Action Lab Shorts, teaching physics on YouTube & TikTok

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Today’s creator is James Orgill (and his family) aka The Action Lab! Orgill takes science lab experiments and explains them on TikTok & YouTube! They’re incredibly educational, well done and very entertaining.

With that, let’s just jump into it.

Meet James Orgill, a mid-30s year old process engineer at Intel Corporation who is the man behind the YouTube channel, The Action Lab and Action Lab Shorts.

Orgill holds a bachelors and PhD degree in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University . He currently lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his wife, Joanna, and kids where they make videos together. The Orgills think of their YouTube channel as a side hustle or just another family project. During the day, they both have their 9-5s and they spend the evening time (after putting the kids to sleep) on filming and editing the YouTube videos.

Humble Beginnings

The Action Lab actually has two YouTube channels and a TikTok page at actionlabshorts. We’ll quickly go over each but mainly focus on the original YouTube channel, The Action Lab.

The channel has over 3.5M subscribers and over 700M views. Their first video was uploaded 5 years ago on May 16, 2016. It’s a video of a golfball being pressed by a Hydraulic Press. A 2 minute video of a golf ball being crushed. 

The videos evolved over time (mostly under the weight of the hydraulic press for the first few) and new items were introduced. From silly string to marbles to coins, the first 10-20 videos were short 2-3 minute videos of items being crushed under the hydraulic press.

Why The Format Works

From a storytelling perspective, the beginning, middle and end of the video is quite easy to understand for the viewer.

Beginning - I have an item & I want to see it crushed.

Middle - it is being crushed, look how cool it is inside said item (s)

End - Item has been crushed, neat.

It also has an easy thread to follow thru the video when you’re watching it. Hmm, I wonder what is inside of a golfball? What happens to coins when crushed by a 40,000 pound hydraulic press? There’s a built in question-answer format that makes it intriguing for the viewer.

The next big video that crushed views

After uploading a few of these, one of them took off to the tune of 1M views, the coins & hydraulic press video. This was after 1 month of uploading videos.

The video currently sits at 1.1M views (compared to the previous hydraulic press videos that are in the 2-3K range). In short, this video crushed it.

That said, it wasn’t the main catalyst to consistently getting those views for videos. It did help get an initial push of subscribers to the channel but the views were inconsistent. What remained was the consistency. The next few videos did decently well to the tune of 2-3K views and then another one popped off to 2.7M views.

You can see the “Toilet Paper Tuned Back to Solid Wood” video hit 2.7M views but even then the views were fairly inconsistent. To date, the channel has 657 videos and only 1% of them have over 1M views. It’s a story of being consistent and not worrying about whether each video has the right hooks and pacing and content. The best part about the Action Lab videos is their curiosity and educational content. It’s not a vlog, it’s not a giveaway or fight video, it’s for educational purposes.

A Quick Side Note on The Three C’s

The Action Lab did many things very well, but the main thing they’ve done incredibly well is abide by the Three C’s.

Content, Consistency & Community.

Any creator who wants to make content and build an audience needs all three done well to see some traction. Your content needs to be engaging, you need put it out consistently and you need to engage/build a community behind the content. Doing all three means your community can expect your content on a consistent basis. The next thing they did would be just that where they would engage their worldwide community thru a product.

Growing an Idea into a Business

The channel didn’t start taking off until late 2018. And even then, they had just over 1M subscribers. The main question is aside from YouTube ad revenue, how to make money?

While most YouTube personalities can have a myriad of income streams from brand deals, courses, lightroom presets, ad sense and more, the Orgill’s channel was different. They both have 9-5s and wanted to keep them. And what that meant was having to navigate the tricky waters of what can and can’t be done.

In multiple videos, they’ve emailed companies and wanted to do experiments and had free items shipped to them, but it seems like the majority of the time and effort is really just them spending from their own pocket for education. I’ve watched over ~20 videos of theirs and there doesn’t really seem to be sponsors.

Anyway, as you can see from above, the main growth happened in 2019 and 2020 where the YouTube channel started ballooning to over 2.5M and eventually passing 3M subscribers in 2021. To date, they upload twice a week and have 3.41M subscribers.

Writing a Book

While making all these YouTube videos, the Orgill’s got tons of requests in the YouTube comment section, emails, tweets and more about writing a book for kids. Teachers wanted to use the book to teach their own classes and take the same experiment setups and use the YouTube videos to teach basic science concepts in a fun, entertaining way. So, in late 2018, they did just that, they started writing a book. And in just a few months (read about a year), they released it! The title is Extreme Garage Science For Kids and you can purchase it here.

A quick note: books are incredibly difficult and tedious in my opinion to write. However, if your content lends itself to writing a book, then go for it. Books are one of the few mediums that take zero input but will always gain audiences. For example, this book was written in 2019 and has timeless experiments for kids to learn science. 10 years from now, it’ll still hold up and sell. Think of the Harry Potter books (yes it’s an unfair example, bear with me). Harry Potter books take zero effort from JK Rowling, the author but kids love it and each year they’re introduced, the books sell.

Books take a lot of upfront labor costs but can have multi-year dividends in terms of passive income. So, if your content allows it, consider writing a book as a creator.

Transferring to TikTok & Shorts

Now this is where I actually found out about this creator, on TikTok. Like anyone, I was on my For You Page and came across a slinky video. And then I went down the rabbit hole. On TikTok, actionlabshorts has 300K followers, which compared to YouTube is close to nothing. There’s over 10,000 accounts on TikTok that have over 1M followers and probably the same number on YouTube. That said, it’s much harder to hit 1M subscribers on YouTube than it is to hit 1M followers on TikTok.

But the action doesn’t stop there. The TikToks are short and fast-paced and as any video library, some pop off and get picked up by the algorithm and some don’t. You can see it above where some videos have millions of views and others don’t. The idea is to always be consistent and in this case, educational and entertaining.

With the new TikTok account also came a YouTube shorts channel, Action Lab Shorts. The channel currently has 835K subscribers and is mainly reposts from TikTok to YouTube to take advantage of YouTube shorts and hit a different audience that may not be on TikTok. YouTube is currently pushing shorts videos a lot to users and even has a new interface entirely for viewing shorts on mobile. It’s a smart move by someone who has a lot of content and can easily clip out highlights from previous or new videos and cross-post to TikTok and YouTube.

So, what’s next for The Action Lab?

Well, only time will tell. Orgill still works at Intel as a process engineer during the day. And doesn’t seem to have any plans of leaving. The Orgills have also started including their kids here and there in a few videos. It’s become quite the family activity to make these videos, so if I had to guess, I’d say the kids will start helping out with making content (if they haven’t done so already).

You can subscribe to the Action Lab below and checkout Action Lab Shorts on YouTube and on TikTok.

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Thanks so much for reading & I’ll see you on Wednesday with the latest creator news!