Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the world’s best-known marketers, but his long-form YouTube videos were still averaging five to ten thousand views each until recently. Within 90 days they added up to one million views, although Gary did not film anything new for them. Strategist Jake Trinder assembled the videos from Gary’s older keynotes and footage. Trinder described the figures and his process in a LinkedIn post.
Ideas hidden in archive footage
Trinder says he did not need Gary to record anything. He went through the existing footage, found ideas in it, and decided which ones deserved a standalone video. The first one he repackaged into a format he called “The New Rules of Social Media (2026)”. He chose it because a similar format had worked in other areas, and Gary had credibility on the subject of social media.
The format matters less than the reason for watching it. It signals that the rules have changed, that what viewers have done so far may no longer hold, and that the author will explain what to do differently. According to Trinder, this is “a much stronger reason to watch than just ‘Gary Vee gives social media advice.’” The video drew more than 300,000 views. Some others, he says, underperformed, but even those beat the previous average fivefold. Across the series, Trinder speaks of ten times the average viewing.
From social media to interest media
For the second video, Trinder drew on a narrative Gary was promoting at the time: the shift from social media to what he calls interest media. Vaynerchuk summarised it in his essay “The New Rules of Social Media (2026)” from 2 July 2026. “We don’t even live in social media anymore. We now live in interest media,” he wrote. According to him, today “when you open up TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook, you’re getting content based on what you’re currently interested in.” The algorithm thus prioritises the relevance of an individual post over the number of subscribers.
For this shift, Trinder used a format he had previously devised for a client in another niche, “The New Era of X Has Just Begun”. The term interest media on its own would mean nothing to a viewer who had not heard Gary’s explanation. The title “The New Era of Social Media Has Just Begun”, on the other hand, gives the viewer a reason to find out what has changed. The video has more than 400,000 views, and the numbers are still rising.
Packaging matters more than filming
Trinder runs the agency Views To Clients, which, according to its website, manages channels for VaynerMedia, Instantly AI and ManyChat, among others. Its process runs from research and strategy through directed filming and editing, with captions and thumbnails, to publishing with ongoing optimisation. Its own AI system analyses which title formats win clicks and which thumbnails stand out.
The weight of this work does not lie in producing more content. “Gary already had the expertise. He already had the footage out there. I found the ideas in that footage, figured out which ones deserved to become entire videos, and gave people a reason to watch them,” Trinder summarises his approach.
The same logic works on European channels
Interest media is not only a US phenomenon. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube use the same recommendation systems in Europe, which rank content for each viewer according to their interests. European brands, however, sit on similar archives: conference keynotes, webinars and recordings of talks that nobody has repackaged into standalone videos with a clear reason to watch. What transfers is the method of working with existing footage. The specific headline differs in each niche.
The material for those videos was already filmed. Only the reason to click on them was missing.
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