3 Things I Learned About Content Marketing From Running My Own YouTube Show
- Jan 22
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 23
According to a 2025 article in Fortune, more than 30% of 12-15 year olds want to be YouTubers when they grow up. As a young millennial, my version was running around the backyard with a DV camcorder shooting movies with my friends in the woods (mostly pre-internet). At the time, I dreamt of one day becoming a big-shot Hollywood director. Now, I tell LinkedIn that I dream of scaling content operations cross functionally, optimizing brands for growth and eliminating headaches for key stakeholders.
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Anyway, I kind of got to live the new gen-alpha dream job between November 2023 and May 2025.
In the course of its 76-episode run, I branded, researched, wrote, edited, voiced, mixed, animated, and designed thumbnails for Meme History. Put more simply – for a year and a half it was my job to tell YouTube-goers the tale of weird internet ephemera from both the current day and Web 1.0.
It was awesome, but I learned precisely nothing about how to make a video. I already knew how to do that from a decade-long career in-house as a video maker.
What I did learn a lot about is content marketing. That’s what I’m here to talk about today.
1. If You Have Multiple Shows, You Probably Need Multiple Channels
When I went full-time with The Daily Dot, I was tasked with re-imagining what their video presence writ-large would and could be. To that end, I planned to sunset my own show. Some context:
At the time, The Daily Dot hosted two shows on their YouTube channel: Mine featured deep dives about meme culture. (Partially it was an SEO play to boost traffic to their site which contains a trove of old articles about those memes.) The other, That One Sound on TikTok, got more views.
Why?
Because That One Sound was inherently about trending stories of today. People were actually searching for the topics it covered. An episode of That One Sound was often shorter, lighter, and less in-depth, but got more clicks. Meme History’s watch time was better because the people who did click were self-selected to be more bought-in to whatever we were covering that week.
The audience for the broader channel grew, but we regularly got comments on Meme History videos saying things like “These are so high-quality, why don’t they get more views?”
It’s because modern algorithms serve videos to users after they spend time watching previous videos by the same account. That One Sound was inherently about trending topics, so the views naturally were higher. But when YouTube then suggested Meme History, users didn’t click because why would someone interested in what’s blowing up all over their feeds today be interested in some niche thing that happened 15 years ago? That meant we were trying to grow a channel with one hand tied behind our backs because audiences were only interested in one half of our content or the other.
The audiences for the two shows were different, and their looks and feels were different even though they were both Daily Dot properties. My plan was to sunset Meme History on The Daily Dot’s main channel, making room for That One Sound with its higher clickrate, and then – maybe down the road after working on some other ideas I had in the hopper – revisit on its own discrete channel.
My advice to anyone launching a series in 2026: Find a format that works, commit to it, and if you want to experiment with something new, give it its own home. Channels are promises. Breaking them confuses both audiences and algorithms.
2. Content Marketing Generalists Build Trust Faster Than Specialists
When I first started working with The Daily Dot, I was brought on as a contractor to handle animation, voice over, and editing for a different show built around adapting written articles. But what the team discovered pretty quickly was that I could also handle brand design. Not long after that, they realized I could also also write.
This was not part of the original job description, but it turns out job descriptions are more of a suggestion once work actually needs to get done.
Being able to contribute across writing, video, and design didn’t just make me useful – it changed the type of trust I was given. It showed that I could think in systems, not just execute tasks. It proved that my value wasn’t knowing where the buttons were in After Effects, or even writing copy that sounded like Maria Menounos channeling Anthony Bourdain (this actually was my tonal north star).
My value was that I could see how the pieces fit together.
In practice, this meant fewer hand-offs, fewer translation errors, and fewer meetings to clarify intent. They trusted me to take a topic (often literally a single cell in a spreadsheet), and then hand them back a ready-to-publish written article, a high-performing animated explainer video, a YouTube video description, and 3 thumbnail options. The work moved faster because fewer people had to have their hands on it.
This isn’t an argument against specialization (some of the best creatives I know are experts in a single thing and they’re better at that thing than I ever will be – I admire it). It’s an argument for understanding the full surface area of the work. In content teams especially, generalists reduce coordination cost, and that is often what quietly kills momentum.
3. Match the Content to the Platform
Meme History is my favorite thing I have ever worked on to-date. And it never quite had the legs it should have.
The format sat in an awkward middle: too long for casual phone scrolling, too short for long-form, lean-back viewing on a TV. Years ago, there was a real audience for 2–6 minute videos watched on a laptop screen. That market has mostly evaporated.
YouTube’s current vision is essentially K-shaped. Short-form content will live on phones and compete with TikTok. Long-form content will live on TVs and compete with Netflix. The middle is increasingly unforgiving.
Our shows were fun to watch. They were well-produced. But they weren’t built for either extreme. And platforms tend to reward clarity of intent over quality alone.
Publishing without accounting for that reality is a strategy problem, not a creative one. As a contractor, I had a client who trusted my judgement, who paid on time, who liked my work, who I liked working with. So why rock that boat? As the Director of Video, it was my job to think strategically about what was working and what wasn’t, which is why I’d planned to shut it down. I just never would have guessed that after two months of bad revenue, our parent company would beat me to the punch.
Running a YouTube Show Didn’t Teach Me How to Make Videos.
It taught me how fragile content performance is when strategy, platform behavior, and audience expectations aren’t aligned. This is a much less romantic lesson than the “follow your passion” advice I was given growing up but it’s proved to be a far more useful one.
Good ideas still fail when they’re put in the wrong container. Strong execution still under-performs when the system around it is mismatched. And teams often mistake those failures for creative shortcomings when they’re actually operational ones.
Content marketing isn’t just about 10 year olds making movies in their backyards. It’s about telling stories that other people want to engage with. And just as importantly, it has to do with where it lives, who it’s for, and how consistently those answers stay true over time.
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