do that one? Because if you're just getting paid off the views anyway, like what would keep you from doing that? Yeah, that one would make sense for us because we know that we can get the views and so we can get a decent amount of that by. Okay. I should have clarified that they're doing UGC now. Which is like, because what I was thinking is imagine all these UGC creators having the opportunity to promote for these big brands and the brands get the guaranteed views. It's a lot bigger than clipping when it becomes UGC campaigns because TikToks, all these platforms have been trying to do that for years like the TikTok creator marketplace. But none of it really works. Yeah. But I think WAP could probably figure it out or the guys that are taking it over. They've done the best so far. Sure, we got to get back onto the hot ham ad leaf mouth out. That was something for the rest of the nerds watching. That was something that applies to three people. Did you guys make raising canes go viral? Yes, several times. And now they don't need a lot of help on their own. They're already a very well known brand. But when they do have launches or say Post Malone is opening this new restaurant with them in Dallas, they bring in a bunch of influencers. But humbly and excitedly, we were the only influencers that were allowed in the building in advance. Why? Because we're not doing, look at me here. I'm at this new event to raising canes and Post Malone. Now that is necessary too. But they know that we can guarantee them and create content that is going to be more widely seen past just that influencers audience that we could create a more viral moment where everybody in meme and culture and that would be a more culturally relevant moment of Post Malone has a new restaurant with raising canes in Dallas. And so we went in, we had under 15 minutes, we knew what we were going to do. We split up and we knocked out eight, maybe nine videos in 15 minutes and on the fly. But that's we're just having years of experience and downloads can allow us to just make viral content kind of on the fly right there. One did probably 11 million and then another one that we did for the Nashville location. I think did upwards of 30 million. Post a 30 million few video. And did you guys like know which one was going to do well? Did you consider at all like Post Malone and like what he looks like, what he's known for in terms of the content you made or was it just post Malone's barely in the video from the Dallas line. I that's where it was on the fly where fireworks are going off. And Post is there. You see him barely. So we had to do some meme reframing to bring it back to the main thing. But I'm painting across and then we're anchored with a Snapchat overlay that says spotted the perfect woman. So that's the anchor. We know what we're waiting for in this big crowd of all the stuff's going on. Post is the celebrity and a pan over to a a girl, whatever actors, she has our purse stuffed full of chicken tenders. And she's just like not paying attention to any of this. She's pulling and eating the chicken tenders out of her purse, making the chicken fingers, the chicken tenders the most important thing. That was the most important thing. That was the perfect woman. Yes. That one got me. I never would have thought that was an ad in my life. Good. Good. That's the whole point. But she was anchored showing that these chicken tenders are the most important thing more so than post alone. But people now understand this is Dallas. This is post Malone and how good these chicken tenders are. And those were our main deliverables. And that's how you can accomplish it in a well written format in six seconds. You can get all these subliminal messaging points in there. So you signed away your name to a record label. Do you legally own your name? Yes. And we'll say record label in quotations because it was essentially just a person who had a lot of money who believed in me, who invested in me, but it was an extraordinarily predatory contract. Do I did not own the rights to my name commercially to be able to entertain outside of being in his ecosystem for a life? What was the name? I don't want to say his name or no, your name. Like that was so it was just Adley. You couldn't be Adley. No. No. I was mostly going by Adley. My maiden name is stump. Don't go look it up. But it was yeah, under my name, I wasn't able to use the only leverage that I had at the time coming off of the voice. And that's where I learned what business really is, which is solving problems for other people because you can't use any leverage and you can't you don't have anything. You're bankrupt. What do you do if you want to make money? You create opportunities. So where somebody needs something and you know how to do something, you either figure out how to make this possible and then you make your whole goal solving their problem. And if you help other people in, you will win by default. So when did you get your name back? When I filed bankruptcy, because when I filed bankruptcy, it made that contract null and void because that was essentially debt. And so I got the rights to my name back. I got the rights to my music back, anything that I'd written during that time. How much money did you lose from that if you don't want me to ask? No, because I had none. I just had none. I was 22 years old and I really didn't have anything yet. So I just had songs that I had written, but I didn't own anything. But I had this contract now that was debt. And so that's why my lawyer was like, I think you should file bankruptcy. You don't really have much going for you, but you're going to be locked in this thing for a very, very long time. And this is Nashville. Anybody who's ever been in a record labels had to file bankruptcy at some point. And it's just because they don't have the rights to their name. Not necessarily that was pertinent to my deal, but yeah, bankruptcy is much more common in the music industry than I knew. Yeah, how did filming videos of your chickens in a bathtub change your life? It forced me to be myself. I hate that my back had to be up against the wall for me to be myself, but that's when I had my biggest breakthrough. Because like many people, when they're first starting out trying to get attention online for their business or their personal brand, they start out doing what we were talking about earlier of just copying other people. But if you're copying other people in a way that's inauthentic to you, we can tell people know that it reads as an authentic, right? So it's not going to work. I'm not saying reinvent the wheel. I am saying study what works, but you have to do what is authentic to you. And that's coming from somebody who scripts viral videos for a living, right? So I know that might sound weird, but authenticity will always have an audience. It will. We can feel it. We know the difference now when somebody genuinely loves something and is being authentic to them. And that's when it works. So I was making videos for a meme company at the time. And I was trying to figure out how to do this thing, right? So I was just copying everybody else and everything was tanking. And I had to have a new video turned around by 6 a.m. every morning. So I shot all my footage. I'm exhausted and I go to edit it at one in the morning and all my footage was corrupt. I've lost everything. And I got to have something turned in in five hours. So I'm crying. And I don't know what I'm going to do. And my boyfriend at the time he goes, "Add, why don't you just go get those chickens in the backyard and do something with them? They make you happy." I was like, "I have no better idea." So okay. So we go out and get all my chickens. And they had funny names. Chick Norris, Ellen DeHinneres, Oprah Hinfry, Chikira Chikira. They look alike. So I just got all my chickens and I put them in a bathtub and we just improv this bit where he walks in on me and goes, "What are you doing?" And I was curling Bruce Hinner's hair. I thought it was a hen turned out to be a rooster. So I'm curling Bruce Hinner's hair. And then I reveal in the bathtub. I had all my chickens in the bathtub. Really silly bit. I'll send it to you. But that video, I turned into the meme company. They didn't care for it too much. But I thought it was funny because I love those chickens and it was funny to me. So I just posted it on my Facebook page at the time. And that video did 19 million views overnight and grew me over 100,000 followers in 24 hours. And that is when I realized that I should be myself. I shouldn't be doing what all of these other people were doing. There were funny weird people out there that were chicken ladies just like me and thought my chickens were funny. And that loved country living and resonated with my goofy personality and this couple's humor of me doing these silly things with my chickens. And so I realized that there were my people out there like that. They wanted more content like that. So I kept the foot on the gas and just kept making videos like that that were really authentic to me. I started showing more of my life and doing skits with my chickens and chicken, Norris and Bruce Hinner and the whole crew. Right? And that's what worked. So authenticity for me was learned the hard way. But it was the biggest gift I'd ever been given because that is my North Star always. And now I know how it feels to create from a place that is authentic. Even if it's silly, even if it's gimmicky, I'm a very silly person. But I never would have found that if I hadn't been trying, if I hadn't been out there getting my reps and seeing what felt authentic and what didn't, I had enough reps into then know the difference. And I think that's the piece a lot of people miss. They spend time trying to figure out what's going to work exactly. And we have no idea. And you don't either until you just start trying and see how it feels, right? And see what works. And the only way people go viral consistently is once they have so many reps in that they just have pockets of content that they can do. But you talk about authentic content creation. But some I thought I had last night was that your personality is almost a bad niche. I like still you should be authentic in your content. But having your personality as the niche isn't great long term because you could get a million followers in 2024, your personality. And then in 2024, people don't care about your personality. Your followers are on the platform. And the videos are still getting served for just your personality and your personalities changed. You kind of know what I'm saying here. And do you like, how do you think about because something you've said in the past is you don't want the people you work with to be influencers because they can't work for brands. You want them to be like creators that are authentic that make like viral type content. Like how do you think about this personality thing? That was when we were running a different business model to where if you were just an actor making viral videos as a job, we don't want you to be an influencer because we may need you to be an Amazon delivery driver in one video, pregnant in the next, evicted in the next. But for the future of the masses like the macro economy here, influence trumps all of that. I think personal brand is going to be more valuable than Bitcoin by 2030 because Bitcoin may 100x, but your personal brand can 1000x, your income, your influence and your impact in the world. Do you think personality is ever a good niche though because there are some creators who don't really do anything and it's just about their personality and them talking and telling stories. I think that can be great. Look at Tabitha Brown. She's an amazing creator and we love her personality. Not because she's like silly goofy. She's trustworthy. She makes us feel calm. She makes us feel safe. She makes us feel like she's a mom of air. That's her personality. Now that's transferable because she could be promoting this thing. She could just be loving on us. She could go sell us a towel if she wanted to because I trust her. So I think your personality can evolve the same way your audience is going to evolve. I think people get in a trap when they just do the same thing every six months and they're not growing at all because I'll come across that person's page or another video of theirs. I'm like, I've seen this before. They've done the same thing for the last six months and I'm kind of over it. I loved it in the beginning but if they don't keep evolving with their personality or with their trade or what they're offering to us is what their value prop is, we're going to get bored anyway. That's another gem I've heard from you before that no one talks about is you have to make content that doesn't look like your other content so people don't get jaded by it. Yeah, like even when I make stories, I try to think of I want this story to be entertaining so people like, oh, add as a new story up and I always know I'm going to be entertained by it. And I don't know if this is right or weird or just a personal preference. I never just post one thing to my story. I want it to be a story. I want it to have a beginning, a middle and an emotional arc and I don't always adhere to that but I want that to be on brand for me is I'm always entertained by her or I'm always uplifted or she always makes me laugh or I trust her right and that is the one thing that I won't sacrifice even when we were baiting people into watching these videos we were honest about that you know people knew what to expect and then now they've grown with me as we move from entertainer to the masses to now we use our powers for good and we teach businesses and brands how to get anybody to watch anything and we critique their videos and show them this skill that they could not go learn and don't have the time to frankly you know and so how can we compress as marketers people's years and years and years of figuring this out and then just tell them what to do in 30 seconds and they get their first 15 million view video that's the thrill for me so what's the practical action here because I'm someone who has a format right it's a podcast clip I ask a question and usually the variables are show Adley's face for first or show Jack's face first something I do is we use a different set pretty much every single time or different colors at least just so it looks a little different but do you think I do you have a role of thumb for that like these people that make talking head content podcast content for what they should be switching up how often they should be switching it up what do you think about what you just did with this is great you make experts people are over experts right we're over it if anybody can sit here and say this stuff they could have looked it up on chat GPT 15 minutes before the interview you make people show their expertise right I think that I haven't seen anybody do it's perfect for clips it's unique and you put make people put their skill where their mouth is on the spot kind of I think this was great and we a creator of ours was advising on a very big podcast a very well-known late-night legend type of guy and she let him do this whole thing and then specifically just win it and make clips not dissimilar to maybe how Sean Kelly just does it and he thinks in clips I think thinking in clips when that is the widest top of funnel is really good but I haven't seen anybody do what we just did here today I will say I took it from not that exact thing I've seen people use props before to demonstrate a point you know and it's the number one podcast that does that and I'm like I don't understand why he does that because it doesn't make me care more but I kind of get what you're saying it puts people puts the guest that people are used to seeing in a different state a different scenario and it just uses metaphor to demonstrate a point so if we can when we're designing viral videos too we're trying to appeal to as many senses as possible can I understand it doesn't speak to me visually auditorily do I smell obviously we can't do but you can demonstrate smell with like or right so how many senses can come across in this video so I just have more touch points to feel the thing that you're talking about so if you haven't realized social media is one of the best ways to make more money online right now like you build a loyal audience that buys whatever you're selling and when it comes to going viral or helping other creators blow up on social media Adley is statistically the best in the game but if you want to work with her and start dominating the algorithm growing a loyal fan base or just making more revenue from the platforms just go to the second link in the description or scan the QR code on screen Adley's one of the few people in the space who can say she generated a billion views a month for five years straight so in my opinion working with her and being mentored by her is a no-brainer so if you guys are interested just go to jackneal.com/adley banyway guys back to the podcast yeah I look back at some of my viral clips and it's weird little things like I smile at the beginning of it when I ask the question it's like that just triggers a tiny emotion in people that broadens the scale of it yeah where are your eyes are you looking at me are you looking at the camera are you intense direct but just looking here versus did you go here and then here in the middle of the question all those little things I think make a huge difference how do you think about your outfits because I think you're a good person to ask about this thank you I think not enough I would Steve Jobs at every day of my life if I could and I'm not even doing what we preach in a viral video since which is tight and bright not in a hoey way but bright pops more on camera if I was wearing a bright red top that would stop the scroll more than what I'm wearing right now so I'm not taking my own advice but we would say tighter and brighter just because that does naturally catch the eye more than something else you're the only person I've heard talk about this facades myself like I think people should figure out their color profile it's like you and are both blonde hair fair skin people so theoretically red blue and then like emerald green specifically would be like our best colors and then black and white and then it's kind of different you're ready to say this is good Jag what else should I be wearing I usually wear black because it's just the most versatile and it seems like that's what every single one of my guests wears they always wear black it's just a common theme but yeah I think if you figure out your colors figure out what makes you look the best figure out what pops I do you ever like what other rules of thumb thumb do you have about this because you're wearing a hat right now that's I don't think anyone's worn hat on the podcast um what yeah one girl wore like a trucker hat and interesting yeah I wear a hat you know what's cool is I start of wearing hats and before that it was bandanas during like voice era and stuff strictly out of insecurity not knowing how to do my hair I still don't I just know how to do this part kind of but my bangs are bad they're damaged and so I started wearing a hat out of insecurity but my insecurity has now become part of my brand it has become like a superpower I'm spotted everywhere I go when I have a hat on where I am more incognito when I'm not and if people do recognize me like where's your hat what started as a big insecurity from now for me has now become a part of my brand then I think it's so funny wardrobe biases of thing location biases of thing I know certain people always sing in their kitchen and that location is a thing so even if they weren't on screen and be like I know that kitchen the more familiar things you can get people to latch on to the more we love that it's a comfort familiarity is comfort and so I think familiar in location or wardrobe or bit or gimmick you know like a simple repeatable scalable thing oh he's the guy who always does this she's the girl who does this in the streets and asking this question we need that familiar thing to grab onto do you ever manufacture comment sections that's all we do not plan them but do you have people comment things when the videos how you play with that 1000% we do it for one of our clients is Andy for sell it with with first form so if we make a viral video that first form is present and I'll either put it if not in the mean border in a top comment and then they can pin it or whatever that's like oh that's a first form quality guy right there like he represents their values like I'll just bait that comment so people are like oh it makes the brand it drives home that messaging so if they were not we don't want it to we don't want the concept to look like an ad so we will make a comment section bring it back to be about the protein or the product or the energy drink whatever we want to say the comment section can do the work for us if we pre-frame the audience by what these top comments are or what the caption is something we talk about a lot is like the first hour of your comment section did terms this sentiment like if the video blows up something I did unintentionally was I posted a video of guests saying good question I just backed it back to back really viral people and then people started commenting on my other post wow that guy asks good questions wow that guy asked good questions so influence culture yeah caption was good question no no so it was a video compilation of different guests saying good question or that's a good question or that's a really good question Jack and then at the end it was like the Jack Neil podcast where we asked pretty good questions and then people commented like love this video and then my next videos is like gosh this guy ask good questions he always asks good questions and it's kind of changed the sentiment so now I was like how do I get people to comment that I do good research you know so I'm like this is great because you have to because I'm trying to appeal to people like what I want people to think about me as a podcaster is this guy ask good questions he has good guests and he does good research like those are pretty much the main buckets so it's like how do you create that sentiment I don't know but that's a great reminder I'm gonna that's I learned a lot from you today but that's a master class right there how do you use AI to make viral videos right now what I'm doing and what we're training AI to do is study our catalog of viral videos to build a sticky score a virality score that can grade content because if we can grade it and we can boil it all down to universal truths of content by studying mass quantities in multiple industries and niches we're gonna have a hell of an R&D department a hell of a development department and a hell of an execution department when it comes to serving people with viralish so right now we're building banks of information which is psychology which that if we can then translate those ones and zeros to generative AI to scripting we're gonna be able to scale the ability of how many people we can help and serve in a day making the and that's most viral content. - I really like that. I would buy that as a customer to do that from my content, like as it done for your service, personally. - It will be live and ready in 60 days, and I will send you the link. (laughing) - Perfect. But like ChatGBT has too much context. So if you, if I gave it 10 of Adley's scripts and like say some had 2000 views, some had millions of views, it wouldn't really know which one went viral. It might have an okay idea. But if you trained it only on Adley content, I think it would likely have a better idea. Is that your kind of thesis on it? - That's one of the applications, but the software that we're building is going to replace a $60,000 a year creative director. It's going to replace the three interns that that person would run or three other departments. So where, right now, what's the natural human behavior? If you have an intern or anybody helping you with social content, is I see a link I'm inspired by? I grab that link and I text to them, I'm like, "Hey, we should do this." Or I DM it to them, "Hey, we should do this." If you loop, I don't wanna say the name of it yet, if you loop our software in with that, it will within 20 seconds scrape that video, the script, break out each frame, frame by frame, run it against RR&D of what performs and makes viral videos, understand why that worked. Re-write it in the next 50 seconds against your goals, top of funnel, middle of the bottom of the funnel ratios, your conversion, your product, and your authenticity, because it also knows your best performing post. And re-injests what you're doing every week. So it not only spits out, here's how you would do this video. Here's what this plumber did to go viral. Here's how you would do it as a holistic trauma educator based on principles. Then it will put it on your weekly slate, your calendar. It will have a props list for you. It will have frame by frame shot list. Not shoot it like this, it will show you an AI rendering of exactly how to shoot it, because-- - But it analyzes the original frames. - Yes. - Correct. - Yes. - Okay, I don't think a lot of these tools don't do is considered the visuals. They just considered the script. - And that is their biggest mistake. Because so much gets lost in translation from just a script. And when we are coaching people at viralish half of it, it's like, "Oh, I wanted you to film here and then move in and I wanted you to be at this angle, not whatever angle you were at." And so now, if coaching on that execution is 50% of the battle, so if we can AI render exactly our frameworks or how to film something viral, you're gonna get it right 90% of the time. We're gonna get to 90% of the way there. And we're gonna have a fully-- Here's what you're shooting this week thing. If you had an outlier last week that was a 12x outlier as a real, we go into your camera role if you give us permission to and we make a carousel version for you. And every week you're saying, "Yes, no, yes, no." If you say no to a piece of content, we suggest with scripts and shot lists. Why did you say no? So it's an amazing employee for you that never gets sick and only gets smarter. And it also knows, say you're inspired by Jack Neal. If Jack Neal had an outlier that week, here's how we take it and put it in your industry and make it related to you. It's all studying psychology and frameworks and that is what makes it so powerful. And this is going off billions and billions of data points of the internet's most viral content over the last five years. So it's not just past viral videos. It's got enough data to do predictive performance in studying enough and ingesting enough viral content from across all of the different industries that I'm training on and all of my coaching and frameworks to R&D on how you can be the number one name and brand in your niche. - I'm excited about it because I haven't seen anything that's produced viral content for me yet. It's usually like it produces 10 ideas and I pick one and that one does well, but it's like not all 10 different. - And they're not trained on as much frameworks and proof as we've got, right? They're not trained on that. I was sending more frameworks and critiquing frameworks again for it this morning and we'll continue to do so. But now it is very good. If I see a video, I can rank it in my mind of how well I think this would do within a couple of millions and then the software and I don't, I'm, it's blind, double blind in some cases and we are right on. - Would you say you're born of a creative person or more of a like data driven action taker? - Not, I'm not data driven. I'm not good at looking at large pools of data unless it's very obvious and making decisions. I go create a first and then use data to back up or pivot my ideas. So definitely create a first. I'm very bad with systems and processes, which is why we took all of our creativity and boiled it down into a formula that makes us viral seven out of 10 times. Seven out of 10 times, I know I'm getting at least a million views on our video. So it's not perfect every time, but I would take that batting average all day long. - How can you unlock your creative potential? Like how can someone become more creative? - Oh, you study it. Just like anything, if you wanna be good at fitness you have to start by doing it. You don't get creative just in your head. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to go into the gym, right? You have to get your reps in. If you want to have an identity shift, it comes through action. So if you want something, first act is if you are a creative person. CS Lewis said this once and he said, "If you want to love something, you act as if you love something "and eventually you'll find you presently come to love it." So if I act as if I'm a creative person, how would a creative person do this? What would they watch? What would they consume? How would they enjoy this? How would they dissect this? So I start embodying it and I start becoming a student of it and what you focus on magnifies, right? And if I start to look for creativity and everything and become a student of it, I'm gonna get better at it. But it is definitely something that you can train. My husband was as creative as a rock when we started making videos. Now he is incredibly creative, but he also uses his creativity back by this data. So you have a container. Creativity gets really stressful for people when they think, "Oh, there's all these crazy things I gotta do out here." No, if you have a container like a viral video formula, then your creativity goes in this container which optimizes your creativity to spit out genius or in our case viral videos on the other side of it. If you had to film a podcast, what are like the variables you would think about to make it creatively interesting visually? Where would you film it? How would you think about these things? So if I wanted to make a viral podcast? I guess it just, if Adley had a podcast, where would you film it? To be unique and stand out. In Asana, and I would do a burning questions type of thing. So first, if you wanna make something like viral, right? You're gonna put your efforts towards something, you wanna make sure it hits. Here's what you do. You take your creativity that can be learned in the frameworks we've talked about, and you take a format that you know works. You know how to make a viral podcast. You research how to make a viral podcast. Here's these pillars that make podcast work really well. Then you put your creativity into that container. For example, if I'm gonna start a podcast, I would want an interesting location. So maybe I do it in Asana, and the questions get harder as the sauna gets hotter. I need to raise the stakes, right? That's step four of our billion-view formula. Have you already done this? No. Okay. It's similar to hot ones. That's why it's good. I'm just wondering where you came up with Asana. Proven formats of what works, right? Have you done videos like InSana's that did well in the past? One, but say you're wearing Haynes T-shirts. You want to make money from this thing, right? So I would put like 20 Haynes T-shirts on or some clothing company. And if I answered this burning question, I get to take one off. So you are anchored knowing I want to get through all these shirts. I want to take all of my clothes off, even though no one's getting naked on a podcast. But now I have a suspense anchor. So once you know the formats that make something viral, whether it's a podcast or a video, you marry the formats with a creative, with creative on top of it, you know? And so that's how I'm gonna do that. I think I've had to raise the stakes, had to have an interesting location and an interesting format that creates a world around whatever product I'm trying to sell. In this case, Haynes T-shirts is baked into the entire concept so people don't suffer from pitch fatigue. It's baked into the world the same way hot ones is. You learn those Buffalo sauce flavors by default, just by going through the podcast. And it doesn't seem weird or gimmicky or salesy at all. It's baked into the world of your podcast. - So did you take the concept of, well, hot ones is an interview channel and their gimmick is the wings gradually get hotter. What else gradually gets hotter? Sauna, is that what you thought of when you thought about this? - Exactly. It's just like we do with the unboxing and the cops. You know, it's marrying these formats. So you actually don't have to be that creative. You just have to be a good student. - Two more questions for you. But first, I just have to ask you about the very, like the most popular format on TikTok, which is just viral dances. - And she's using props and Curiosity Gap. Why does she have a cake? I don't know if that's part of the trend, but why does she have a cake? Then she shows how she's gonna interact with that. We don't know why we have a 50 on the cake as if she stole this from an old person, no offense to anyone who's over 50. But she also looks super cute. It's still a very sexual song. It's a trend, so there's familiarity there with the fridge. But she added this whole other prop which raises the stakes and raises the curiosity gap in our mind. And then uses it to add to the sexuality. And I think she stole the cake from an old person. And it's licking it. And then she's gonna go give it to him. - What prop would you do? - I'd have tampons in the fridge probably. Only because it's a funny try to do. interesting, try it. If you've ever seen a video with tampons in the fridge, you can see where people got that. - That's gonna be one of our props for you. - It wasn't really. - It was. - That's all that the hotel is like, our tampons and condoms like too much for this park. I think it'd be fun, but. (laughing) - But it starts people commenting. So even though you were doing the familiar trend thing, if you have something as commonplace as tampons, but in a controversial or interesting location, people will start entire comet threads about that. Like, should we be reproducing our tampons? Is that something we should be doing? And that other people will be like, absolutely. I've always done that with mine. And you're like, wow, where is this comet section gone? But we would do, that's step five of our billion before Milette, which is tactics to get people engaged who would normally never engage on your content is doing little subtle things like that. - Well, I do, this has been fantastic. Hearing how your mind works and all these things, because the type of content you create is very niche in that there are a lot of creators in America that only make content for American creators, but you're somehow able to go so viral that it hits everyone in your main platform like is vertical and short form. So you're kind of like the female Mr. Beast in a way, I'm sure you've been called that a couple of times. - I don't know if I deserve it, but I have been called that a lot. - To go off that. Well, one, is there a bigger female creator than you? Like in terms of views? - Data, I don't think so. The difference is we may be more visible, but you don't know that I'm behind most of what I'm behind. And so it keeps me less of a liability. It keeps me able to continue monetizing even if I were to get canceled because we have a deeper playbook than just me being Adley and making money, right? And we're able to help other people make money, which in turn is good for our company and our business as well. But from a views and data standpoint, we've done a lot of damage over the last five years. That, so people may have less views than us, but more brand affinity because all of my views don't tie back to Adley. And I kind of like it that way. - I usually ask every guest who's the most impressive person you've met, but who's the most impressive marketer you've met? - The most impressive marketer I've met is, are the people that are behind the faces to the brand? - Do you mean there are certain creators that have someone helping them blow up? Is that what you mean? - Yes. And so does that make the creator good if they have a team supporting them? Yes, and like I'm a good creator and I'm a good marketer, but I'm only one person. I become incredibly more powerful when I have a team supporting me because I have one zone of genius. And if I can pull from five other team members zone of geniuses, now we are a force to be reckoned with. And that's why you have teams like Mr. Beast. He can only do so much on his own, but he became so much more powerful when he had those early days of five other YouTubers having a mind share, you know? - So he can hire five people to focus, like hyper focus on five different things that come with marketing. And then eventually all five of those people are gonna be better than him. And then he's just kind of the face of it. I kind of know what you're saying about this. - Yeah. It's like the smartest marketer is the one who is actually not the smartest marketer, but they put the smartest marketers around them. Not even marketers, the other people in their zone of genius to make them look like a fantastic marketer. They hired their weaknesses, which is exactly what I'm working on doing now is let me be what I'm great at, but that's only gonna take us so far. You know? - Yeah, how long does it take you to make a video on average, like back in the day when you were making them consistently? - Three minutes and one second. - I'm kidding. - Kind of, because that's how long it was to be monetized. Some videos, we could whip out a phone and make a hundred million hitter in 30 seconds. Other times, hundred million views on a single video would take us three hours of perfecting it. It definitely depends on the concept, but I will tell you, the only constant is the ones that we cared about the least and or did not want to make. It's always the video that you don't want to make that somehow goes the most viral. The one you weren't so emotionally attached to. There's a video that made me $80,000 that I had put in the trash. I was so nervous unattracted to, thought this video was bad, literally just because of the way my hair looked. I had extensions and you could see my tracks and I was in security that made me trash that video. My husband, who does not edit, got it back out of my trash, re-edited the video, posted it and it made us $80,000. I had $80,000 sitting in my trash can. That's bonkers, strictly because of vanity. I almost lost that money. Never again have I let vanity keep me from posting a video. If you look crazy in a video that's just going to be better for you and actually people can see more of themselves in that imperfection than they can when you make a video with perfect lighting and all your boxes are checked. That's really interesting. I love that story from you. I forgot that the same thing happened to me. I had 20 K followers on TikTok and that was after six months and I had this video that I made. It was like, well, every state is best and more stuff and I was like, I asked my girlfriend at the time, I was like, "Shut up, post this, this is like really cringy." 'Cause no one made any talking head content on TikTok at the time and she's like, "Yeah, I'll just post it. What's the worst thing that happened?" I was like, "Okay." And I went to bed looking the morning. It's like 500,000 followers gained in like 10 million views and then I have this 50 part series ready to go and I would never have done that 'cause no one had done anything like that before. That's usually why you wanted to lead it 'cause it's like this feels so-- - Off-center. - Yes, off-brand. But everything that you want is on the other side of cringe mountain is doing something outside of your comfort zone. If you look silly in a video and you think you do, you have to post it. The video you are most nervous to post is the one that is gonna go the most viral. I see it every single week in our community. And so our job as coaches, our job at VIRUS is to coach them, to push them past their comfort zone because staying in the comfort zone is getting them the results that they're currently getting which they're unhappy with. You hire a coach to push you. You hire a trainer to train you. That content is not exclusive of your content. If you want the quickest way to compress time and get you more success from your content is to hire somebody who has what you want. It's the same thing with anything else in life. And content is no different. Hire the person who has what you want, who has the results and pay them to get you there. That will save you tens of thousands of dollars in the long run. - I agree with that heavily. Because most people don't have access to large creators. It's like I still, most large creators are still talking with each other to try to share notes and it's hard to get into that circle. So you can either get famous and then meet them or pay to meet them early and then have access to it for free for the rest of your life. What's the most a brand has ever paid you for one video? Up front $20,000 for one video, not that much. - Really? - We do a lot on the back end. - Just to give you a more impressive number, if you want to share. What's the most money you've made on Facebook in one month? - A million dollars. - How many views was that? - And that was just one platform. I know that was probably about 750 million views in Q4. On Facebook alone. Yeah, million dollars on Facebook alone. 750 million views in Q4. - Do you repost all your, like, - Yes. - Banger videos in Q4? - Yes. - I was thinking about that. I was like, that might be the best time to repost. - Yes, 1000%. - And do you guys go particularly hard in Q4? - Yes. We go hard on content creation. We go hard on reposting and you can, because there's more demand for content. There's more supply of ads. So then there's more content needed. So anybody who's putting content out there, I would put out way more content than you normally do in Q4. - Would you say it makes double the amount of money as the other quarters, or like 1.5x, something like that? - Totally depends on the CPM, you know? If we're just talking about monetizing views alone, then it all comes down to CPM. On TikTok, you can get a video that does 60 million, 100 million views and get three grand, you know? What are they paying on CPM? What are they paying on RPM? Versus that same amount of views on Facebook is gonna pay you way more. - I think we've done 500 million views on Instagram in the past year and we made $2.03. - Oh, it's awful. We're not monetized on Instagram. - What happens to business owners who don't become content creators? - They become irrelevant. They become extinct. If you want to be in business in 2025 and beyond, not just in business, but you want a good, healthy business. If you want a business that is visible in 2025 and beyond, you have to start acting more like a content creator and less like a company. That is how brands are gonna survive. And one of the easiest ways to do this is by making what we call an SRS, at BiReLisht. It is a simple, repeatable, and scalable concept that feels familiar to people. We like what feels familiar and then you come in with a unique angle on it. Dude wipes does an amazing job of this with a branded content series. Hot ones does an amazing job of this with a branded content series. Just kidding TV has a simple, repeatable, scalable thing. Look at all of the creators that you, look at most of the creators that you follow, the kind where you can say, "Oh, she's Adley. "She makes videos like this." Oh, he's Jack. He has a podcast where he asks really good questions. What are you known for? What is your bit or gimmick, but it doesn't have to be cringey, but it does have to be, it just has to be interesting, right? The easiest way for brands to have a breakthrough is to create an SRS that they can become known for, that they can do over and over and over again. So people don't, so they don't have pitch fatigue and they don't have to wake up every day saying, why don't we make for social media? That is what we help brands do inside of eyelashes. We come up with an SRS so that they can cut through social media as quick as possible. And in many cases, lower their ads bend by at least half. That is what we're seeing from brands who are taking content creation seriously as a major part of their marketing strategy. Last question here. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received? Yes, but the best personal advice I ever received was if you make your life a life of service, you'll never have to wake up lonely, depressed, or anxious another day in your life. Because you think about it and when we're anxious about ourselves or what we should be doing, and anytime I'm depressed or lonely or anxious, I am just thinking about me and my experience in my body or in that room I'm going to be in and I make it all about me. But when I wake up and I think of how can I serve? How can I make somebody else smile today? How can I be of the greatest and highest value? I love that day. And I become more effective that day when I'm not thinking about myself. And I'm not depressed and I'm not lonely and I'm not anxious about anything when I make it about other people, which is also the greatest gift in business too, is if you just, if you don't focus on making your goals about money, you don't focus on your quarterly KPIs just for arbitrary reasons and you strictly make your goals focused about how well you're serving your customer and their results. Not how many millions of views I'm getting. How many millions of views are my clients or my customers or the people inside viralish getting? That is what we make all of our goals around is the customer experience because if we take care of that and we get acts and we get acts of service right, and now we can put that as my goal, all the money goals take care of themselves, all of them. So actually the best piece of advice I ever received personally turns out to be pretty good business advice as well. So do you think you take care of yourself first or you take care of others and that takes care of you? You put on your own mask first so that you can take care of others first. When I was bankrupt and I had no way to make money, the only way I got money was by solving problems for other people. That's still the only way you and I make money is by solving problems for other people. That's all business is. So every day when I wake up and I treat my life as a life of service, the money comes and it comes abundantly when you aren't thinking about your own goals and your own financial problems or just for arbitrary reasons. If you focus on the outcome that you're producing for people, everything else takes care of yourself. I think we've talked about that topic a lot on the podcast but I think you finally are the person that gave an accurate representation of it. It's like you can't pour from a cup that's half empty but you can pour if the cup pours back into you is really what you're saying. You kind of have to be rewarded for what you're doing for other people because if you just give to someone without anything when you have nothing, it's like that's what the circle people are calling. Exactly right. Well everyone, this has been your guest, Adley Kinsman. This is the Jack Neal podcast where can people find you? Adley, Adley, why? On most platforms, it's forward slash Adley on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, on Facebook. But yeah, this was one of my favorite conversations. See you guys. See ya!