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When wildlife TV personality Forrest Galante sat down for his monthly call with YouTube consultant Paddy Galloway, he received some bad news.
But it was Galloway, something of a guru in the still-burgeoning YouTube creator economy, who identified that whenever Galante showed turtles in his videos, viewer engagement dropped. It was consistent and significant.
"Maybe it's just turtles are more commonplace and they're kind of slow and they don't really do much," Galloway said in an interview. "We noticed three or four videos in a row, when Forrest was showing turtles, the viewers were just kind of disengaged, and they were leaving."
This is the kind of insight that many of the most popular YouTube creators, including Jimmy Donaldson, known to the world as MrBeast, and sports creator Jesse Riedel, also known as Jesser, have paid Galloway to provide.
As YouTube creatorship cracks open millions, or potentially even billions, of dollars for the most-watched personalities, Galloway has made a name for himself as one of the best of a growing class of YouTube consultants — a bona fide YouTube whisperer.
"I think he's an absolute genius," said Galante.
YouTube will showcase many of its top creators on Wednesday in New York City's Lincoln Center for its annual upfront advertising presentation, which it calls Brandcast. Like YouTube's influence in modern media, the event has grown in size and prestige every year as YouTube's viewership share rises.
YouTube makes up 12.7% of all streaming in the U.S., according to Nielsen's most recent "The Gauge" report. Netflix is second with 8.4%, followed by Disney with 5%.
Sixty-seven million people consider themselves online content creators, according to a 2025 Goldman Sachs report. That number could rise to more than 100 million by 2030, Goldman estimates.
With YouTube's recommendation algorithm constantly evolving, many creators have been turning to strategists to maintain success on the platform.
In recent years, videos best watched on TV, rather than on mobile devices, have surged in popularity as YouTube has taken over more and more connected-TV viewing, rivaling subscription streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+.
Creators say the Alphabet-owned platform has responded by favoring longer videos, often exceeding 30 minutes. That shift means higher production value and bigger investment from creators. It also means the potential to earn more money.
Since 2021, YouTube has paid out over $100 billion to creators, and an increasing share of that money is flowing to those producing content for bigger screens, YouTube said. The number of channels earning more than $100,000 from TV screens jumped 45% year over year, the company reported.
Regardless, success on the platform remains a simple task of getting viewers through the door, and these strategists maintain that they are the best equipped to optimize a creator's videos.
"The reason people pay us top dollar is because we have been doing it for the longest, and we have the best success rate," Galloway said. "Our average increase in views after a year — so, year-on-year after working with us — is 350%."
Galloway's interest in YouTube consulting began out of self-interest. He started posting YouTube videos of his own in 2006, just a year after the service first began, and wanted to figure out why certain videos went viral so his own could gain popularity, he told CNBC.
Galloway worked with Riedel from 2021 through January of this year, encouraging him to change his focus from daily vlogs to bigger concept ideas that pulled in more viewers.
"He was like, 'You need to make videos that anybody can enjoy,'" Riedel said. "A lot of my videos were personal joke after personal joke. Right in the intro, if you watched it and you didn't know me or my jokes, you'd be like, 'What am I watching?'"
Galloway's secrets often center around two simple concepts: headline and thumbnail image.
"We will deliberate a title — just one title — for like 30 minutes," said Yang, who's worked with Galloway since early 2022. "Changing a couple of the words in the title can have a huge impact on how the actual video does."
Galloway has a staff of seven people who analyze what's working on YouTube and how to create the best content target to perform well on the platform. He also owns three other companies, including one, Upright Media, that helps with the production and editing of videos.
Galloway's largest clients have daily Slack communication with his team to discuss thumbnails and to run detailed diagnostics of video performance.
At his peak, Galloway said, he had a waitlist of 5,000 people and was only able to work with about 10 clients at a time.
Galloway typically charges flat fees for his work "starting in the $15,000 a month range" he said, though rates can go "considerably higher" depending on the project. That price gets clients full-time service — "in the weeds with you every day," he said.
"It was like, 'Oh my god, we're paying this big amount of money for this unknown factor, will we ever get a return?" said Galante, of the turtle-light wildlife videos.
Strategist Mishra said he works primarily with business owners who have built YouTube channels around their products or services. He said he charges between $1,500 and $12,000 a month, depending on how much work he takes on, and said the creators who hire him have already figured out the basics on their own and hit a ceiling.
Mishra said his advice is often to study what is already working in a certain niche and replicate it.
"Copy with taste," he said. "It's very important that you have some kind of unique angle, but make sure the formatting of the videos, the pacing and everything else is similar to an outlier idea that is already proven in the niche."
"What I do is I promise you knowledge, and hopefully with enough knowledge, growth comes next," said Mario Joos, who spent nearly three years as retention director for MrBeast. "The algorithm will just reward what people want to watch."
Though the highest level of advisory services can run into the thousands of dollars, an initial call with a YouTube coach can cost as little as $250, Joos said. He described the next level of service as "consultant" — someone who is providing advice but not actually helping a creator implement it. That's Joos' role today, he said.
The final rung is pure strategist — a role Joos had when he was working with MrBeast, he said, and the rung Galloway falls into.
"Now it's not just like you're telling the creator to execute on the knowledge. You are applying the knowledge," said Joos. "You leave notes on videos. You go through the ideation process. And when there's 100 ideas on the table, you look into them, you think about them, and you may even come up with the ideas. So that's what a strategist does there. They have expertise."
For YouTube's most popular creators, the platform offers some consultant-like services for free, including thumbnail art guidance, guest ideas and suggestions for video introductions, according to Reed Fernandez, a strategic partner manager for YouTube's top creators since 2021.
Fernandez is one of several hundred strategic partner managers for YouTube around the world who focus on the top 10% of YouTube creators. Fernandez's specific team works with about 100 creators in the U.S., he said. Some of his clients include Brittany Broski, Dude Perfect and Alix Earle.
Fernandez's team typically approaches the creators it wants to help, based on perceived growth opportunity on the platform, Fernandez said. That makes the partnership beneficial for both YouTube and the individual creator, boosting overall engagement on the site.
"We're looking for things like: Do we see them growing a lot year over year? We think they're a big bet that we should try to put our full force behind to help them succeed on the platform," said Fernandez.
Beyond consultant services, YouTube also connects some of these creators with speaking events and press junkets to extend reach and boost awareness.
But even with YouTube's internal support, many creators still turn to outside strategists to go deeper on the technical side.
When a viewer clicks on a YouTube video, watches it through, shares it or leaves a comment, YouTube registers that as a positive signal of interest. Videos that consistently generate those responses get surfaced more broadly and pushed onto the homepage, into recommendations and in front of new audiences.
Joos said his expertise sits specifically in retention, understanding not just whether a video performs, but exactly when viewers stop watching and why.
YouTube Studio, the backend dashboard that gives creators detailed statistics on their content, includes a retention chart that tracks audience drop-off. YouTube strategists use that data to inform everything from pacing decisions to keeping the viewer engaged until the end of the video.
Gabriel Leblanc-Picard, co-founder of Upload Strategy and the former head of ideation for MrBeast, said simplicity is the most reliable formula for success on the platform.
"Dim it down to like, if a 6-year-old could understand it," he said. "People don't want to watch something that is complicated, even the language that you use."
During his time at MrBeast, Leblanc-Picard said he filtered through roughly 10,000 ideas, constantly looking for concepts that could expand the channel's audience. One challenge he was given: Attract more female viewers to a channel whose fanbase he described as mostly "11-year-old boys."
His answer was to develop a video about being stranded in the woods with an ex-girlfriend.
A video titled "Survive 30 Days Stranded With Your Ex, Win $250,000" was posted in March and has already surpassed 120 million views.
"At the end of the day, you're making content for people," Leblanc-Picard said. "The algorithm will reward what people want to watch."