Coming up with new creative content is indeed difficult with a poker channel. Including anything related to the online gameplay again - be it that you play tourneys on youtube livestream, you analyse tourneys that you have played, that you comment on hands posted in the HS thread or a continuation of the micro stakes challenge - might be an option though. I guess Doug just doesn't have the time to do that at the moment.

Watching the latest Joe Ingram podcast, it was quite enjoyable, but there was a lot of chat about not having a clear direction in life. Both Joey and Doug are still pretty young, but at that time when you start having to think about long term goals.

Playing poker when you're younger is a fun challenge, you can do it in front of your computer and is like playing videogames in that respect. Even if you depend upon it for an income, it feels like a hobby rather than much of a career.

What I mean is that if you get a job with a company, you don't have to worry about what you will do next so much. You will be on a career path and to a certain extent your employer will tell you what they expect of you.

I understand why Fedor decided to channel his energy into entrepreneurship and develop his own app. Working with a team of people to achieve specific business goals is likely more rewarding than grinding high rollers (although perhaps not financially).

I guess Doug has got Upswing and now Coin Central, but you can tell it feels a bit disjointed. He is good at a lot of stuff, but starting to look like a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none maybe.

I hope he figures it all out.

I just subbed a few days ago and Doug you need to make your channel much broader then just poker. I'm thinking of Joe Rogan and Brendan Shaub where their core thing is comedy and fighting but they have so much more range of things to discuss. I just subbed your channel and to be honest I'd rather see a vid where you just take fan emails about everyday life/poker and answer their questions on that kinda like Bill Burr does. You just giving marriage advice could be interesting lol.


All poker all the time is probably why your channel's growth has been severely stunted after the first influx of subbers. Poker only has so much reach, where just being a human known from poker and talking about a broad range of topics will make it much more interesting to a much largerer group of people. As it is poker aint that interesting unless you're in study mode or just trying to follow espn-like highlights of huge cash pots and high end tournies. I'd say give up the channel or go broader cuz a much broader range of topics is far more interesting just like playing lag is more fun then playing like a nit.



You sir atm are a nit when it comes to youtube content. LAG IT UP BABY!!!

I do 100% agree with this.

Just watching Doug talk about any random stuff is pretty entertaining as long as he has a good person to talk to. Filling airtime with The Manz was hilarious on KotH, and all the podcast stuff with Joey is entertaining as well.

Yes, Doug is entertaining enough on his own without any pretense of big news. Doug should put up more quantity of videos, and not need any actual events in poker to do so.

I would watch Doug do prop bets. Or he could interview random poker players in Vegas, he could ask them if they know who Doug Polk is, and lots of funny questions.

If Doug plays sports, he could blog the betting on those, or just practicing those sports, with attention to talking to other people on camera. Doug is entertaining when he interacts with people.

When he interviewed Helmuth before the Masters, it was great because he would just look into to camera after a typical Helmuth comment and crack up.

A lot of good suggestions in here in regards to doug and making videos. hope he takes up some of these ideas.

i don't think he should change anything. he's doing a great job of helping to "make poker fun" for celebrity-minded people. that's where poker can thrive in the future -- popularizing the live scene to the point where rich dudes wanna play just to have their name/face in the discussion... winning or losing 20k means zilch to these folks, but having daniel negreanu tweet about them would mean the world.

Came across this while browsing LATB website

YouTube apparently isn't a big revenue earner but the Upswing training site obviously potentially is.

JNandez let some numbers slip in a podcast. If the figures were genuine there's a truckload of money to be made from Upswing.

You don't need to be a genius to work out 5,000 people x $100/month =$6M/year. The running costs are relatively small and there's an economy of scale as subscription numbers go up.

So Doug will gravitate towards what encourages more Upswing subscribers. e.g, mainstream playing or commentary appearances pushing the Upswing brand rather than fun YouTube videos that are essentially throwaway fun.

I seriously doubt it has even close to 5000 subscribers

我從使用 Tapatalk 的 SM-G9350 發送

Why did Doug steal Pratyush's s/n?

ghosting

Maybe not, but it's a reasonable target figure to go for. Even if the figure were 1/10th of that at 500 it's still $600K of revenue per year with a lot of growth potential.

If I had to take my own guess at the total figures, including all of the Upswing courses and labs etc, I'd guess at somewhere between 1500 and 2000 people, which is only the equivalent of 5 new sign ups per day in the last year during a time when his YouTube channel has had an average of ~80K subscribers and other exposure has been growing.

It has at least 2600

Featuring "everyone's favorite left-hander Alec Torelli"

omg . torelli bit up front was hillarious. great work.

In consideration for giving me a good laugh, I promise to never make fun you again for for getting spanked by Hellmuth playing HU deepstack freezeout.

Doug doesn't know what a bomb pot is or just trolling?

Is Polk gonna play Charlie Carrel in the HU challenge? Heard Charlie say that might happen.

Is it some kind of costume party? Tilly can fill up big part of session alone, attention distribution was strongly in her favor.

I'm running thru a bunch of old vids from last year and they are pretty awesome. Highly informative and very entertaining. I really like the short amount of time you spent ****ting on Dan Bilzarian and his silly claims at making all that money at poker and the hand breakdowns whether huge posts or $2k pots you are playing.

Some notes

- Your videos at times are over 10 mins, from what I understand from when I was into a ton of youtube vids, videos that are 5-10 minutes get more hits, likes, people can sit thru them in this era of short attention spans. I feel like some of your vids should be split in 2 parts

-I really love the poker stuff but people wanna get to know the youtube personality they are listening to. I'd say share more about yourself other then poker stuff.

-Fan feedback and questions. THIS IS HUGE! Some of the most interesting stuff when it comes to podcasts or youtube vids is fan email. People with poker questions will be flooding in, as well as you're are married!! Capitalize on the fact that you have a successful relationship and that you have tips you can give people. ON top of that how a successful relationship is effected by poker. Obviously don't go into too much detail but there is a lot of gold to be mined from that.

-Away from the table habits and lifestyle. In other words how do you keep yourself in the most efficient and effective state as possible. Lifestyle tips, nutrition tips, exercises you might do, do you meditate or do other stress relieving exercises, how do you manage time with friends/people in general do you gamble or have any other major money leaks. I'm assuming you're pretty much sober by your eyes but I could be wrong..... go into that a bit and your thoughts and experiences behind that.




These are just a few thoughts, it seems you either want to grow your youtube channel or do less of it. If you wanna grow more, then you need to really bring more to the game. Also bring in other people and maybe do a 2+ hour podcast while at a tourney with other players, even audio on youtube would be a big hit as lots of people listen to podcasts at work.

Anyway, this channel is pretty awesome. Time to upgrade tho or your sub rate will suffer as that seems to be standard if you stick to a niche on youtube. Look at Joe Rogan, talks about anything and everything. Let the universe pour thru you and you will be much bigger then just another poker channel.

What he does on YouTube is pretty spot on. The variation to keep the audience engaged is that he
applies a comical spin to many of the topics in terms of the way he puts the info across and the way the video is filmed and edited.

The appealing to the masses angle you're encouraging, he does on Instagram with some lifestyle content which is more for the consumption of the masses, some of whom are not yet fully into poker.

IMO his YouTube videos should stick 90% to poker because that's where his expertise and appeal is.

As I see it either he makes the necessary changes or we get WAY LESS CONTENT. He's not happy about his youtube growth, I just happen to be the youtube geek that sees holes in his game.

I want more content cuz this guy is an entertainer, no growth tho from his words means LESS CONTENT. NO ****ING BUENO as I just found this guy and just found out he's not the douche I thought he was lol. I want more content and I'm sure we all do, this will make it happen if he makes necessary changes. If not we are ****ed when it comes to more WCGRider content.



He talked in a Chicago Joey cast where he's losing interest so I'm trying to up his game a bit. He's one of the only poker personalities I see me paying attention to in this realm other then Joey, I wanna keep it going.

Yeah some fair points.

But maybe it's a simple as poker being quite a narrow total market size and he has reached the point where it's not possible to grow any more.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. There are plenty of businesses that reach a level, a successful one, and then happily remain there for a long period.

Perhaps his mindset is being skewed by playing poker where one is always looking to move up the stakes. In the YouTube poker world perhaps 150K subscribers is the poker equivalent of playing $1K/$2K NLHE and there is no "bigger game".

This is a good post.

Granted, I might not agree with every point in it -- e.g. I'm not that interested in what a poker player eats or how he meditates or how his marriage is going. But everyone's mileage will vary. I have plenty of channel subs that put out a wide variety of content, and it's very easy to pick and choose which stuff I want to watch. Doug's channel could easily be one of them.

Doug made a pretty good video a few whiles ago in which he introduced himself to those who might not know who he is or -- more importantly -- why he's qualified to opine about poker. Perhaps this should be moved to the About page of his channel? Not sure, just spitballin' a bit on that one.

Also, Doug DID do some video podcasts in there. You might have missed them. To the short-attention-span crowd, no, not for them. For more avid poker enthusiasts (e.g. people who come to 2+2), they were great.

Anyway, I'm not really sure how much more Doug can realistically do, at least in terms of YouTube. Think how well-branded Daniel Negreanu is, and yet Doug's channel has more subscribers (150,247 to 144,898).

Seriously, tho... looking at some of the subscriber stats, just how large of a staff does Smosh have??

I remember how he repeatedly would say he would complete the BR challenge and does what he says.

As much I’ve enjoyed the content it’s clear how disingenuous and self serving he operates. Not that it’s a huge negative. Human nature. Not everyone has “it”.