An inside look into how Team Whistle is leveraging YouTube Shorts to maximize viewership of its long-form content

If you like digital first sports videos, Team Whistle has you covered.

The global sports and media entertainment company is known for finding innovative ways to reach the largest audience possible. YouTube Shorts has given them a vigorous option to get their content in the hands of everyday consumers.

Now they are providing a glimpse into how they are utilizing the platform as a tool to maximize its long-form content viewership, and those of its trusted partners through its MAGNET social content agency.

“From a content distribution point of view at Whistle, we like to be forward thinking on what is going to move the needle in terms of viewership for our content, ” said Dashiell Desloovere, Vice President of Programming at Whistle. “It is important for us to utilize the new platform offerings to amplify our strategy and those of our trusted partners. We were very pleased to find the momentum Shorts has had on growing a long-term audience from a short-form video.” 

With currently over 50 owned original content series, such as ‘No Days Off’, ‘Dunk League,’ ‘Days Off,’ ‘Put You On,’ ‘My Hustle,’ ‘Cheat Day,’ ‘Meet the Pets’ and more, Whistle currently pulls in 4.7 billion views per month across their network's social and OTT platforms, positioning it as a top ten ranked US media sports property on ComScore. Whistle content is available across a whopping 30 platforms. 

Through Whistles flagship ‘No Days Off,’ series, which marries viral social phenoms with a more in-depth docuseries format, they have been able to create a funnel of new viewers through the utilization of the YouTube Shorts feature.

Whistle recently featured track prodigy Jaiya Patillo, a 12-year-old who aspires to take her talents to the Summer Olympics, on an episode of ‘No Days Off.’ As part of the promotion, Whistle created a YouTube Short using a clip with the highest retention from the episode - that Short now has over 90 million views and brought in an additional 125,000 subscribers to the channel. This in turn drove an audience to the full-length episode that wanted to learn more about Jaiya’s relentless spirit and pursuit of her dreams. 

Whistle also saw similar success with a recent ‘I Could Do That’ episode, featuring 10-year-old viral phenom Rudolph ‘Blaze’ Ingram. A YouTube short of him running past defenders, which received 1.1M views, drew additional eyeballs to the main episode which currently has over 3 million views.

On the heels of the success from YouTube Shorts, Whistle launched a “Creator Of The Week” program, where each week they highlight a new partner of theirs on Shorts, introducing them to their audience of 2.5 million YouTube subs. This gives the publisher an opportunity to showcase creators like Dockery or Famous Los, that may not make sense for a longform piece of content, but have tremendous ability and incredible feats that still deserve to be recognized and spotlighted to their audience. 

From a partner perspective, Team Whistle’s “MAGNET” Social Content Agency works directly with YouTube to help expand education and usage of YouTube Shorts. Magnet has been working with several professional athletes across soccer, Formula 1, and more to launch their channels, produce Shorts, and teach best practices on the platform. This work continues to expand as Whistle’s Magnet supports training sessions for athletes to learn how to leverage the YouTube feature.

Team Whistle's content is available on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and of course YouTube. You can also find their content on WhistleTV, their official streaming service.

Want to find out more about Team Whistle? Click the link below: https://teamwhistle.com/