🔴 Minimize your media

I recently listened to a podcast where MrBeast discussed how switching from voice actors to AI-powered software to translate one of his videos for a non-English-speaking audience created an admittedly worse product but improved the audience retention rate. Couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I wrote about it.

In this issue:

• 🤖 AI dubbing vs. meticulous translation

• 👀 Visual media reaches the largest audience

• ↔️ Minimizing the distance between an idea and its audience

— Francis Zierer, Editor

Quick favor: I made a stupid bet with our podcast producer that we'd hit 2.5k YouTube subscribers by the end of the month. Which is Sunday. We're 768 short. Help me out and subscribe?

• A five-step YouTube production framework (Creator Spotlight)

• How to “get paid to exist” without going viral (Instagram)

• Former Spotlight guest and expert podcast developer Eric Silver told us he’s taking on new clients (short and long-term alike).

The shortest distance between idea and audience

The most successful creators have a clarity of vision and a talent for matching the right message to the right medium to solicit a desired response from their audience.

Writing an article or shooting a video is one thing; distributing it is another challenge entirely. Creators always have to focus on both. It’s about understanding your intended audience, what they’re interested in, where they spend their time, and how to bake all of those insights into the creation stage.

To be a truly great creator is to focus more of your work on the space between the ideas you wish to express and the media you’re choosing to deploy those ideas.

It is also to focus on media minimization, on removing mediation layers that water down or distort your ideas as they travel to your audience.

When I say “media,” I don’t just mean formats like TikTok videos, email newsletters, books, or movies.

• Format mediation: Converting thoughts into video, text, audio, images

• Cultural mediation: Adapting for different audiences, languages, contexts

• Technical mediation: Editing, production, platform optimization, and medium (watching a movie in a theater vs. on your phone)

When I say “media minimization,” I’m talking about strategically controlling the media between your ideas and your audience to maximize the chance that your audience receives and acts on your ideas in the way you intend.

(Don’t) use your words

Written or spoken language-based media are effective for communicating detailed and complex ideas — high-fidelity communication that requires the audience to pay close attention and digest the information. The easiest way to reach a mass, global audience, however, is with visual media that entirely excludes written or spoken language.

Take it from Alex Emery, a YouTube strategist I interviewed last October. John Nellis, the creator Alex works with, is a British football YouTuber. His videos are often 10–20 minutes long, narrative-based, and chatty — language-rich.

When we spoke, Alex emphasized his confidence in the growth trajectory of John’s channel. This was early October 2024, and they had reached 1.75 million subscribers, having added 1 million subscribers in the previous nine months. Nearly 8 months later, the channel has 7.5 million subscribers; that confidence was earned.

But Alex explained that John’s videos were still too complicated (relatively) to reach a truly mass, global audience. He brought up another creator, Celine Dept, to underline the point.

Celine Dept’s YouTube channel currently has 48.1 million subscribers. Visual media are more effective in reaching mass audiences than written media. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, and those thousand words are in whatever language the viewer speaks, with no need for translation.

@celinedept

Try to do the same move.. 😅 (vs Echeverri)

This is extreme media minimization. Take the above video — it transcends language in a way even a toddler can comprehend.

Translation is an art

Earlier this year, we had Chico Felitti on our podcast. Chico is Brazil’s most-listened-to podcaster. We spoke on the occasion of his first English-language release, a meticulous re-telling of his hit 10-episode narrative podcast about a Brazilian influencer turned human trafficker.

Chico’s adaptation of the original podcast A Coach into the American-market Don’t Cross Kat is more focused, surgical media minimization. The original podcast, if you were an American listener who does not speak Portuguese or know anything about Brazil, is heavily mediated. It’s in the language, yes, but also in the structure of the story and the locations and characters referenced, as well as how they’re referenced.

True translation is an art. In both the Brazilian and American versions of the podcast, the core story remains the same — exploring how a person gained fame on the internet and abused that fame to harm others. A simple AI dub from the original Portuguese to the English language would have flopped in the American market; Don’t Cross Kat hit the top 10 on Apple Podcasts.

Marginally worse quality but better retention

In an episode of The Colin & Samir Show this March, MrBeast discussed how YouTube allows creators to attach multiple audio tracks to their videos and that his team works with voice actors to do so in 16 different languages. This is an expensive and time-consuming process — one that he has begun to replace with AI.

As he says in that same interview, “If you’re not dubbing, you can’t reach the majority of the world.” He’s the most-subscribed YouTuber, period; he’s trying to reach as many people as possible.

You are not trying to reach every single person in the world. However, no audience is a monolith, and the same principles of simplification and media minimization apply to any creator seeking to better connect with their audience.

The challenge is not necessarily “How do I write this article to best reach my audience” or “How do I script this video to best reach my audience,” but “How do I best reach my audience.” Generally, you want to mediate your ideas as little and as precisely as possible.

@mrbeast

This was a struggle lol 😅 sprinting with more and more money

The difference between great creators and the best creators

Creators and media professionals who can strategize between the idea and any media are best-situated to succeed as creators and in marketing or media jobs generally.

Most of us are not that skilled in all the available media. This is where other people (expensive) or software (relatively cheap) come in. MrBeast saved money when he switched from other people to software to dub his videos in different languages, without affecting his core metric (viewer retention), but, by his own admission, while shipping a lower-quality product.

Does that matter to his bottom line? Not this time. What mattered to him was minimizing the media layers between his content and new audiences. One thing that clearly mattered to his audience was hearing his voice instead of a voice actor's.

There are always more layers of mediation between your ideas and your audience than are visible at first glance. Focus on understanding all the layers of media between the two and removing or modifying those that serve neither purpose.

• Audit every layer between your idea and your audience

• Ask — does this format/language/platform/etc. best serve my goal?

• Remove or swap any that don’t

Great creators focus on the craft of at least one medium. They study the art of writing, videography, or editing. The best creators do that, too, but aren’t precious about specific media; they’re focused purely on connecting their ideas with receptive audiences.