An Introduction to Marathon Content

There’s more to YouTube than meets the eye. In fact, there is so much more to YouTube that many real estate agents haven’t even begun to think about. If you look at any Facebook group, you see comments about what types of channel name they should use, and how to get subscribers. And don’t get me wrong, subscribers are a good thing, however, they are also considered a vanity metric.  

What’s really important is watch time.

YouTube is a delicate ecosystem. There are several players, but at a high level it includes the following:

• Creators
• Viewers
• Advertisers
• YouTube the Company

YouTube, the company, is a business. And businesses are interested in making money. YouTube gets paid by advertisers. YouTube’s objective is to find the best videos, that get the most traction and most watch time so advertisers will have more opportunities to pay YouTube because their ads will be shown more significantly. This is why making good videos, that engage viewers, and get them to watch is so important. Subscribers, yes it feels good for creators because when someone subscribe’s, it’s a note to the creator saying, “hey I like your content, give me more!” But subscribers are not serving the advertisers purpose, this is why focusing on watch time is more important than subscribers. This is where the challenge happens, and while many real estate agents think “I don’t want to get bogged down in camera gear”, I’ll just use my iphone… yes that is a start, but layering in a variety of shots, views and most importantly, incorprating a good story line are all much more important to keeping a nicely balanced ecosystem.

What is “Marathon Content” and why should you care?

Marathon Content is the act of going into your previously published library and repurposing it to gain more content from it. It is not the absolute most important thing that you can do, but what’s trending recently is having longform content on YouTube. Again, this is where advertisers in the ecosystem really benefit. Marathoning is a way to generate more content easily. If you have 5 videos about your market, you can create one long form video, much like what I did above with commentary and insight. If someone lands on your channel and watches for 30 or 40 minutes, YouTube gets really happy.

And what happens when YouTube gets happy?

They recommend you. In the above video, I simply use one piece of content to go in and evaluate to make one more new piece of content. I could’ve gone much deeper, but I felt like overwhelm was a risk with this particular content since I was evaluating an entire video series I created for my Charleston Channel. Give it a watch and let me know what you think! Thanks!