YouTube vs Instagram for Comedians

—Disclaimer—

I am not an expert at any of this. I am simply sharing my experiences using YouTube and Instagram with standup comedy related material. I did get 500,000 subscribers on YouTube in 50 days for one channel and 30,000 in 30 days for another. This is all how I remember it.

—End—

Context: I filmed 7 comedy specials with 17 comedians over the past two years (www.youtube.com/@ofthecomics) and I also filmed my own special with just me (www.youtube.com/@realfunnypat). As neither myself nor Of The Comics had any sort of following, I am releasing everything for free on YouTube to build a following, in hopes it leads to opportunities unforeseen.

This post will share my experience starting with what I read about what I should do, and what I saw actually happen with using Hootsuite, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Prior to releasing any content, I read several books about “Social Media Strategy” and I can sum them up in the following:

1) Find 4-5 accounts that most simply align with what you are doing and study as much as you can about them: how often do they post? what types of posts? what posts on what platforms? what influencers to they work with? etc…

2) Copy what they are doing with your own content and hope for the best

3) Try to learn what you can and know ahead of time that none of it really makes any sense.

Now after reading all that and then trying things, here is what I learned and advise others:

1) Try anything and everything - multiple times.

2) You can delete anything you want, its yours and no one cares but you.

3) Negative comments help (I hate this) and will happen (remember it is most likely someone who is just real angry with the life they have) so don’t get wrapped up in them. I “like” nearly every comment because none of this matters.

4) The Name of the game is, “How short can you make this?” I have started removing the set up for jokes and replacing it with text onscreen that serves as the set up.

So I filmed everything, and needed to release it all. I started by using Hootsuite’s free trial because I had so many clips and wanted to test them all on as many platforms as possible. What did I get out of this? I learned that similar accounts posted 3-4 times a week with 7-8 hashtags and that videos of less than 30 seconds seemed to do best. I also learned that platforms recognize posts that come from aggregator services and treat them differently and you don’t have full functionality.

How did I learn that? Aside from using it, I had an incident with YouTube that nearly made me miss the best platform for me to use.

Using HootSuite I was posting to YouTube shorts and I think the maximum amount of views I got was 30 on one video. So I was going to not post to YouTube shorts.

I cancelled Hootsuite and then late one night as I was posting horizontal content to YouTube, I thought “maybe I should try this one more time.” So I posted a few shorts, scheduling them over the next few days to be released at midnight (the default time setting, because I am lazy).

Fast forward a week. One video had 5k views, another had 3k…

In that week I spent a lot of time posting the same videos to instagram and was getting minimal watch numbers (a few hundred). The first post I did on IG got a few thousand and then after that things dropped. I continued to post on IG (even with comedians as collaborators) and if we got 3 thousand views, we would only get 2 followers.

I focused on YouTube and started using their “promote this short”. I created a few campaigns with a $20 budget, selecting only the shorts that had more than 1000 views and had an 80% or more retention for watch length. The countries advertised in were USA, Australia, India, United Kingdom, and Canada. Within a week the subscriber numbers started revving up fast!

I increased the budgets, released more shorts, and modified the above strategy of promoting the shorts that got 80% retention only (not using the videos that got 1k views organically) and I added the countries of Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, Nigeria, Norway, Sweden, Austria, and Iceland. I would do $20 over two weeks per short.

I would then let the promotions run for 3 days and any promotion that got less than 16 subscribers per dollar spent I would stop. Anything with 20 subscribers per dollar, I would increase the budget and time length of the shorts promotion.

While all this was happening, I reconsidered using instagram and facebook. I jumped on their meta business suite ads manager, and repeatedly got frustrated with how difficult it was to set up an ad in the placement I wanted it to be (reels vs. stories vs. whatever) within the facebook/meta platforms. Many times the editing was difficult or I had to select multiple placements instead of just one, and it was SOOOO frustrating.

In addition to that, I had a potential ad flagged for violation of policy and it was not! As far as I can tell it was because the comedian said “my partner and I are aging like a US President” in reference to the first year of being a parent in a VERY clean set. When that happened, I decided no more focus on that - my adspend would go to YouTube.

I continue to sporadically post to IG only based on what I see happen with YouTube. For IG I will collaborate with standup accounts which means I pay them $10 so that my post will be on their page and get visibility. For every 2000 - 3000 views, I get 1-2 followers on IG. The only reason I still do it for my own personal standup is that the high view count creates a vanity metric of clips that are all on my wall (most of them have 30,000+ views). It is all for the looks.

SO, back to YouTube and what works. The only consistent things that seem to work with YouTube Shorts is videos 8-14 seconds, having animated captions in the video, cutting angle/zooming every 2-3 seconds in sync with the sound, and using text as an overlay to cut out your joke set up time.

Have a title of 50 characters or less that also serves as the set up for your punch line, and in the description ask a question related to the topic.

This seems to make it so that by the time people realize what they are watching, it has already played at 100% so the algorithm thinks people like it and then spreads it.

People constantly ask me - how are you going to make money? with 500,000 subscribers you are already monetizing right?

Answers in sequential order: I think I will eventually just ask for money and no.

Any subscriber obtained through paid promotions on YouTube doesn’t count towards monetization. I have spent several thousand dollars on the promotions of YouTube Shorts to get the 500,000 subscribers. Yes it is all vanity metrics here in the sense of “oh wow, 500,000 subscribers in 45 days…”

You need to know the series I filmed (Of The Comics) was with comedians way better than I will be for a long time. The series has standup comedy and a roundtable discussion. At first I posted shorts that were 30 seconds and they would do ok with about 1 in 5 getting a few thousand views. I stopped posting the standup clips, and just posted the roundtable clips and those consistently get 400-900 views in the first 24 hours (with 500,000 subscribers).

I scheduled a bunch of posts for Of The Comics (OTC) and then focused on my personal standup comedy and worked out the “formula” for shorts shared above. I am so excited to start posting the standup shorts with what I have learned, and that will be happening in the coming weeks!

This blog isn’t complete. I don’t know what will happen. I am just sharing what happened with me so you can hopefully learn and use this information to help yourself with your own content!