Which Features Do You NEED? Honest VidIQ Review

Key Takeaways

here at Channel makers we have been using vid IQ for years long enough to know that we don't actually use it not all that often at least and we've even done sponsored videos so we've actively looked for ways to use it tried out all the tools we've had the premium versions and really tried to figure out exactly how much you can do with it but in the end we find that there's only a couple features we really use consistently I want to help you figure out if the paid version is worth it for you and if not just which ones are the most helpful even if you get the free version your time is valuable and I don't want you to have to waste a lot of time testing out features that you ultimately aren't going to even want and so in this video I'm going to try to help you figure out which features are the best which ones you'll actually use and also help you figure out if you want to get the paid version we also have two other videos on similar topics that came out this week we have a tubebuddy video that is an in-depth review of tubebuddy so watch that later and we have a tubebuddy versus vid IQ where we put them head to head and compare which one is actually better and more worth the money so this video is unsponsored although we are Affiliates we have an affiliate Link in the description right now but I really hope it's already obvious that we are unbiased and trying to give you honest helpful information so I'm going to go over with you the free features that I find the most helpful the paid features that I find the most helpful and then finally talk about their new AI software because it's really interesting and I did some tests and I was honestly surprised by the results I've been telling everybody around here about it so free features the number one thing that I use all the time and I use it so much that if I am using a browser or on a YouTube channel that doesn't have it I immediately notice because I need this feature it is the thing where you click into the video and then they have the thumbnail on the side of the video so typically when you click into a YouTube video you can no longer see the thumbnail with the vidiq extension the free version you can see the thumbnail of that video on the side which I know it sounds like how could that even be a big deal but trust me it is so nice also you're probably thinking that that's really just relevant to us because we do YouTube strategy and in a way that's true it's slightly more relevant to us but if you are trying to grow a YouTube channel on any topic it's really helpful to do industry research to look at what other people in similar topics or even completely different topics are doing for their thumbnails and how those match up against the actual video content itself it is so nice to be able to watch a video and then look over the side and see what the thumbnail is especially with these new auto play things where the videos start playing automatically and so you only get to see the thumbnail for a second anyways it can be so frustrating so definitely definitely that IQ is worth it the download the free version is worth it for that feature alone okay the next one I really like is the daily ideas with the free version you only get a couple of them each day and I don't think the video ideas are anything too spectacular you can get pretty much the same quality of ideas from chat GPT for completely free and you can get as many as you want from Chachi BT the nice thing about vid IQ is that they're kind of all in one place you don't have to like re-put in your channel topic every time because it remembers what your topic is and it's really easy to save the ideas next is the competitor analysis now you can only compare yourself against a few competitors with the free version but it's still nice and you can switch those out so that if you are willing to just keep putting in new competitors you can see how your channel is doing against a bunch more than just a few competitors it's just you can't see it all at once so it's slightly less convenient I don't like to spend a lot of time comparing ourselves anyways although it is kind of nice to get a climate if you will of how the overall industry is doing especially in like a slow period it's nice to see is this an industry-wide thing is it some seasonality thing or is it specific to our Channel maybe we need to step it up now for paid features kind of the same ones again I really like the daily ideas and I think the daily ideas get significantly better better with the paid version not because the ideas themselves are better but because you can look at a bunch at one time and scroll through with the free version often the first two you're not going to even like them anyway so they might feel kind of overly basic or just not be ideas you want to do or maybe you've already thought of them but with the paid version you get to look at a lot at once and that really helps with the brainstorming process especially if you kind of mix and match them and come up with your own ideas based on little bits from different ideas they have and you can just look at more at once get more ideas at one time is it worth it to pay for the paid version for that it depends obviously on how much you think you need it how much you want that convenience again I think you can get about the same thing from Chachi BT it's just much less convenient than it is in vid IQ the next thing I like about the paid version is the competitor analysis you get to compare yourself against a lot of channels at once and that's pretty helpful to see an overall big picture and gives you more ideas of who to collaborate with okay so you might have noticed that those are the same ones that were my favorite features of the free plan and they are slightly better in the paid version now there there are some features that you can only get with a paid plan but I don't actually find them to be all that impressive I have nothing against it IQ in fact I think it's an awesome tool because you can get some really helpful things for absolutely free I just don't know if the paid plan is worth it for most people okay but I promise you we would talk about the AI so let's get into that because this one was a doozy I was pretty shocked by what happened so they have this new AI thing and they looks like they're putting a lot of work into it it's a big portion of the whole home page on vid IQ now so they have this whole AI like Suite there's a lot of different features in it they have things like Channel audits video ideas and they'll even script out your videos so those are some pretty neat features and I had to do a channel audit and it gave me some advice that was kind of helpful slightly generic it was definitely pulling some data from our YouTube channel in fact it said that we have a mostly male audience so we should work on making more content that appeals to our female audience now for this channel specifically that probably makes sense but let's say you had a niche targeting um stay-at-home dads well that's not going to make sense right so they're taking your data and drawing a conclusion which may or may not be right or I should say the AI is taking your Channel's data and drawing a conclusion there's two factors that one is that you can already get that information from the YouTube analytics itself you don't need a vid IQ extension you can go find that data on your channel already the other thing is it's probably better for you to draw your own conclusions because in the example I just gave they're not always right it might give you some good ideas though now I wanted to see how it would do with Community post ideas because a while ago I tried asking chat gbt for Community post ideas and it really didn't seem to know much about what a YouTube Community to post was it almost just gave me ideas for something that would be good for like a social media post but definitely not specific to community posts now chat EBT seems to have figured out what YouTube Community posts are much better so it gives pretty good ideas I love using chat GPT for ideas for Community posts and I wanted to ask a similar question on FedEx you and so I went over to the tab where it says that it gets your channel data click that and then I asked this question because I wanted to see how it would do in another Niche that wasn't YouTube strategy specific I wasn't actually trying to check it but let's look at what happened so I asked give me a community post idea for a Channel about Legos that I could use AI said based on your Channel's recent performance and Niche I have a community post idea for you since your channel is about Legos you could create a post asking your audience to share their favorite Lego sets or Creations they built recently this will encouragement engagement interaction blah blah I get that I kind of put it in a tough spot but I would have been way more impressed if it said something like I don't have enough data to give you an answer on this or based on your Channel's data this doesn't seem relevant to your Niche or based on your Channel's data I can't give you anything helpful I wish it would have recognized in some way that it didn't know rather than kind of pretend like it's a scripted canned answer that it did know that my channel was about Legos even though I was on the telemakers account and channel makers is not about Legos I don't want to be too hard on it it is still in the beta version and it's AI so you can only expect so much but I just think it's really important to not overestimate how much it's using your Channel's data to come up with this information if this is being helpful at all please give it a like I would really appreciate it thank you so what of these tools is actually worth using there are a lot of different tools and you might find different ones useful than I did so I definitely suggest that you get the free version and even maybe sign up for the paid version with our super steep discount it makes it practically free for the first month just don't forget to cancel maybe even put a reminder on your phone so that you don't forget and accidentally get charged for something you're not using we honestly don't use many of these features at all we use a thumbnail one like every day but as far as the daily ideas and even the competitor analysis we've used it a handful of times over the last couple years probably like once every three to six months so honestly like we just don't use it that much even though it's helpful could we use it more yes but if we're not using it even though we've kind of been trying to use it I'd be really really hesitant to tell anybody that they need it and I just really want to give you an honest review so we also have two other videos about similar topics so we have a tubebuddy one that just came out this week where we do an in-depth analysis of tubebuddy and then also a vid IQ versus tubebuddy where we put them head to head and compare all the features and which one comes out on top with each thing so check those out and we'll see you there [Music]