In 2009 Rasmus Albrechtsen began offering men’s hairstyling tutorials on YouTube. He called his channel “Slikhaar TV,” as in “slick hair.” The channel scaled to over 2 million subscribers.
Then came YouTube’s artificial intelligence-driven browse feature, showing viewers the videos that likely interest them. Suddenly, Albrechtsen’s 2 million subscribers seemed less impactful. He’s now producing videos “for the browse feature more than for the subscribers.”
Albrecthsen is based in Denmark, where I’m vacationing. He and I recently discussed Slikhaar TV, By Vilain (his line of hair products), and the impact of AI on video marketing.
The entire audio of our conversation is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.
Eric Bandholz: What do you do?
Rasmus Vilain Albrechtsen: I co-founded two businesses with my twin brother, Emil. We have Slikhaar TV, which is a YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers offering men’s hairstyling tutorials and advice. We launched it in 2009.
Then we have By Vilain, where we develop and sell hair products for men, such as waxes, pre-stylers, shampoos, and accessories.
Having a brother as a business partner is nice, although it has challenges. We are identical twins, but we have different personalities. I’m more into the creative, vision space. Emil is more into executing and operations. He’s also our CEO. We complement each other pretty well.
Bandholz: Organic YouTube views can be hard to come by.
Albrechtsen: It has been turbulent on YouTube. We can thank the browse feature for the turbulence. It’s getting smarter, using artificial intelligence to help viewers discover their unique interests.
We have 2 million subscribers, but we don’t have 2 million viewers. We have 2 million people who, once in 14 years, chose to push the subscribe button. Their lives may be different now.
So we’re trying to produce videos around trends for the browse feature…
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