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Galante has 2.5 million YouTube subscribers. He’s been producing wildlife programming for more than a decade, including a docuseries on Animal Planet and a show on the History Channel. He owns his own production company. Generally speaking, Galante’s got a good feel for what his audience wants. 

But it was Galloway, something of a guru in the still-burgeoning YouTube creator economy, who identified that whenever Galante showed turtles in his videos, viewer engagement dropped. It was consistent and significant.

“Maybe it’s just turtles are more commonplace and they’re kind of slow and they don’t really do much,” Galloway said in an interview. “We noticed three or four videos in a row, when Forrest was showing turtles, the viewers were just kind of disengaged, and they were leaving.”

This is the kind of insight that many of the most popular YouTube creators, including Jimmy Donaldson, known to the world as MrBeast, and sports creator Jesse Riedel, also known as Jesser, have paid Galloway to provide. 

As YouTube creatorship cracks open millions, or potentially even billions, of dollars for the most-watched personalities, Galloway has made a name for himself as one of the best of a growing class of YouTube consultants — a bona fide YouTube whisperer.

“I think he’s an absolute genius,” said Galante. 

“Super smart guy,” Riedel told CNBC.

“I don’t want to say Paddy has changed my life completely,” said Humphrey Yang, a former financial advisor whose YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers. “But he’s definitely helped a lot.”

YouTube will showcase many of its top creators on Wednesday in New York City’s Lincoln Center for its annual upfront advertising presentation, which it calls Brandcast. Like YouTube’s influence in modern media, the event has grown in size and prestige every year as YouTube’s viewership share rises.

YouTube makes up 12.7% of all streaming in the U.S., according to Nielsen’s most recent “The Gauge” report. Netflix is second with 8.4%, followed by Disney with 5%.

Sixty-seven million people consider themselves online content creators, according to a 2025 Goldman Sachs report. That number could rise to more than 100 million by 2030, Goldman estimates.

About 10,000 U.S. YouTube channels have more than 1 million subscribers, according to a YouTube spokesperson. For many of these creators, YouTube can be a lucrative full-time job. But to make a business out of the largely free platform, videos need to get consistent clicks — preferably in the millions.

With YouTube’s recommendation algorithm constantly evolving, many creators have been turning to strategists to maintain success on the platform.

“From zero [subscribers] to 1 million, you don’t need it, but from 1 million to 10 million, or 1 million to 100 million, you definitely need a strategist,” Aniket Mishra, a YouTube growth strategist, told CNBC.

In recent years, videos best watched on TV, rather than on mobile devices, have surged in popularity as YouTube has taken over more and more connected-TV viewing, rivaling subscription streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+.

Creators say the Alphabet-owned platform has responded by favoring longer videos, often exceeding 30 minutes. That shift means higher production value and bigger investment from creators. It also means the potential to earn more money.

Since 2021, YouTube has paid out over $100 billion to creators, and an increasing share of that money is flowing to those producing content for bigger screens, YouTube said. The number of channels earning more than $100,000 from TV screens jumped 45% year over year, the company reported.

Regardless, success on the platform remains a simple task of getting viewers through the door, and these strategists maintain that they are the best equipped to optimize a creator’s videos.

“The reason people pay us top dollar is because we have been doing it for the longest, and we have the best success rate,” Galloway said. “Our average increase in views after a year — so, year-on-year after working with us — is 350%.”

Galloway’s interest in YouTube consulting began out of self-interest. He started posting YouTube videos of his own in 2006, just a year after the service first began, and wanted to figure out why certain videos went viral so his own could gain popularity, he told CNBC. 

Within a few years, Galloway’s search for the ingredients of virality became the subject of his videos. He began creating self-dubbed “YouTube Masterclass” videos such as “How Peter McKinnon gained 1 million subscribers in under 1 year” and “Here’s How Mr Beast BLEW UP - How He Grew His YouTube Channel.”

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