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Second Channel, Double the Income šø
How a side quest helped Thomas Frank grow his business
Good morning. Design creator Soren Iverson, known for posting imaginative (and sometimes extremely funny) product design renderingsālike our favorites, an Instagram unfollow notification and a tool to dispute someoneās skills on LinkedInājust celebrated 300 consecutive days of posting new ideas daily. Iverson says heās not finishedā¦maybe with 300 more days of his ideas, weāll actually get something as genius as a ChatGPT summarizer for unnecessarily long texts.
How This Creatorās Second Channel Doubled His Revenue
Productivity creator Thomas Frank goes in-depth on his Notion set-ups on his second channel, Thomas Frank Explains / Thomas Frank Explains
Productivity creator Thomas Frank launched his second channel, Thomas Frank Explains, as a āside questā in 2020, sharing video tutorials for task management app Notion and exploring product ideas he wanted to build. It was a departure from his original academic and productivity contentā¦but it worked.
The details: Though Frankās second channel has less than 15% the number of subscribers his main channel has, he said that heās doubled his income and grown his team to 11 employees in the nearly two years since he stopped posting to his main channelāa hiatus he finally ended last month.
āI didnāt intend to step back from the main channel for that longā¦I just happened to make this extra business that took up all my time,ā Frank told us.
So why return now? We talked with the creator to better understand how his business has evolved:
3 million subscribers and a decade in on YouTube, Frank felt like heād run out of content topics and didnāt want to rely on grinding out sponsor-backed videos forever.
So he launched a more creatively-driven second channel focused on ādiscovery and building things,ā including a month-long project to develop an āall-in-oneā productivity template within Notion called Ultimate Brain.
That template instantly clicked with Frankās newer, more niche audienceāand a productized version he sold on his website quickly grew to six figures in monthly revenue.
Since creating that first template, Frank has assembled a team of product developers and even launched a new startup called Flylighter. Hereās the high-level look at his business:
Looking ahead: By focusing on a specific type of content, Frank effectively built a revenue-generating content side hustle that took the pressure off of his main channel and enabled it to serve as a space to update his audience on his journey.
āI liken it to Tony Stark: He gets to go into a cave and tinker with a box of scrapsā¦and every once in a while, stand on stage in a tuxedo to show his creations off to the world,ā Frank told us. āThatās a method of working that really resonates with me.ā
Keith Lee Rocks the ATL
Keith Leeās frank food review saga takes over Atlanta / Illustration by Moy Zhong with photography by Keith Lee
TikTok food reviewer Keith Lee went to Atlanta this week as part of a multi-city food tourāand the fiery response to his constructive criticism of some ATL hotspots illustrates the double-edged nature of an audience as large as his.
Backstory: Nevada-based Leeās visits to lesser-known establishments have been known to cause significant traffic spikes with the so-called āKeith Lee Effect.ā
Lee brought the same business rush to four restaurants in Atlanta this week.
While there, Lee posted critical videos about two restaurants that had long wait times or strange takeout rules. A range of commenters, from Cardi B to local news, suggested Leeās reviews were an accurate reflection of Atlanta restaurant culture.
But some of his audience took Leeās POV to the extreme, lobbing death threats at the restaurants (Lee extensively condemned that behavior).
Zoom out: Lee is currently one of the most-followed food review accounts on TikTok with an audience of over 14 million. With that reach comes influenceāwhich can quickly turn sour. As Kai Cenat, MrBeast, and plenty of other mega-popular creators have proven before Lee, sometimes influence comes with unintended consequences.
The Gap Between Hollywood and Creators Continues to Shrink
Creators are catching up with Hollywood / Illustration by Moy Zhong
Video creators could soon easily outpace Hollywood in terms of high-quality output, according to a new essay by former Warner Media strategist Doug Shaprio.
Shapiroās reasoning:
Hollywood made 15,000 hours of new TV episodes and films last year.
But 30,000 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube per hour.
If consumers consider just .01% of YouTube videos to be on par with Hollywood productions, that would mean creators can double Hollywoodās annual output.
Zoom out: Nielsen says YouTube is the most-streamed service in the U.S. on televisions, which means that many consumers are watching content from Hollywood and creators in the same place: their TV.
āThe question is not whether the production values of independent content will be comparable to Hollywood,ā Shapiro wrote. āIt is whether consumers will consider it competitive for similar use cases based on their own definitions of quality.ā
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