A few years ago, someone at a dinner party asked Calum what he did for a living. He said he was a YouTube strategist. They nodded politely and asked which videos he made.

He doesn't make videos. He decides which videos get made, why, for whom, packaged how, and distributed where. And then he measures whether any of it moved the business forward. That's a different job. And for most people, including a lot of people who think they want to do it, the distinction matters more than it sounds.

This piece is for anyone considering YouTube strategy as a career. It won't tell you it's a great field and leave it there. Six questions follow that are worth sitting with honestly — but first, a clear look at what the work actually involves.

What the Job Actually Covers

YouTube strategy covers research, competitive analysis, topic ideation, packaging (titles and thumbnails), scripting direction, analytics, and connecting all of it to business outcomes. In a given week, a strategist might be deep in a retention curve trying to understand why viewers drop off at the two-minute mark, reviewing thumbnail options against CTR data, briefing a scriptwriter on hook structure, and presenting monthly performance to a CMO.

The job looks very different depending on where you work. Some strategists go deep on a single channel, treating YouTube as a craft in its own right. Others embed it within a broader marketing operation, working across multiple channels and clients at once. Understanding which version suits you is one of the most important early decisions you'll make — and the two career paths below illustrate the difference concretely.

Two Careers in YouTube Strategy

Jake Trinder: Going Deep on the Craft

Jake Trinder has built a career by going all-in on YouTube as a specialism. His work centres on the core mechanics of the role: packaging, ideation, retention, and algorithm behaviour. It's a path that rewards genuine platform expertise and a willingness to stay at the sharp end of how the platform evolves.

The trade-off is real. You're building a career on a single platform, which means staying ahead of how it changes is part of the job permanently. The upside is that strategists who go genuinely deep are in very short supply — and that tends to be reflected in what they can charge.

Edward Wood & Calum Russell: YouTube as a Commercial Discipline

When Calum joined CareerFoundry in late 2020, the YouTube channel had 16,000 subscribers, a scattered back catalogue, and no clear connection to the company's commercial goals. Videos were taking three to four weeks to produce. Uploads barely reached two a month. Nobody on the team had a clear view of whether any of it was working.

That's the before. The after is more familiar: 255,000 subscribers, €650,000 in attributed revenue in the first year of properly-run strategy, and a production system that eventually ran itself well enough to self-fund a filming expedition to the US on €95,000 in annual ad revenue. The difference between those two states wasn't creative genius. It was strategic focus, a batching system, and a distribution web that sent every video through email, blog, and social from the moment it went live.

Ed's path ran through Babbel, where he managed a content team of thirty people overseeing channels that contributed roughly 25% of the company's nine-figure annual revenue, and then as CMO at CareerFoundry during a period of roughly 15x revenue growth. In both cases, YouTube existed not as a standalone channel but as a component of a broader commercial strategy.

At Humble&Brag, that framing shapes everything. You can read more about how Calum built the CareerFoundry system in How I Grew a Business YouTube Channel to 255K Subscribers on the Humble&Brag blog.

Two different paths, two different sets of strengths. The questions below apply to both.

6 Questions Worth Asking Yourself

1. Are you genuinely obsessed with what makes content work?

Do you notice when a thumbnail has been A/B tested? Do you rewatch the first thirty seconds of a video to pick apart the hook? Do you find yourself asking why one video generates two million views while a nearly identical one flatlines — and does that question actually keep you up?

Most people find this mildly interesting. Good strategists find it compulsive. If watching a great video makes you want to reverse-engineer it rather than simply enjoy it, that instinct is the raw material of the role.

2. Do you think in systems?

The CareerFoundry breakthrough wasn't a single great video. It was a batching system, a distribution discipline, and a tracking setup that compounded week after week for three years. The videos were the output; the system was the work.

Building repeatable engines, and finding genuine satisfaction in doing so, is central to this career. If that kind of operational thinking energises you, you'll likely thrive here. And if it sounds like the part you'd rather delegate — that's worth knowing before you commit.

3. Are you comfortable sitting in data?

Retention graphs, CTR benchmarks, suggested video traffic sources, subscriber rates by format: this is daily bread for a YouTube strategist. You don't need a data science background, but you need to genuinely enjoy forming hypotheses from numbers and then testing them against reality.

The strategists who make the biggest impact are almost always the ones who go further into the data than anyone asked them to.

4. Do you understand business, not just content?

This is the question that most separates the role from adjacent ones. A lot of people who think they want to be YouTube strategists actually want to make good content. That's a fine ambition; it's just a different job.

The best YouTube strategists can walk into a board meeting and explain why a video about 'what is data analytics?' is worth €650,000 in annual pipeline. They can connect a packaging decision to a conversion rate, and a content calendar to a quarterly revenue target. If that kind of thinking appeals to you as much as the creative side does, you're in the right territory.

5. Are you endlessly curious about human psychology?

Why do people click on one thumbnail and skip another? Why do they drop off at 47 seconds? What makes someone subscribe after one video and ignore ten others? The mechanics of a hook, the function of stakes in a script, the psychology of a title: these are questions a good strategist never stops asking.

Platform mechanics change constantly. The underlying human behaviour they're built on changes very slowly. The strategists who stay relevant longest are the ones who understand both, and who know which layer they're working on at any given moment.

6. Are you patient enough for a long game?

Most people considering this career have seen a channel grow fast and assumed that's what YouTube strategy looks like. It isn't, or at least not often.

YouTube compounds. That's its great strength. It's also the thing that most frustrates people who are new to it.

The CareerFoundry channel posted consistently for months before its growth curve noticeably changed. 9x — a business channel now generating 2.8 million views a year and 56,200 new subscribers in twelve months — followed the same pattern: a long flat baseline, then a series of sharp inflection points as the content and distribution systems locked in. Neither of those outcomes was visible in the first few weeks of work.

If you need rapid visible results to stay motivated, that early period will test you. If you find the gradual accumulation of evidence that a system is working genuinely satisfying, you're well suited to this.

The Career Case — and an Honest Caveat

Most people who dismiss YouTube strategy as a serious career path have confused it with content creation. They're thinking about someone sitting in a ring light filming themselves. The role described in this piece — the one that attributed €650,000 in revenue to a single channel's first year of properly run strategy — is closer to a performance marketing function than a creative one.

Demand is far outstripping supply. Most brands have no serious YouTube presence, and the ones that do are consistently under-investing in strategic expertise. The skills are highly transferable across SEO, paid media, brand, and lifecycle marketing. Earning potential at agency or senior in-house level is strong. And the work compounds in a way that almost no other marketing function does: you're building assets that keep performing, not running campaigns that stop the moment the budget does.

The caveat is that the career rewards patience. People who want YouTube to move at the speed of paid media will be disappointed.

What a Career Path Might Look Like

Many of the best strategists arrived from adjacent roles: SEO, performance marketing, journalism, video production. There's no single prescribed route. A rough progression runs from junior strategist or content researcher, through channel manager, to senior strategist or head of content, and from there into agency work, consultancy, or a senior in-house role at a brand that's serious about YouTube.

The most important early investment is developing genuine platform knowledge; not surface-level familiarity, but a working understanding of how the algorithm rewards certain behaviours, how packaging affects click-through, and how to connect content decisions to business outcomes. That knowledge is what separates a YouTube strategist from a content scheduler. The title is the same. The work is very different.

Where to Go from Here

If you want to understand the range of approaches people bring to this field, The 13 Best YouTube Strategists in the World on the Humble&Brag blog profiles the people shaping YouTube strategy in 2026 and what distinguishes each of them. For a detailed look at what rigorous, commercially-minded strategy actually looks like in practice, How I Grew a Business YouTube Channel to 255K Subscribers is the place to start.

And if you're thinking seriously about working with a YouTube-first agency, whether as a client or as part of a team, we're always happy to talk.