Little Dots Studios has just hosted its last YouTube breakfast event of the year, ‘Ignite Your YouTube Strategy’. Based on over 10 years of managing more than 700 YouTube channels, the digital-first firm shared insider tips, knowledge and data to help channel owners and creators take their YouTube game to the next level.
Insights were provided by managing director for entertainment, James Loveridge; managing director for sport, Robbie Spargo; CCO, Holly Graham; and insights manager, Michael Deller. Each of them covered specialist topics ranging how to make a great content strategy to how to monetise your YouTube channel.
LDS distilled the day’s learnings into the following eight takeaways:
SEO strategy is crucial: YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google, so giving the platform as many data points as possible with keywords, tags and metadata for SEO is super important. Plus, integration with Google means you can enhance the discoverability of branded content if you’re one of the rights holders.
Offer lean back content: YouTube is now the No.1 platform for TV streaming in the US, beating Netflix. This means audiences may be watching content in a TV setting, so focus on creating “lean back entertainment” as a key part of your content strategy.
Focus clearly on monetisation options: There are several revenue streams on YouTube. From advertising revenue to channel memberships, brand partnerships and branded content, diversifying those streams is key. But for those just starting out, it’s vital to ensure you’ve got the monetisation tag switched on.
Archive is a secret weapon: A comprehensive YouTube content strategy can be broken down into five core constituents: Archive Content, Clips, Original, Live and Shorts. Archive content is your secret weapon; you can repurpose it in relation to what’s trending to maximise your budget. Originals, of course, will help differentiate a channel, but it goes without saying that this is more costly to produce.
Watch time metric is key: For social media managers, engagement is probably the metric they lean towards the most to evidence if content is working across multiple platforms. But, when it comes to YouTube, it’s important to also consider viewer watch time to understand how content is performing and what resonates with audiences.
Shorts can help build the business: The relationship between YouTube and Shorts is slowly changing, says LDS, but right now, “we know that shorts drive higher comment and subscriber rates so they are great to grow your channel quickly, although they have little opportunities for monetisation.”
Longer content is performing well: “2025 is the year I’m declaring a war on the 5-10 minute video,” said Graham Swallow, head of data, tech and product. Gone are the days when YouTube best practice is posting cat videos under 10 minutes long. Now anything under 8 minutes is hard to monetise, and LDS data shows that videos over 120 minutes generate 16x more revenue on average.
Sweat the small stuff: It may come as a bit of a shock, explains LDS, but some of the most important factors that impact viewer retention and watch time are the minor details, like ensuring there’s consistent brightness in a video, fast cuts so the frame is frequently changing, and including actual human faces on screen.
For anyone seeking further insights, head over to LDS’ YouTube Knowledge Hub.
