Codie Sanchez: What All 1,038 Videos Reveal

Codie Sanchez has 2.25 million subscribers and 418.8 million lifetime views built on one idea: buy boring businesses. Laundromats, vending machines, storage units, land. The channel is the marketing engine for Contrarian Thinking, her media and investment company, so every video is also a lead.

I processed all 1,038 videos through my analysis tools: 179 long-form and 857 Shorts, with every view, like and comment count. Alongside that I read the transcripts of her three biggest videos and pulled the US search data. Every video is compared against the videos she published in the same six months, so a 2022 video with four years of accrued views gets no head start over one from this spring.

The pattern that came out is the opposite of how most business channels write titles.

The 6 findings

1. Naming the machine beats naming the money. Titles naming a specific boring trade get 2.63x her average at the time. Titles with a dollar sign get 0.67x.
2. Numbered lists get 1.99x the views. 21 videos, and her two biggest videos of all time are both numbered lists.
3. 20 to 30 minutes is the sweet spot. 1.32x since 2023. Under 10 minutes gets 0.38x.
4. In 2025 she cut output by a third and the median doubled. 44 long videos and 229,434 median views in 2024 became 30 videos and 543,361 in 2025.
5. She is in the Shorts trap. Output nearly tripled to 8 a week while the median Short fell from 192,466 views to 41,843.
6. Almost nobody searches for her topics. 22,200 people a month search for her name. Her biggest video targets a phrase 30 people a month search for, and advertisers pay $6.67 a click for "codie sanchez", which is more than they pay for any topic she covers.

1. Naming the machine beats naming the money

I compared every long-form video over 90 days old against the videos she published in the same six months, then sorted them by what's in their titles. The two ends of the table:

Title contains	Videos	Vs her average then
A named boring trade (laundromat, vending, land, storage, car wash, ATM, billboard)	11	2.63x
"business"	50	1.27x
Any money word or symbol	73	0.97x
"million"	19	0.68x
A dollar sign	35	0.67x

On a channel whose whole subject is money, the dollar sign is the worst thing she can put in a title, and the specific machine is the best. "Why I'm Buying UNWANTED Land" did 3.5 times her average then. "I Bought 3 Vending Machines" did 3.8 times. The audience doesn't click on the promise of money. It clicks on the thing that makes it.

The plainer money words are fine: "rich" and "money" on their own get 1.18x. The damage comes from the showiest money words, the $ figures and "million", which are exactly the words most business channels reach for first.

The takeout to try yourself: Name the concrete thing your video is about, not the outcome it promises. If every title on your channel leads with the money, you're competing with every other channel shouting the same word.

2. Numbered lists get 1.99x the views, and her two biggest videos ever are both lists

21 of her long-form videos are numbered lists. The typical numbered list does 1.99x her average at the time, against 0.96x for everything else, and the format holds across every year from 2022 to 2026.

Her most-viewed video of all time is "Businesses that Never Fail? 6 Businesses with Amazingly Low Failure Rates": 5.85 million views, 36 times what her videos of that period typically did. Her second is its mirror, "Businesses that Always Fail? 7 Businesses with Shockingly High Failure Rates" at 2.84 million and 15 times its period's typical video. The same list format, run in both directions.

The transcript of that 5.85 million video shows why the format works this hard for her. It opens on the fear inside fifteen seconds: "20% of US small businesses fail within the first year... 50% by year five." Every claim after it carries a named source, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, a Chamber of Commerce study. It's a listicle with citations, in a genre that mostly sells confidence.

The takeout to try yourself: A numbered list with sourced data in every item is a format you can repeat. Pick the question your buyers are most afraid of, and answer it as a ranked list with a citation per entry.

3. 20 to 30 minutes is the sweet spot

Duration (2023 on)	Videos	Vs her average then
Under 10 minutes	7	0.38x
10 to 20 minutes	72	1.00x
20 to 30 minutes	30	1.32x
Over 30 minutes	26	0.81x

Short videos on this channel fail. Very long ones sag. The band that wins is the one long enough to work through a real list and short enough to finish. Mel Robbins ran the same test on her library and landed longer, over 90 minutes, which is one reason none of these numbers transfers between channels without testing.

The takeout to try yourself: Your channel has a duration sweet spot and it's probably not the one you assume. Group your own videos by length and compare each group against videos from the same period, before you decide videos need to be shorter.

4. In 2025 she cut output by a third and the median doubled

Year	Long videos	Median views
2022	33	239,952
2023	42	273,010
2024	44	229,434
2025	30	543,361
2026 so far	28	200,492*

Three years at roughly 40 long videos a year moved the median nowhere. In 2025 she published a third fewer and the median doubled. The 2026 row is marked because those videos are months old rather than years, and long-form on this channel accrues for a long time, so it isn't yet evidence the gain has been given back.

The takeout to try yourself: Publishing more is the easiest lever and might be the wrong one. If your median has been flat for two years, the evidence here says try fewer, bigger videos before you try more.

5. She is in the Shorts trap

Year	Shorts published	Median views
2022	85	242,638
2024	160	192,466
2025	190	81,465
2026 (8 months)	292	41,843*

Shorts output went from 3 a week in 2024 to 8 a week this year. The median Short lost about three quarters of its views over the same period. She published more Shorts and got fewer views back, even in total: 190 Shorts earned 66.5 million views in 2025, while 160 earned 102.9 million in 2024.

This year the gap per upload is stark. Her 28 long videos average 319,807 views each. Her 292 Shorts average 58,823. One long video is earning roughly what five Shorts earn, and Shorts outnumber long-form ten to one on the production calendar.

Shorts still hold 79% of the library's lifetime views, so they built the audience. But at this year's numbers, it's fair to ask whether each extra Short is still worth the production time it takes.

The takeout to try yourself: Track your median Short by quarter, not your total Shorts views. A rising total from rising output can hide a collapsing per-video return, and per-video return is what tells you whether the format still works.

6. Almost nobody searches for her topics. 22,200 people a month search for her name

US Google Ads figures, pulled 1 September 2026, in US dollars:

Term	US searches/mo	CPC
passive income	33,100	$2.75
codie sanchez	22,200	$6.67
vending machine business	18,100	$4.98
side hustle ideas	6,600	$2.01
how to buy a business	2,900	$3.41
laundromat business	1,600	$2.85
boring businesses	590	$3.12
businesses that never fail	30	$3.25

Her most-viewed video, 5.85 million views, targets a phrase that 30 people a month type into Google. Search didn't build this channel. Suggested traffic did, which is why the titles that win are curiosity formats rather than keyword formats.

Now look at her own name in that table. "Codie sanchez" gets 22,200 US searches a month, and advertisers bid $6.67 a click for it, which is more than any topic she covers. After 1,038 videos, the most commercially valuable keyword on her channel is her own name.

That's what a personal brand is in numbers: the audience stops searching for the subject and starts searching for the person.

The takeout to try yourself: Check what advertisers pay for your name against what they pay for your topics. The gap between the two is a working measure of how much brand your channel has actually built.

The inconvenient truth

The six formulas above will get you more views. What turns her views into money is simpler: every video is a shop window for a specific, buyable thing. A laundromat video doubles as a product page, because buying one is the exact step her company sells help with. The 2.63x on named trades and the $6.67 on her own name are the same fact from two directions: specificity built the views, and the views built the brand.

Codie publishes sourced data in a genre that mostly sells confidence, her flat years would be most business channels' best ever, and the 2025 shift to fewer, longer videos shows a channel that acts on its own numbers.

The thing to watch next is her Shorts schedule. She makes eight Shorts a week and they typically get 41,843 views each. Her long videos average 319,807. That's a lot of production time going into the format that earns less. Everything on YouTube is a test that keeps running, and her own numbers already show which way this one is going.

Method and limitsSources, dates and what this can't see

Public data only, pulled 1 September 2026: the full 1,038-video library from the YouTube Data API (exact view, like and comment counts), the transcripts of her three biggest videos, and US Google Ads for search volumes and CPCs, in US dollars, because her audience is American. Two livestreams were excluded from every comparison.

Every per-video comparison scores a video against the median of the videos she published in the same six-month period, and only videos over 90 days old are scored, so age can't masquerade as performance. Cuts with fewer than 8 videos aren't reported. YouTube changed how it counts a view on 24 August 2026; the period medians are almost entirely pre-boundary, and the 2026 rows are marked where young videos make a figure provisional.

There's no Studio access here, so nothing estimates impressions, click-through, retention, traffic sources or revenue. A paid-traffic screen was run on her six biggest videos (comments and like rate against her own channel norms) and found nothing unusual.

Analysis and write-up: Stewart Read.