Name first · short (18 to 25 s)
- Powell, asked twice
- Trump, most beautiful word
- Trump on Powell, out real fast
- Yellen, default by another name
MakeStockMoney · content engine · September 2026
What makes a clip win, and the machine that now makes them.
577 YouTube uploads told us exactly which clips travel. This page shows the pattern, the clean-up of the library, ten existing clips rebuilt to the pattern, ten new clips cut from source footage without a clipper, and the experiment that decides what we post next.
1. What the numbers say
Every upload on the makestockmoney YouTube channel, read back through the API and matched to the clip library.
577uploads on the channel, 54.5M views
82%of all views came from the top 20 uploads
4,900views for the median upload
10×politics and policy clips vs everything else (47K median vs 5K)
The channel does not grow on average clips. It grows on outliers, and the outliers share one shape. Length matters too: clips of 21 to 35 seconds average 258,000 views, clips of 36 to 60 seconds average 48,000. One fact, delivered, done.
| Clip | Views | Name | The number or fact | Tension |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Powell salary | 13.1M + 6.9M | Fed chairman | $190K, must clear asset sales | Questioned |
| Cash stacks | 3.5M | none, pure visual | $20K vs $1M vs $1B | Scale shock |
| Australia's richest man | 3.1M | Richest man | "I am not evading tax" | Confession under questioning |
| Golden ticket | 2.0M | Simpsons | greed meme | Recognition |
| Pelosi | 1.9M | Speaker of the House | 2008 Visa IPO | Confronted |
| Mark Cuban | 1.6M | Cuban | "millions shorting bullshit companies" | Insider confession |
| Bloomberg Terminal | 1.5M | Bloomberg | $25,000 a year | Secret tool, price tag |
| Goldman VP | 1.3M | Goldman Sachs | "cut off your tie" | Insider culture |
2. The formula
Four elements, present in seven of the eight winners.
F1
A name everyone knows, first
Powell, Pelosi, Cuban, Goldman, Bloomberg, Buffett. In the top 40 these names appear five to ten times as often as in the rest of the library. Unknown traders explaining setups do 4,000.
F2
One number that feels wrong
$190K for the man who runs the dollar. $25,000 a year for a screen. $1 billion on a pallet. The number is the hook, the person is the credibility.
F3
Confrontation or confession
Someone powerful being questioned, or an insider saying how it really works. Hearing and interview footage, never a talking-head explainer.
F4
Card written flat
Name, fact, period. No question, no "you won't believe". The YouTube titles were clickbait; the card that stopped the scroll was a plain sentence.
The anti-pattern. Trading psychology advice is the biggest category in the library, 99 clips, median 5,000 views. Advice does not travel. Facts about powerful people do.
3. The library, cleaned up
Every clip we own, in one queryable index, posted once, framed for the phone.
911clips in the library, both Drive folders
301YouTube-only uploads recovered and rebuilt as "v2" clips
714 / 472clips queued for TikTok / Snapchat, 8+ months of posting
100titles that sat under the phone's top bar, moved into the safe zone
301 videos existed only on YouTube. They were pulled back, given the gold title card at the phone-safe position, the watermark, and a quiet narration under the speaker, then stored as a distinct version so their performance can be compared with the originals. Their filenames carry the YouTube views, and the 60 proven winners post first.
4. Ten existing clips, rebuilt to the formula
Footage already in the library that had never posted on TikTok or Snapchat. New cards, moved to the front of the queue.
| Slot | Card | Why it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Sep 18 13:00 | JPMorgan's CEO: Wall Street analysts work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. | institution + number + insider |
| Sep 18 17:00 | Stanley Druckenmiller reviews 272 charts a day, starting at 4:30 am. | name + extreme number |
| Sep 19 13:00 | Goldman Sachs staff never talk about Goldman Sachs. The Fight Club rule. | institution + confession |
| Sep 19 17:00 | Jamie Dimon: JP Morgan moves $10 trillion around the world every day. | name + unreal number |
| Sep 20 13:00 | Elon Musk: AI and robotics will dwarf everything else. Nvidia is obvious. | name + flat claim |
| Sep 20 17:00 | Druckenmiller since 1976: buy two years before an election, sell on it. | name + secret rule |
| Sep 21 13:00 | Jerome Powell was told the Fed renovation hit $3.1 billion. He wasn't aware. | Powell + number + confrontation |
| Sep 21 17:00 | Jamie Dimon to Gen Z: barring nuclear war, you inherit an unbelievable life. | name + provocation |
| Sep 22 13:00 | Jerome Powell: the President cannot fire me. I have a four-year term. | Powell + questioned |
| Sep 22 17:00 | Warren Buffett hopes a stock drops after he buys it, so he can buy more. | name + counterintuitive fact |
5. New clips, cut from source footage
No clipper. The machine finds the hearing or press conference, reads the captions, picks the moment, cuts it, frames it, writes the card, adds the narration. Every clip was checked against its transcript and by frame before it went into Drive.
| Slot | Card | Source | Cell |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 23 09:00 | $2 trillion: what Elon Musk promised to cut from the federal budget. | Trump rally, Oct 2024 | number · short |
| Sep 23 13:00 | Rand Paul: a trillion dollars a year in interest is crowding out everything else. | Senate floor, Rand Paul's channel | number · long |
| Sep 23 17:00 | Ross Perot, 1992: a giant sucking sound of jobs going south. | Presidential debate, 1992 | name · short |
| Sep 24 09:00 | China 67%, us 34%: Trump reads the reciprocal tariff chart in the Rose Garden. | Rose Garden, Apr 2025 | number · long |
| Sep 24 13:00 | $42 billion pulled in under a day: the fastest bank run in history. | Senate Banking, SVB hearing 2023 | number · short |
| Sep 24 17:00 | $567 short every month: Katie Porter puts a Chase teller's budget to Jamie Dimon. | House Financial Services 2019 | number · long |
| Sep 25 09:00 | Jerome Powell, asked twice if he'd leave for Trump. Both answers: No. | Federal Reserve press conference, Nov 2024 | name · short |
| Sep 25 13:00 | Elizabeth Warren to Wells Fargo's CEO: you should resign and give back the money. | Senate Banking 2016 | name · long |
| Sep 25 17:00 | $27.6 billion profit even after refunds: Elizabeth Warren does Jamie Dimon's math. | Senate Banking 2021 | number · long |
| Sep 26 09:00 | Donald Trump: tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. | Bloomberg interview | name · short |
| Sep 26 13:00 | Keith Gill to Congress: I am not a cat. I am not a hedge fund. | House GameStop hearing 2021 | name · long |
| Sep 26 17:00 | Trump on Powell: if I want him out, he'll be out of there real fast. | Oval Office 2025 | name · short |
| Sep 27 09:00 | Janet Yellen: paying some bills and not others is default by another name. | Senate Finance 2023 | name · short |
| Sep 27 13:00 | 2 million out of work: Elizabeth Warren asks Powell what he'd tell them. | Senate Banking 2023 | number · short |
Still in the build queue
Tariffs and Trump ($2 billion a day), US debt old and new (Reagan's nine words, Yellen on the $34 trillion), Congress and money scandals (Menendez's gold bars, Lehman's $480 million, FTX's "old-fashioned embezzlement", Robinhood's $3.4 billion, Sanders on three men), and how the money was made (Burry and The Big Short, Cuban's Yahoo collar, Ackman vs Icahn, Chanos on Enron, Soros and the pound, Margin Call, Wolf of Wall Street). Same review before any of them publish.
6. The experiment
Two things vary across the new clips. Everything else is held constant, so the comparison is clean.
Number first · short
- $42 billion, SVB bank run
- 2 million out of work, Warren to Powell
Name first · long (30 to 40 s)
- Warren to Wells Fargo's CEO
- Keith Gill, not a cat
Number first · long
- $567 short, Porter and Dimon
- $27.6 billion, Warren and Dimon
- China 67%, us 34%
How we read it: each clip's cell is recorded in the library. When views come in, the average per cell tells us whether leading with the number beats leading with the name, and whether 20 seconds beats 35. The ten re-carded clips run the same week with the old caption style and act as the control.
One blind spot. TikTok and Snapchat views do not reach the library yet. A weekly TikTok Studio export closes half of it; Instagram needs the Business account connected.
7. The machine
What happens to a moment between "this would work" and "it is in the queue".
01
FindSearch YouTube for the hearing or presser; official feeds first.02
WordsPull the word-timed captions. Speaker labels stripped.03
MomentPick the 20 to 40 second window that carries the name, the number, the tension.04
CutDownload only that section. Trim news banners.05
Frame4:5 crop under the card, 1080×1920, captions drawn word by word.06
CardGold title in the safe zone, watermark at 22%. Checked against the transcript.07
VoiceA calm narration 12 dB under the speaker, 70% of the runtime.08
QueueBoth Drive folders, the library, both playlists. Posted once, never twice.Two people used to sit in this chain: a clipper finding and cutting footage, and a hand posting it. The chain now runs on its own, and the parts that need judgment show up as a sheet of frames to approve or veto.
8. What comes next
- 5 to 7 posts a day. The schedule already carries 5, 6 and 7-slot days. Supply is not the limit any more; the limit is knowing what works, which the experiment above starts to answer.
- Daily targets from the news. A generator reads the day's business and politics headlines and proposes moments in the formula. Each morning's candidates land as one contact sheet with a short veto window before they join the queue.
- Read-back. TikTok views in via a weekly export, Instagram via the Business account. Then original vs v2, cell vs cell, name vs number, all in one query.
- The employee's folder. One Drive drop folder with a watcher, so every clip made by hand also enters the library and the machine the same day.