The Shintaro Higashi Show - 5 YouTube Lessons After 44 Million Views | The Shintaro Higashi Show

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

In this solo episode, Shintaro Higashi shares 5 key lessons he’s learned from growing a successful YouTube channel in the grappling space. With over 1,500 videos and 44 million views, Shintaro breaks down what really matters when starting out, the financial realities of being a YouTuber in the judo niche, and how it all connects back to his business and community.🎯 Whether you're a martial artist, content creator, or small business owner, this episode is packed with honest insights about content, consistency, monetization, and time management.00:00 Introduction – Lessons From 5 Years on YouTube00:40 Lesson 1: Quantity First, Then Quality02:10 Lesson 2: Google AdSense Doesn’t Pay Much03:40 Lesson 3: Judo Niche = Low Revenue05:00 Lesson 4: The Compounding Effect of Content07:30 Lesson 5: YouTube is Extremely Time Consuming08:50 Building a Workflow with the Right Team10:00 Final Thoughts and How You Can Reach Out🚨 LIMITED-TIME OFFER: 40% OFF 🚨The All-in-One Instructional Bundle just got even better.Every major instructional. One complete system. Now at our biggest discount yet.Grab yours now at 40% off : https://higashibrand.com/products/all-instructionalsThis won’t last. Build your game today.🔥 Get 20% OFF FUJI Gear! 🔥Looking to level up your judo training with the best gear? FUJI Sports has you covered. Use my exclusive link to grab 20% OFF high-quality gis, belts, bags, and more.👉 https://www.fujisports.com/JUDOSHINTARO 👈No code needed – just click and save!Links:🇯🇵 Kokushi Budo Institute (The Dojo) Class Schedule in New York, NY 🗽: https://www.kokushibudo.com/schedule🇯🇵 Higashi Brand Merch & Instructionals: https://www.higashibrand.com📚 Shintari Higashi x BJJ Fanatics Judo Courses & Instructionals Collection: https://bjjfanatics.com/collections/shintaro-higashi/

The Shintaro Higashi show is sponsored by Judo TV, your premier destination for live and on-demand judo coverage. Never miss a throat. Higashi brand. Train hard, live strong, wear Higashi brand. Hakuin AI. Hakuin AI helps you measure, predict, and solve customer churn. Visit Hakuin AI and start your free churn on it today. Here are five different things I learned from being a YouTuber in the Grapling space, Judo B. Jujay. I have over 1,500 videos. online. I have over 44 million total views. It's something of a following and you know, I want to share with you five things I learned. The first thing is that in the beginning, quantity matters a lot and then over time quality is going to start to matter more. It kind of does a flip. And when I was

getting my MBA at Stern, there was someone that worked that YouTube corporate. Like she worked for Google. She was amazing. And the one advice she gave me was post as much as you can, as frequent as you can in the beginning. So I posted a video day. And during that time period, the quality wasn't so good. It was straight up out of my iPhone 7 camera. I had no editing skills. So I would just shoot it in one shot and then just post it. And then I wouldn't even really look at it, you know? So as I did that, I would literally film probably like 10 clips right after judo practice. It would take me 20 minutes and I would just post it. And then I would just go from week to week to week and I had a huge backlog just straight technique videos if you guys go back in time maybe like three or four years it's all just

from an iPhone one shot zero edits and over time some of those videos catch and then do really well and then little by little the quality of the production got better because number one I got better at talking in front of a camera that's a productivity thing that kind of increased over time and then little by little I started hiring out for editors because I have no editing skills And anyway, at the end of the video, I'm going to show you, I'm going to give you sort of a contact of my guy, and then we'll talk a little bit about how you could kind of do this as well. But yes, in the beginning, it's quantity, then little by little quality matters. And then when you get to a certain level, if you post videos that don't do well, the algorithm kind of punishes you and they won't push your next video as much, so quality matters even more as time goes by. So when you're trying to get started and you're like, oh, I've got to get the best camera.

I have to spend 45 minutes, you know, filming the thing and I have to spend five hours editing it. Don't even do that. Just start posting the stuff. Quantity matters in the beginning more than anything. All right. Number two, Google AdSense doesn't make that much money. I always thought if I had a million views a month, I would be rolling in cash. That's simply not true. So most of the months, I don't even bring a thousand dollars a month with Google AdSense. Okay. And Google AdSense is sort of this Google partnership program where they take advertising revenue that gets shown from your channel and they share it with you. So that's kind of a nice thing. Like I just said, I have about a million views a month through my YouTube channel and Google pays me about $1,000 a month on a good

month. And then it fluctuates a lot, you know, and it depends on how well my, you know, videos do that month. But majority of my revenue right now are still coming from one or two videos that has done well historically. For instance, five basic judo throws. That's like my number one video. If you sort my videos by views, that's the number one at the top, and that's still making me money every month. It's a big portion of my Google AdSense revenue. Because they pay out, there's a metric. I think it's CPM, I'm not sure.

It's dollar per thousand views. And in a niche like judo, it's not that much because a lot of people are advertising on channels like mine. But if you go into the personal finance space, I think it's like $7 or something like that per 1,000 views. I think for me, it's like less, it's like two, two, or something like that. It's really, really low. So yeah, Google AdSense doesn't make that much money. And then moving on to my third point that I've learned was that the judo niche and the judo YouTube doesn't make much money at all. So, you know, it's kind of a thing. It's like it's a real time suck. And I'm going to talk about, you know, the time consuming aspect of it later in the

video. But first and foremost, you know, talking about revenue coming from being a YouTuber, the niche of judo doesn't really pay much, unfortunately. But if you want to contribute and if you want to buy my stuff like haigashibrand.com, that's a real thing. Please buy it. So you have 500 of these guys sitting in a warehouse and I've only sold like seven of them. So some things do really well and then some things don't. And then, you know, as you guys are listening, that's the third thing. You know, YouTube for the judo niche doesn't pay that well.

Anyway, the fourth thing that I learned, based on, and it's kind of going off this money thing, the AdSense doesn't pay much, Dutonich doesn't pay much, but the fourth thing is that there is sort of this compounding synergistic thing, and I'm going to explain. AdSense by itself doesn't make a lot. Higashi brand by itself doesn't make a lot, but combined, plus my video sales, plus the traffic it gets to the KBI website, plus like sort of the authority. ranking that all my websites get because of the traffic with the judo neation, the Google crawlers and all this stuff, I think that has sort of this effect, right? That kind of makes me do well sort of at the end of the day. I was talking to a new student of mine at the dojo. He's been doing judo for two weeks. And he's like, dude, I saw every one of your videos. And what a great thing, right? He's been watching my YouTube channel for like six months. And then the algorithm's

constantly pushing it, pushing it, you know? And then it has the this sort of effect where eventually he was like, oh, I got to go and try this thing, you know. And I think it's all sort of connected on the, on the worldwide. I mean, obviously, it is the internet. It's the whole premise is connection, right? Everything is connected. But I'll give you an example. You know, someone's searching for grappling after school, martial arts, whatever.

They're in the geographic location of New York City. And then they type it in, bang, pops up, Kukushibudo Institute. Maybe there's even a sponsored ad at the top of the page through Google. ads, they click it, they go to the website, and then they see Kokushiburo Institute, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever it is, and then because they search for judo, you know, in the thing, and then maybe they get a PMAX campaign ad on YouTube or something, or they go, oh, yeah, what is this judo thing? And they type into YouTube judo, and then my thing comes up, five basic judo, you know,

Tatoshi Uchimada, whatever it is, and they click on it, and now of a sudden the algorithm's like, oh, this guy's interested in judo, let me keep pumping out all his stuff, right? this Shantara Higashi Judo stuff. And they start watching it. They watch some IJF content. You know, they see my ads constantly popping up in Google ads. And then they're like, you know what? I'm going to look for judo near me. And then they do that thing. And then they maybe find my Instagram page or whatever it is. And they walk in through the door and they're like, oh my God, you're that guy I saw on the internet. They're much more likely to sign up. And how many of those guys do I have in the room? I don't really know. And in terms of visitors and drop-ins, we get that stuff all

the time. And I think that's because of the YouTube. And it gives me authority in the space. So there is sort of this thing that I get. There's yields, right? There's like this return on investment sort of thing from a time standpoint where it is helping my business. And if you add up all the different things that it gives me the YouTube, I think it's definitely a net positive. And, you know, moving on to the fifth thing that I learned from being a YouTuber essentially for the last five years, you know, it's like a little by little, I'm starting to identify more. more as a YouTuber than an actual grappler because I'm getting 40 at knee surgery. I haven't been training as much.

And I'm like, I'm more so making YouTube content than actually grappling, which is crazy. But yes, the fifth point that I learned was that it's extremely time consuming. And in the beginning, I tried to do everything on my own. At this point, I really, really cannot. I've been through probably five to 10 hires throughout the time of editing videos, social media managers, Google Ads people, you name it, graphic designers, I've done it all. But right now, I have a very, very good sort of workflow slash system. I have one company that I deal with.

I'm not going to say the name of the company right now. But if you reach out to me, I will give you their contact. We're trying to actually do a collaborative thing because this person who owns this company, this media company, and I swear this whole podcast episode isn't a huge commercial. But, you know, it's related. So I'm going to talk about it. This company has been watching my YouTube videos, clipping my YouTube videos, doing my social media,

all this stuff for the last two years. So they have a very good understanding of grappling, which is actually the hardest thing I found, going to a random shop, you know, grappling shop, video cutting shop, social media thing. They just don't get the nuances of grappling. So to train somebody to understand it, it was very difficult

you know like I would do 40 throws or whatever it was through all the videos that I sent them they would pick the worst ones so I had to meticulously go through the video footage and be like man this video was better than that video do this video first people like foot sweeps

that's not a goddamn foot sweep bro you know that's clearly an arm throw it of course I can't expect them to know this stuff but it was extremely frustrating if I'm going to scroll through all the footage to pick out all the things and then storyboard it and all the stuff, might as well just do it myself was kind of the idea, you know?

So anyway, this company, two years with me, you know, they're kind of vetted, right, for this grappling perspective. So if you reach out to me, I will connect you. And then, you know, you guys could kind of take it off too. And they're sort of a full package deal. They do social media, editing, they cut clips. They do graphic design. You do websites.

So if you're a dojo owner especially, and if you're looking for a one-stop shop situation, this guy's company is the way to go. And, yeah, hit me up and let me know if you want. I will give you their contact. So yeah, there you go. The five things I learned from being a YouTuber, this is a lot more interesting in my head going into it.

But I hope it was helpful. And you could reach out to me anytime. Shantorhagashi.com have a website. I do seminars You know Higashibrand.com And you know

That's another one too With the YouTube When I show my stuff Footage from different seminars Whenever I post footage from that On the YouTube People reach out Say hey can you do a seminar

For us too So those things kind of add up All right Thank you so much And talk to you guys soon