If I Wanted To Grow An Audience In 2026, I'd Do This

Why does it matter? Because chasing views is quietly destroying your business.

Hormozi ran a 90-day experiment making entertainment content instead of business content. Views tripled. Ad revenue dropped 50%. That single data point blows up the foundational assumption behind most content strategies — that more eyeballs eventually become more customers.

Walk away knowing:

• Entertainment audiences and education audiences are permanently separate — one never converts into the other at any rate worth building a business around
• Ad revenue per video is a better primary KPI than views because it simultaneously measures quantity and audience quality
• Shorts viewers and long-form viewers are distinct audiences — 480 fifteen-second clips deliver less purchase intent than two hours of long-form
• Narrowing to business-only content produced 2x book sales, 26% more opt-ins, and 24.6% higher subscriber conversion — with fewer total views

The 'entertainment feeds education' funnel is a myth — and believing it means you're paying to attract people who will never buy

Three billion impressions. Four and a half million new subscribers. Then Hormozi ran the experiment: 90 days of edutainment and entertainment, views 2–3x what they were used to, ad revenue cut in half.

"Entertainment people want more entertainment content. And education people want more, say it with me, education content."

They don't crossover. Not in any appreciable rate you'd build a business around. And they certainly don't read the books, join the email list, or apply to become portfolio businesses.

The funnel model — wide entertaining content at the top, educational content in the middle, customers at the bottom — assumes people migrate between audience types. They don't. When Hormozi put edutainment into the top of the funnel, he got more edutainment viewers. Full stop. The business owners he actually wanted were watching less, not more.

This matters operationally: every dollar and hour spent producing entertainment content to 'warm up' future buyers is misallocated. You are not building a funnel. You are building two separate audiences that will never meet. The only question is which one you're actually trying to serve.

Stop making content for reach. Make content for the 9% who are business owners — and accept that you will never get the views Mr. Beast gets, because you are not playing the same game.

Ad revenue per video is the only content KPI that simultaneously measures how many people watched and whether they were worth watching

Hormozi ignored ad revenue for years, treating it as a rounding error that offset some production costs. That was a mistake.

Ad revenue is views multiplied by RPM — revenue per thousand viewers. RPM is set by advertisers based on audience quality. Business owners have the highest spending power of any audience category, which means their eyeballs command the highest RPMs. When Hormozi switched to business-only content, RPMs went up 68%.

"We had this video that had 100,000 views and it made more ad revenue than the one that had 10 million."

This is the paired metric problem. Track only views and you'll chase views — which means chasing the wrong people. But RPM on its own doesn't tell you enough either. Multiply them together and you get a real-time signal that bounces both dimensions against each other: are we getting more of the right people? The month with the highest RPMs also produced the most book sales, the most opt-ins, and the most business applications.

For any department, paired metrics are the right tool. Customer service needs speed of resolution AND quality rating. Media needs views AND revenue per view. One metric alone always gets gamed in the wrong direction. Hormozi's team can now look at every piece of content in real time and know immediately whether it served the audience that actually matters — not six months later when deal flow tells you something went wrong.

Shorts viewers never become long-form viewers — and 480 fifteen-second clips produce less purchase intent than two hours with you

The prevailing belief: shorts pull people into long-form, long-form turns them into customers. The data says otherwise.

"Shorts viewers watch more shorts and long viewers watch more longs and customers buy more."

These are three permanently distinct audiences. Within a single platform, a shorts viewer is not on a journey toward your two-hour podcast. They have a consumption preference and they will not change it for you. The crossover that does exist — someone who finds you on TikTok shorts and then watches you on YouTube long-form — is a different-platform effect, not evidence that shorts feed long-form on the same platform.

The math is brutal: if your average short is 15 seconds, that's four shorts per minute. To match the reinforcement cycles of two hours of long-form content, a viewer would need to watch 480 shorts. How many compliance reinforcement cycles do you build in 30 seconds versus 120 minutes? It's not close.

Hormozi's evidence on influence is visceral: at a soccer match featuring creators across tiers, A-list celebrities got barely any applause. Short-form creators got slightly more. Long-form creators — podcasters, YouTubers — got real crowd energy. Then the live streamers walked out and the stadium erupted.

Longs drive book sales, opt-ins, and acquisition applications. Shorts don't. That's not an opinion — that's where the conversions actually came from. Shorts still have a role: facial recognition for retargeting. But treating them as a conversion vehicle is a structural mistake.

Narrowing to business-only content with fewer views produced 2x book sales, 26% more opt-ins, and 24.6% higher subscriber conversion in three weeks

Three weeks. Not a quarter. Not a year. Three weeks after making six content shifts, the numbers moved — hard.

RPMs up 68%. Comments per view up 25%. Long-form views up nearly 30% even though individual video view counts dropped. Subscriber conversion up 24.6%. Opt-ins up 26% per week. Book sales doubled.

Not up 20%. Twice.

Hormozi was braced for everything to tank. He expected fewer views to mean fewer of everything. Instead, the right 9% of the population — business owners — started converting at dramatically higher rates because the content was actually for them.

"We're getting fewer views, but more sales by a lot like 2x the sales."

The lesson isn't subtle: the right audience is exponentially more valuable than a large audience. A video with 100,000 business owner views outperforms a video with 10 million entertainment views across every metric that actually matters to the business. The vanity metric was hiding this for months.

Narrowing feels wrong because views go down. But views going down while revenue goes up is the entire point. If your content strategy is calibrated to a metric that's inversely correlated with your business results, every optimization you make is taking you in the wrong direction.

Most creators are unknowingly making content for their team, not their buyer — and the fix requires auditing five structural layers, not just topic choice

A business owner doing $10 million a year walked into Hormozi's headquarters and said, off-handedly, that he hadn't been watching much lately. It just didn't resonate.

"I started making videos for my team, not my ideal customer, a business owner."

The team would suggest video ideas. The team would respond to content. The team's aesthetic preferences shaped production decisions. And the team is not the buyer. This happens invisibly because the people with the most access to your content calendar are the people least representative of your actual customer.

The audit runs across five layers — not just topic:

Packaging: Go from vague to clear. If someone can't describe what your thumbnail is about, they can't click on it for the right reason. Curiosity gaps hurt educational content — just say what it is.

Introductions: The framework is proof, promise, plan. Lead with why they should listen to you — credentials, results, evidence. Then tell them what they'll get. Then set expectations for structure. Entertainment intros confirm the stunt; education intros establish authority.

Body content: Nine out of 12 of the best-performing videos emphasized language over production. Lists, steps, and stories outperformed vlog-style and effects-heavy content by a significant margin.

Visuals: Overproduction for an education goal actively hurts comprehension. A changing background color does not help anyone learn. Clarifying text on screen does.

Pre-work: "An ounce of pre-work is worth a pound of post." Videos with heavy front-end research required almost no editing and performed better. Spend a quarter of the post-production time on pre-production and eliminate 90-95% of editing hours.

Branding is a deliberate pairing of things through an outcome — not a feeling, not a logo — and it's happening to your business whether you're managing it or not

Every popular definition of branding is vague enough to be useless. Gut feelings. Emotional shorthand. Accumulated memories. None of it tells you what to actually do.

Hormozi's definition is operational: "Branding is a deliberate pairing of things through an outcome."

Coca-Cola pairs the product with the act of drinking with the outcome of pleasure — yum. Nike pairs the logo with LeBron and Tiger with the outcome of winning. The pairing is deliberate. The outcome is measurable. Customers who associate your brand with good outcomes buy more, pay more, and return without considering alternatives.

Bud Light is the case study in both directions. The Dylan Mulvaney collaboration was good advertising — it let a lot of people know about the product. But it was bad branding because the pairing produced a negative outcome for the majority of the core audience, and sales dropped. Shane Gillis and the UFC were good branding for that same audience — more of the customer base liked the pairing, and sales recovered.

"Most people's brands happen by accident. It's just whatever they appear next to, whatever the people associate their stuff with."

Good branding has three measurable outputs: influence (does the brand change behavior when seen?), direction (toward or away?), and reach (how many people?). The goal is a large, positive, strong brand — not a polar one. Taylor Swift moves most of the people who see her toward her. That's the model. A strong brand commands premium pricing, improves ad conversion rates, and creates customer loyalty that protects against competitors. A weak or accidental brand has none of those properties.

The SPCL framework — Status, Power, Credibility, Likeness — is the real variable behind purchase compliance, and live streaming maxes out all four simultaneously

Views measure reach. SPCL measures influence — defined as the likelihood someone complies with your request, whether that request is subscribing, buying a book, or applying to become a portfolio company.

Status: you control something scarce that people want. Demonstrate it in every intro — results, revenue, track record. The bartender at a busy bar has status. Walk him outside and he doesn't.

Power: say-do correspondence from behavioral dynamics. If you tell someone to do something, they do it, and a good outcome follows, your next request gets a higher compliance rate. This is why one stock tip that hits matters less than ten. This is why Hormozi's content produces applications — he's delivered results through instructions repeatedly enough that the audience complies with larger requests.

Credibility: third-party verification. The reason Hormozi paid Guinness judges to be on-site at his book launch wasn't ceremony — it was because an independent verifier that entire organizations trust transferred credibility to the record claim.

Likeness: just be you. The audience finds people who match their values and literal appearance easier to comply with. Your parents had all four elements maxed out from birth — that's why their influence on behavior is so hard to resist even decades later.

Where this is heading: live streaming. At the soccer match that became the measuring stick for creator influence, A-listers got almost no applause. Short-form creators got a little. Long-form creators got real energy. Live streamers brought the stadium to its feet.

"I think the internet will always move towards truth."

Live is unscripted, unedited, unpolished — and that rawness is what approximates the reinforcement cycles of actually spending time with someone. It's where Hormozi is putting his focus: live, interactive.

Every title with your name in it, every inside joke, every unexplained reference is a wall blocking your best future customers from walking in

If you want new people, you cannot assume they already know you. This sounds obvious. Almost no one does it.

The Alex Hormozi Diet. Day in the Life of Alex Hormozi. The Alexi Guide to Haters. Every one of those titles assumes the viewer already knows who Alex Hormozi is and why that's relevant. A stranger scrolling past has no idea. They move on.

"If you want your content to bring people who don't know you, which is why many of you guys make content, then you can't assume they do."

The fix runs across four behaviors. First, introduce yourself every time — name, proof, why they should listen, every video. Warm audiences like the reminder; cold audiences need the introduction. Second, tell people why they should listen to you in every piece of content, not once in an About page they'll never read. Third, fully explain every reference — inside jokes put new viewers on the outside, and people don't spend money from the outside. Fourth, mentally act as though you are always talking to a stranger — because if the content does well, you are.

The Simpsons has run the same intro for decades. Bart in detention, same structure, same positive associations compounded over time — but the chalkboard message changes every episode, giving longtime fans an Easter egg while new fans get a complete, comprehensible entry point. Both audiences served. No wall.

"Warm people like the reminders and cold people need the introduction."

Repost your best content from a year ago. More people have entered your audience since then. They've never seen it. You're not repeating yourself — you're finally reaching them.

The creator who goes narrower while everyone else goes broader wins — and this episode shows exactly what the numbers look like when that bet pays off

Every educator with a growing audience eventually gets pulled toward entertainment — toward wider topics, higher production, more views. The incentive is real and the pull is constant. Hormozi felt it for six months before the data forced a correction.

The operators who resist that pull and stay narrow are building something nobody else can replicate: an audience of the exact right people, accumulating reinforcement cycles at high density, with purchase intent that compounds over time.

The 90-day entertainment experiment wasn't a failure. It was proof. Views are a vanity metric for business builders. The number that matters is whether the right 9% keeps showing up.

Content is the targeting now. The algorithm knows what you're talking about. Make it for your buyer.

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Topics: content strategy, audience building, personal brand, brand building, content monetization, YouTube strategy, short-form vs long-form, content metrics, influencer deals, business education