We Are Splitting Up

In Celebrate by El Rubio26 Comments

It’s Been A Good Run

Before we were a company, The Longhairs was established to educate, advocate for, and celebrate guys with long hair. We started out making long hair content on our blog, and publishing tips and tutorials on The Longhairs' YouTube channel. Relatable videos, to which you might nod your head with clarity, but also have a chuckle or two.

Fast forward a few years and our YouTube channel grew as fast as our locks. Within a couple years we were getting hundreds of thousands of views with tens of thousands of subscribers.

The Longhairs and YouTube

Our channel’s space rocket growth opened new doors of content creativity, and soon we introduced other types of videos, everything from the 4th of July weekend countdown and Sneak Peek: Hair Ties For Guys V2, to Get to Know The Longhairs Team, The Best Hair in Baseball and Let It Ride LIVE. Call it “variety content.”

Since our very first video in 2014, we have seen a consistent pattern in terms of how our videos perform, meaning how many views, minutes watched, discoverability, etc.

In short, videos about hair—and specifically tutorial videos—always perform far better than other content. Just scrolling through our videos page you can plainly see: tips and tutorials are consistently in the tens of thousands of views (some far more), while nearly all the rest of our videos fail to crack the 10k mark.

That’s great for tutorials, but we’re basically comedians, and we like making all kinds of content. So why is it some of our own favorites like A Farewell to The Longhairs Global Headquarters and Hair Whip Wednesday get no love?

The answer to this, and all questions, is the YouTube algorithm. Basically, for a given channel, videos that are most consistent with the channel topic are most favored by the algorithm. In other words, our tutorial videos get served to our subscribers, discovered in search, and otherwise broadcast to a wider audience. Meanwhile, our variety content gets buried in the deep annals of the web.

Therefore, after seven years of clear and compelling evidence, we’re splitting up The Longhairs YouTube into two channels.

You probably thought this would never happen, and it will be sad for some. The good news is we are not going anywhere, we’re still going to make tutorial videos AND variety content, they’re just going to be on separate channels.

Here’s what the whole thing is going to look like from here out.

Extending Our Locks

We are going full blast on two channels. The original channel—The Longhairs—will continue to be your go-to source for tips, tactics, tutorials and hair education content.

Our new(er) channel is Let It Ride, currently sitting at a modest 189 subscribers. We’ve had this channel for a while, but until now we’d only been using it for podcast episodes.

We’re extending our Let It Ride channel to Long Hair Entertainment and Lifestyle, making content that connects, inspires and amuses. That includes the podcast as well as vlog-style videos, community, fitness, variety content, product reviews, and basically anything that isn’t hair tutorial specific.

Sometimes Splitting Up Is The Right Thing To Do

Are you still going to get tips and tactics? Hell yeah you are. Are you still going to get entertaining variety content? I dare say it twice, but hell yeah you are. The only difference is now we’re on two channels, and normally you have to pay double for that kind of action.

If you are a fan of The Longhairs' YouTube, we sure would appreciate a little boost on Let It Ride, because things are PRETTY slow going over there.

A lot of video content rolling down the creative pipeline. Keep letting it ride.