Jonathan Murphy

YouTube is rolling out a crazy new update soon. Top Fans mode lets you publish videos exclusively to your top 1% of viewers. The people who watch everything, comment on everything, and have been there since the beginning. If you have 100,000 subscribers, your top 1% is 1,000 loyal people. That is a real audience. You can post behind the scenes content, early access, raw unfiltered videos, and build a tier of relationship that no membership paywall required. If you have 2,000 subscribers, your top 1% is 20 people. This feature does nothing for you. This is a tool built for the top 1% of channels. The ones that already have a massive, loyal base and want to deepen that relationship without adding a paid layer on top of it. For everyone else, the only thing this does is distract you from the actual job. When you are small, your entire focus should be on getting more people into the top of your funnel. Not optimizing the tiny percentage already at the bottom of it. Build the audience. Then reward it.

This is how I’d rank content channels for info operators in 2026 after running 50+ accounts and generating 250M+ impressions. Quick caveat before the chart. This ranking is for secondary silo accounts, not your main personal account. Different rules apply when you're building a personal brand on the main. A few things worth knowing: YouTube longform is S-tier because the content pays dividends for years. The caveat is it's a long-term play, so if you're starting from scratch, you might see faster early wins on short-form. You should definitely do longform at the start too, just be prepared for it to take a bit longer to compound. Among the short-form channels, the ranking goes IG Reels > Tiktok > YouTube Shorts in raw audience quality. WhatsApp & Telegram groups sit in A-tier because the users are on those platforms daily, you get direct communication to them for all your messages/announcements, and it’s also a nice way to segment leads who are interested in specific offers. Pitching leads in a closed doors environment helps with conversion rates. LinkedIn is B-tier for info operators specifically. It's a great channel, just not the strongest one in your acquisition stack at $250-500K.