Studies show that young people are more likely to remember and share news/information that’s delivered with humor. With a staggering 77% of the Morning Brew audience expressing a preference for comedic content, Good Work with Dan Toomey sets out to educate the next generation of business leaders as they navigate both the world of business and the business of the world.
On Good Work, Dan Toomey explores business (or business-y) news and culture in a humorously investigative tone. The channel puts the “funny” and “business” in “funny business” with hit videos like “Wait why can politicians trade stocks?” and “Is the sports betting industry a huge mistake?” We launched the channel in 2023, and in 2024, the Good Work team set out to not only grow the channel’s audience, but to deepen the quality of what we offered to viewers, with richer reporting, more ambitious longform video and expansion into other formats like YouTube Shorts and Community Tab posts.
We started Good Work with an ambition to not just cover the same stories big business media outlets were talking about – we aim to surface culture-making stories and timely issues, like the sudden explosion in Zyn use among white-collar workers, and “dark money” fueling U.S. elections. What drives our work is the opportunity to use comedy as a tool to broaden the reach of potentially niche business stories, expanding the appeal to audiences that would never read a traditional business publication or even know this world exists.
Good Work is investigative journalism, packaged in a way that’s relatable, understandable, and memorable.
Bringing a Good Work video to life takes time – the team spends weeks researching each story, interviewing sources, and punching up jokes. We refined our production process so we could publish more consistently, resulting in better traction within YouTube’s algorithm. This year has been full of firsts for the channel, like our first on-location shoots: interviewing congresspeople at the U.S. Capitol, digging into Miami’s real estate market, and test driving Cybertrucks in the field. Our comedy got more ambitious, too – we hired an actor to play Jim Cramer when we couldn’t book the real guy for an interview, and Dan fought his own brother in our video about office workers’ obsession with Zyn.
We publish a new video every 3 weeks, and aim to set each piece up for maximum success. Packaging our videos with the right titles and thumbnails has been a critical part of this process. The Good Work team works closely with our audience development and design leads to develop strong thumbnails that effectively tell a video’s story and titles that hook viewers in. We use YouTube’s A/B/C testing tool to determine what packaging resonates best with our audience, and use test results to inform packaging strategy on our future videos.
Our Shorts strategy goes well beyond the typical media org approach of “cut longform clips down for Shorts.” For each longform video we produce, we also create custom, thematically relevant shortform pieces, and revisit relevant topics through YouTube Shorts when there’s more news to cover. For example, months after posting our longform video investigating the world of legal sports betting, we published a YouTube Short about the Jontay Porter betting scandal, linking back to the older video using YouTube’s “Related Shorts” feature.
Our greatest successes on YouTube Shorts come from our fully original shortform sketches, like our fake Excel launch interview or our parody of Apple presentations. Shorts give us an opportunity to reach audiences that may never watch our longform videos and serve the people who watch everything we publish. Shorts help us expand the creative world of Good Work, experimenting with new formats and creating space for stories that wouldn’t work in a longform format.
Our relationship with our most dedicated fans extends beyond video, all the way to our Community Tab. We use that space to tease new videos and promote our merch drops, but mostly, it’s a place to share memes and showcase some of the funniest comments from our YouTube videos. Engaging in this space lets us create a true community on the channel – instead of dropping a new video and ignoring our comments, we’re actively promoting more conversation and building inside jokes with our fans.
Our longform viewership increased 142% in 2024 to 20M views, and people watched our content for 2 million hours – a 212% increase YOY. Viewers stuck around for an average of 6 minutes and 6 seconds – an 82-second increase from 2023. Those increases in retention and watch time are signs that we’re building better content – we’re not just reaching larger audiences, but building deeper connections that with viewers who spend time with our channel. We added hundreds of thousands of new subscribers to our channel, growing our subscriber base by 66% year-over-year.
Our Shorts views increased 98% to 38M views in 2024, and our Community Tab impressions more than tripled, to 13M impressions. Our like-to-dislike ratio increased 1.1 percentage points to 98.4%, and we saw significant increases in the number of likes, comments, and shares from viewers – we didn’t just reach more audiences, we got them to meaningfully engage with our channel.
We’re building lasting relationships with our audiences, and are producing the kind of content that pushes us forward creatively.
