This week, two crazy things happened. First, Market Power turned 5 years old. My first video was published December 14, 2018. It's crazy to think that I've been doing this for a full five years now.
The other crazy thing happened today. Market Power reached 50,000 subscribers. Holy cow! I can't believe those two milestones happened at the same time. A huge thank you to everyone who supports the channel.
Naturally, it felt like a good time to reflect on what I've learned over the last five years. There are tons of lessons, but I decided to pull three that mean the most to me.
And for the paid subscribers, I've included a bonus fourth lesson at the end.
Find a Comparative Advantage
Your comparative advantage is the thing that you can do relatively cheaply compared to everyone else. A good example of this is 3blue1brown, who makes videos that animate unique perspectives in math. I have zero background in animation, and if I were to try to animate a math video, it would be incredibly costly for me. It's not my comparative advantage. (But if you have this comparative advantage and can make a 3blue1brown-style video on economics topics, there's totally a market for it and you should do it.)
I wasted a lot of time pursuing paths where I had no comparative advantage. In the early days, I tried giving the economics angle on the day's trending topic. Sometimes that worked. Just a few months after I started, I looked at some of the economics behind the college admissions scandal. It was my first breakout video, and that feedback told me that it was a path I should pursue (completely consistent with a new paper). But that led me to constantly produce low-quality videos that had no long-term value once the news cycle ended. And, worst of all, it was costly for me. My work suffered and the channel's sustainability was threatened.
I'm still working out my comparative advantage. I have some ideas going into the new year, but maybe you can see it better than me! Feel free to comment what you think my comparative advantage is!
Packaging is important
When you teach in school, you don't have to worry too much about getting students interested in the material. Good teachers will still motivate it through engaging ideas, but every student knows what the ultimate motivator is. If I have a student missing a class, they send me an email asking, "Did I miss anything important for the exam?"
When you're on YouTube, it's a completely different cricket game. This is people's leisure. When they're deciding what to watch, they're deciding between your video and MrBeast's most recent multi-million dollar video engineered to get 40 million views in 24 hours. You have to convince people that your video is so good that the opportunity cost of watching MrBeast is too high.
Again, this is something I'm still working on. But I know that my poor performance here has impeded me reaching people who would have benefitted from my content.
Evergreen videos are underrated
Evergreen content is content that continues to be relevant years after it was made. A video on the economics of keep Spider-Man in the MCU is not evergreen content--that is a trending issue that people will forget was even a thing two years later. But helping people understand a topic that's in every economics class is a video that won't go viral when it's released, but it might consistently get views over the years.
And that's what I've seen. If you look at views on my channel in the last 48 hours, the top 10 most popular videos are all made in 2022 or earlier. In fact, only one of them was 2022, and the rest were 2021 or earlier. The top video is the last 48 hours was from 2021, and my second most popular video is from 2019.
The reason why I say this content is underrated is because YouTube rates your video's performance based on the present. As soon as you publish a video, YouTube compares it to your 9 most-recently published videos. Is this one doing well compared to those? Well, if it's on a trending topic, it will do really well. But that quick explosion will fizzle quickly. Evergreen videos, on the other hand, look like they do poorly at the beginning. Yet in the long-run, they outperform everything else.
One way to think of this is the value of investing in an exchange-traded fund versus day trading. Day trading leads to big wins and big losses. Over the long-run, your performance is random. Your safest investment is betting on the long-term.
The Fourth Lesson
Here’s a recording of my fourth lesson, as well as some behind the scenes photos from the early days!
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