Should You Use Your Substack To Grow Your Youtube Channel?

I was shocked by these results.

It is abundantly clear that more and more people are using video to discover new ideas and information. And not only are they using video, they are increasingly engaging with short form video.

I guess we can thank social media for making long attention spans are a thing of the past!

With this recognition, I decided to take a crack at Youtube starting December. Given the size of my mailing list on Substack (16,000 reders), I thought I had a massive advantage because I had a way to distribute my videos.

I decided to start publishing videos once every 1-2 weeks in dedicated emails that highlighted any new video content. I also have a podcast that links out to the video episode called EvolutionFM. 

My readers had been used to receiving written blog posts from me, so I wanted to make it easy for them to unsubscribe from the videos and continue to get written content from me.

So I created a new section called “On the Path (Videos)” where I planned on sharing all video focused content.

Over the course of 6 weeks, I sent 3 emails which embedded 9 videos. These weren’t just emails with embeds, but rather thoughtful narratives included the video embed as a part of it.

Here’s what happened

First Let’s Look At Engagement With the Emails

So despite lots of exposure with in aggregate over 18,326 email opens across 3 emails only 123 people clicked through. These emails resulted in 58 unsubscribes.

Here’s how this is translated on Youtube.

Between the 123 clicks and 14,560 impressions over the thumbnail on Youtube, my sense is that Youtube drove most of the 1205 views vs. my emails to my readers. Unfortunately, they can’t provide perfect analytics of watches on 3rd party embeds, but the numbers tell a pretty clear story to me.

Between Youtube’s promotion and my emails, the end result was 26 new Youtube subscribers at the cost of 58 unsubscribes.

What does this tell us?

At least in my case, relying on a large Substack email list to grow a Youtube channel probably isn’t the best growth strategy. 

People are on Substack to read. Not to watch videos. You might even cause more harm then good by alienating people by hitting them with content forms that don’t match their context.

And in the time it takes to create an email, you probably could have created a 60 second Youtube short and drove more subscribers then writing an email to your list. I am learning quickly that Youtube shorts are an excellent way to grow your channel and an amazing bang for your buck time wise. I will write more about my shorts learnings in a coming post.

Did you find this helpful? What questions do you have? Let me know in the comments