When wildlife TV personality Forrest Galante sat down for his monthly call with YouTube consultant Paddy Galloway, he received some bad news.

No more turtles.

Galante has 2.5 million YouTube subscribers. He’s been producing wildlife programming for more than a decade, including a docuseries on Animal Planet and a show on the History Channel. He owns his own production company. Generally speaking, Galante’s got a good feel for what his audience wants. 

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. 

“Super smart guy,” Riedel told CNBC.

“I don’t want to say Paddy has changed my life completely,” said Humphrey Yang, a former financial advisor whose YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers. “But he’s definitely helped a lot.”

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.

About 10,000 U.S. YouTube channels have more than 1 million subscribers, according to a YouTube spokesperson. For many of these creators, YouTube can be a lucrative full-time job. But to make a business out of the largely free platform, videos need to get consistent clicks — preferably in the millions.

With YouTube’s recommendation algorithm constantly evolving, many creators have been turning to strategists to maintain success on the platform.

“From zero [subscribers] to 1 million, you don’t need it, but from 1 million to 10 million, or 1 million to 100 million, you definitely need a strategist,” Aniket Mishra, a YouTube growth strategist, told CNBC.

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. 

Within a few years, Galloway’s search for the ingredients of virality became the subject of his videos. He began creating self-dubbed “YouTube Masterclass” videos such as “How Peter McKinnon gained 1 million subscribers in under 1 year” and “Here’s How Mr Beast BLEW UP – How He Grew His YouTube Channel.”

Galloway grew his channel to about 500,000 subscribers, and the videos got Donaldson’s attention. Galloway began working directly for Donaldson, providing him with strategy ideas. Donaldson is now the undisputed king of YouTube with 483 million subscribers. 

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?'”

After years of plateauing at roughly 3 million subscribers, Riedel saw his subscriber number begin to soar. Today, Riedel is the largest sports-focused creator on YouTube with more than 41 million subscribers.

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. 

Social media influencer and wrestler Logan Paul made history last week when he auctioned and sold a rare Pokémon card for $16.5 million, a world record price for an auctioned trading card. The winner views it as an investment.

AJ Scaramucci — son of investor and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci — won the bidding war for the “Pikachu Illustrator” card, made in 1998 and one of only an estimated few dozen to exist. 

It’s the crowning achievement in the Solari Capital founder’s short collecting career, which started with trading cards during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I mean, Picassos are great,” he said in an interview, explaining the Illustrator card’s importance. “But Pokémon means way more than just a Picasso painting to people.”

After winning, Scaramucci said the card’s purchase was the first action in what will be, as he dubbed, a “planetary treasure hunt.” He said the goal, which he is embarking on with his younger brother, is to collect a number of real-world, scarce assets across varying categories. 

Trading card markets have exploded in recent years. According to data from Card Ladder, an analytics firm that tracks trading card prices and sales, the monthly sales volume in secondary trading has nearly doubled in the last two years.

EBay CEO Jamie Iannone in the company’s earnings call last week detailed that the largest contributor to gross merchandise volume growth in the fourth-quarter were collectibles, particularly “driven by continued strength in trading cards.”

Paul himself bought the illustrator card in 2021 for nearly $5.3 million, indicating he sold it with a more than 200% return. Card Ladder’s “Pokémon index” has grown 145% in the past year. Compare those gains to the S&P 500, which is up 15.2% in the past year. Or compare it to “Magnificent Seven” darling Alphabet, which is up 73.4% in the past year. 

“Especially in 2025, the growth has been astronomical,” said Ken Goldin, founder and CEO of Goldin Auctions, which is owned by eBay. Goldin ran the auction for the illustrator card last week. “We have people who are buying solely either because they absolutely love it or they firmly believe that trading cards and collectibles are a legitimate alternative asset class.”

Scaramucci is someone who is buying Pokémon cards for both of those reasons: his own pleasure and the investment potential. 

“The compounded annual growth rate of these cards is out of control,” he said. “And they should be treated as investments because that’s what they are. It’s just obvious.”

Scaramucci added the cards are a way to play the “debasement trade,” where investors fearful of countries devaluing their currencies move money into hard assets. 

Viewing collectibles as an alternative asset is not new, even if unorthodox. 

Paul Karger, co-founder and managing partner at wealth advisory firm TwinFocus, said he works with clients who collect art, wine, watches and even guitars. But while some view these items as investments, Karger wouldn’t advise clients to get into that mentality. 

“Think of it as a passion first, and kind of an investment second,” he said. “You hope they go up over time, but they’re absolutely not a replacement to financial assets, it’s just maybe a complement at the margin.”

Karger warned that the illiquid nature of collectibles, and the dependency they have on others determining their worth, often via auctions, are added risks. 

Kaycee LeCong, managing director of the family office at Brighton Jones Wealth Management, also noted a risk is that capital gains on collectibles are taxed at 28%, higher than capital gains taxes on stocks that are around 15% and 20%.

Despite the risks, Goldin projects more people will view collectibles, particularly trading cards, as alternative assets. He said as more headlines come about detailing major sales — like that of Paul’s — and price discovery becomes easier to do with more data, it will only attract more participants. 

Scaramucci will embark on his treasure hunt through a new company called Treasure Trove. However, he did not disclose any details about what that company will be nor how it will operate, beyond that it will receive funding from Solari Capital. Scaramucci also didn’t disclose if he plans to sell the Illustrator card, or any other of his collectibles, if it grows more in value. 

And while Scaramucci said he’d like to obtain the Declaration of Independence as part of his hunt after he won the Illustrator card, he acknowledged to CNBC that it’s a goal that will take much work to achieve while not addressing a plan on how to do it. 

But at the moment, the lack of clarity in his future plans is the point. 

“For now, if you think I’m just a crazy person buying up real-world, scarce assets,” he said, “that’s all you need to know.”