I’ve found that content quality is much more important than posting consistency. This is because there’s a nonlinear relationship between views & quality. For example a video that is twice as good might be capable of getting 10 times as many views. If that’s true it implies that (within reason) spending more time to make a better video is the best strategy. Intuitively this makes sense: would it be better to make 1 mediocre video every day consistently OR 1 really good video every 1-3 weeks that gets 100x the views.
I’ve heard the argument that YouTube rewards consistency, but I am anything but consistent with my videos [1](every 1-3 months) and I haven’t noticed any negative consequences.
This is absolutely crazy. OP is like asking for acting advice from internet randos. Suddenly, Al Pacino drops in!
stuffmadehere is famous shit. Middle schoolers watch it in the classroom because the science teacher plays this. He has millions of subscribers & each show ( I refuse to call it video. Its a proper show. ) is very professionally done. It's so popular, if you were in India & you were speaking in Hindi, you would legit be on TV. Over there people are glued to content because some guy is explaining centrifugal force in hindi with some string & tincan. Meanwhile, look at your production values! Huge respect. Thanks for everything you do.
As someone who spends a bunch of time paying attention to the YouTube meta, "consistency" is a virtue that's been professed for a long time, but YouTube has been pretty clear that it's not a factor in how recommendations work.
I still think it's decent advice for new YouTubers, because you only get better at a thing by doing it a lot, and over time. The value of consistency isn't in the algorithmic properties, but instead in developing the skills that lead to quality.
It’s also worth noting that the algorithm is not the only meta and posting consistently might be more or less expected depending on your audience, topic and so on.
Absolutely, each audience has different expectations for what "quality" even means. Though I'm not really sure where "the algorithm" (I kinda hate how anthropomorphized it is) doesn't play into even in your scenario. Browse and Search are the two largest ways to grow traffic, and both are algorithmic to different degrees... unless you just mean like, growth is not a goal on YouTube for you, in which case, yeah you can just ignore all of this for sure.
But the language used around this topic is often implying that "the algorithm" will "punish you" if you like, post too often, post too little, post at different times... and I personally believe that that is empirically demonstrated to be not the case, and is also something YouTube (at least lately, I've only been paying close attention for a year or two) has never implied is important. And they've said things that imply that it's totally irrelevant, recommendation wise.
> But the language used around this topic is often implying that "the algorithm" will "punish you" if you like, post too often, post too little, post at different times...
These are all kinda true though?
- If you post too often your notifications get bundled, so now it's "x published two videos" instead of "x published that amazing video",
- if you post too little then people are less likely to recognize your username and thus just not click on it unless the creator really left an impression (this is probably the most dependent on the audience however).
- if you post at differing times you suddenly have to increase your audience significantly as your usual watchers won't be on YouTube at that moment, so you're effectively missing out on the initial upvotes by your fanbase until much later, reducing the chance of the video going into trending.
I mean they're not the only variables and they become pretty much non-issues as the channel grows, but all of these effects can be directly measured in clicks when the audience is still pretty small
I would agree with that. I've been posting consistently every day, at the same time for 8 months and hasn't seen much return.
But my vids are highly automated and pretty niche weather content, so wouldn't expect it to go crazy either.
https://www.youtube.com/@aussiefromspace
I'm pretty happy, as a user that YouTube no longer pushes constancy over quality.
Another value in consistency is that when people are browsing aimlessly, they know when they can check your channel for new content. If I check some channel for new content a few times and there is none (and no indication of any coming), I will simply forget about it. Not intentionally. Someone else who posts predictably will have captured my idle time.
As my sibling says, this may be how some users use youtube, generally these views ("channel page views" is the term used in the analytics) are a small minority of overall views.
In fact, this sort of behavior you're talking about is one of the reasons why "the algorithm" is a thing. If there's something you'd like to watch, but you've forgotten about it, it's YouTube's job to surface it to you, even if you've forgotten. This is one of the reasons why browse is the default view and not your subscribers feed, for example.
> I’ve found that content quality is much more important than posting consistency.
I know "The Algorithm" gets a lot of hate, but surfacing quality-over-quantity content is one place where recommendation algorithms excel over pure chronological feeds.
When I switched Twitter to chronological mode, I had to unfollow several people because they posted all day long. The most valuable Tweets I wanted to see were buried in the noise. The algorithmic feed is far from perfect, but it does a good job of highlighting posts I've missed from people I've interacted with previously. It takes some time to see the algorithm with enough likes and interactions, and it won't work if you never click the like button, but it's actually not half bad once it's up and running.
Reddit is another platform where quantity over quality prevails. If you click through to the post history of people who get content to the front page, it's basically a firehose of posts using recycled content and slightly altered headlines to as many subreddits as they can get away with. Eventually one of them clicks and rises to the top, but by that point the headline is often so mangled into clickbait that it doesn't accurately reflect the content of the article. Redditors don't really read articles, though, so it doesn't matter. Spam away.
> If you click through to the post history of people who get content to the front page, it's basically a firehose of posts using recycled content and slightly altered headlines to as many subreddits as they can get away with.
I’ve seen this too. It seems like a lot of work and I’m unclear what the reward is. It isn’t like most of that content is pimping some brand of burger or something…
It's nice that Twitter allows you to switch modes. Normally I'm in chronological mode, but I can go to the mobile.twitter.com site on desktop too, and that is in the "Algorithm" mode. So it's pretty easy to just swap and see if I'm feeling in the mood to let the algorithm discover new things for me / catch some interesting replies or likes of people I follow / etc. It'd be interesting to go full power user with more customization and easy swapping, but such features don't tend to last if they ever get implemented in the first place...
> I know "The Algorithm" gets a lot of hate, but surfacing quality-over-quantity content is one place where recommendation algorithms excel over pure chronological feeds.
Do you find great content on youtube via YT's recommendations? I practically never have, everything I like I've stumbled upon on other sites where something is discussed and a channel is mentioned, or from someone who's work I like mention someone else. YT's recommendations have always been garbage for me, so I eventually just hid them completely because it's mostly noise.
I personally have found some excellent content through YT's recommendations. For example, the algorithm introduced me to LockPickingLawyer, Taskmaster, and Jet Lag: The Game.
Your videos are awesome. I've watched every one of them multiple times. I love when you go deep into the technical details of the problems / solutions you run into (especially with your code) -- especially in _integration hell_.
I'm sure not-your-entire audience is interested in these things. Have you ever considered making a second channel where you go into more detail about the details of the technical problems / solutions you run into? The videos could be a lot less well produced, I'm just desperate for the info.
Perhaps it varies by category. I think your "mad-science" niche disproportionally rewards quality because (1) there's a high barrier to entry, (2) each project stands up on its own, and (3) your channel already has a positive loop of subscribers.
You have infinitely more Youtube experience than I do (love your videos, by the way!), but maybe those other categories are in your blindspot, just like they are not in my Youtube suggestions.
I'd expect vloggers, celebrities, podcasters, game streamers, political pundits, etc to benefit more from consistent uploads. More videos = more rolls of the viral dice, and furthermore frequency is required for building up fame, parasocial relationships, or just reliably filling the silence during commute.
"reliably filling the silence during commute" - this has never made sense to me. There are an infinite number of creators I can subscribe to. So I can always have unwatched content available just by subscribing to creators with high signal-to-noise ratio.
Do normal users tend to just subscribe to a smaller number of channels, so they want channels that publish a lot?
Your new videos are a family night event at my house, complete with popcorn. There are so many great ones, but the chainsaw robot is our favorite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix68oRfI5Gw. That and the "robotically perfect mullet." And we all say "Oh wa cool."
In short, thank you for your awesome videos and take your time to keep the quality so high!
It’s good to see you here! I totally agree with quality there (although not from personal experience) but taking as an example your videos, Idk how you first came up with the idea of the “wife mode” but now your video have gone from something I totally nerd on to something I call my wife to watch with me, which she does with minimal eye rolls and actually enjoyment from her part! Haven’t found that many other maker channels that I share with her (with the obvious exception of Simone Giertz!)
Not a maker channel, but Technology Connections fills a similar niche in our household. Simultaneously in-depth enough for me and accessible and interesting for my wife.
Brother you literally are the definition of quality over quantity. I've never seen anyone else rise so fast in the youtube world as yourself, especially on the back of only a handful of videos. Really incredible work from a truly inspiring engineer. Keep it up.
You post extremely good quality videos. I agree with your arguments. Every time you drop a video, I make sure to watch it. It would not be the case if you posted everyday.
Yeah, and I believe the reason for this behavior is the fact people subscribe if they found a video worthwhile. Then, once they're subscribed, they'll check their feed every once in a while and it will contain recommendations based on which channels they're subscribed to. It then doesn't matter how often you post or when (quantity), it is all about whether the video interests them (quality).
The mistake here is thinking that high quantity / low quality would lead to satisfied customers; not in the long term. When the quality is too low they'll unsub, simple as that.
My problem with YouTube videos in general is they don't cut to the point. They have too much fanfare around the point, stuff which does not interest me. I expect such behavior in advertising, not in content. To me, it lowers the quality of the content because it lowers the signal-to-noise ratio.
This was my first thought as well. However, it’s worth noting that your videos are _exceptionally_ good. I drop everything to watch one when it comes out.
There's also a confounding factor in pushing yourself to do a lot of videos all at once: you may get some good practice in. Are you getting more views after a few months of consistently publishing videos because you are consistently publishing videos, or because you are getting better at making interesting videos?
I don't know if this is true, but I've heard the algorithm has changed over the years - in 2015 during peak Vlog, there wasn't much content on Youtube made by creators targeting (and putting professional-level effort into) the platform, so the algorithm rewarded creators that were creating enough content to really hold a user on Youtube.
Now, there's enough content that the algorithm favors quality more, because YT can more easily keep a user by recommending similar content from a different creator of a higher quality.
.. again, no idea if that's true, but it does feel like it makes sense.
As a consumer of YouTube videos, I couldn't agree with you more.
I think the consistency of popping out videos on the regular is about working the algorithm and grinding out content for views, and with those views: ad dollars. I've seen too many channels just turn into churning really awful, boring, long videos with little in the way of direction in the hopes you'll just mindlessly watch it. But I think the math just works out better (marginally) to pump out low-effort, low-value content more often than for example, what you are creating. And like I said: blame the algorithm.
Wow I see what you mean. I was planning on cutting down to 1 video a week once my channel had grown a bit but I can see from your channel that quality > quantity so I might do that sooner! Thank you.
I wonder if Youtubers are mistaking consistency with quality? They don't realize that their consistent production is causing an increase in their quality (via practice/learning)
Hey there, would you be open to discussing how you became such an amazing maker?
I work with an org that funds and supports a really large community of young makers (mostly young people in their teens, but we also have folks in their mid-twenties and beyond). I'd love to talk to you about how you honed your skills. A lot of them watch your videos and I suspect they would be really interested in reading about how you honed your skills and achieved your currently glorious skillset. (I would be too!)
More and more, Youtube's algorithm seems to surface a mix of newer and older stuff. The "Caipirinha" and "Caramelldansen" meme videos from the late 2000's have reappeared on my recommended's, and Gen Z accounts are commenting on them too.
So I agree that quality is an important factor. While there has to be some weighting to favor the needs of advertisers in play, it's not as strong lately as it has been.
> I’ve found that content quality is much more important than posting consistency
If anyone is giving you any kind of marketing or content distribution advice, and at no point do they mention product-market fit, or content quality, then they are selling you a dream.
Maybe if you are starting is good strategy to have consistency with weekly uploads? And later when you build a small audience, yes, you can apply your strategy of quality over quantity.
Then there's channels like stuffmadehere that consistently produce hit videos, due to their superb quality. It's not luck if you can do it many times over.
Do you want your life to revolve around whether or not you can keep the lowest common denominator entertained for 10 minutes at a time? Spending (maybe) hours and hours of your life every week doing nothing but video editing?
If the answer is, "no" then you're never going to be "a YouTuber" (that makes enough money to live from your channel).
I highly recommend doing what I do: Post videos because you want to help people, not entertain them. Also, every now and again I'll post a video just because making videos can be fun but it's fun for me... Whether everyone else has fun with it is mostly irrelevant :)
If I make a few bucks from my tutorial videos about how to make an analog hall effect keyboard that'd be nice but really, I made them so I could point people to the video series to save myself a lot of time explaining things in chat messages. If enough people use those videos to gain that skill maybe we can move the world off of electromechanical switch technology (aka "cave man switches") some day.
You don't need a lot of editing if you produce useful content that's not filmed with a potato. Any time I post a car repair video, I get 100x the views of anything else I've done. No real editing is needed, other than stitching a few video clips together.
Thanks for writing about your experience! I think too many educated / computer science focused creators get demotivated when they see the kind of low brow "viral" content that's plaguing youtube currently (yes, I mean Mr. Beast). Mr. Beast type content is to me more mind numbing than TikTok - it makes creators like Logan Paul and low brow comedy podcasts look like academics in comparison.
I recently started dipping my toes in AI again, even building some tooling for GPU deployments for stable diffusion etc after a friend (less technical) ended up with a GPU mining farm that was burning a $60k hole in his pocket every month when ETH mining dried up.
As a result, I found a curious niche and started making admittedly not very good videos of me attempting to create more approachable AI text to image content for a slightly less technical audience.
I've been pleasantly surprised by how warm, interested and excited my small audience has been.
I'm working on some internal projects as a part of my channel, a big part are some active developments with the Stable Hoard project.
Edit - goes without saying, many of my early videos are really bad, my speech is hard to follow etc. Ironically since I'm full remote, this has actually helped rehab my speech a bit and give me something technical outside of work to do sort of creative things with. I'd be lying if I didn't intend to turn this into a revenue stream at some point, probably starting with a mailing list.
I don't necessarily take issue with your point overall, but I have to take issue with your calling out of Mr. Beast. Have you seen how much money Mr. Beast gives out to people? There are people just buying cars with their YT money, but he puts most of it back into his channel & directly in the hands of everyday people. I really don't understand how you could say he makes Logan Paul look like an academic.
Also, he's pretty savy with growing his audience. I'm not aware of very many people who translate their videos into (some) other languages, particularly using somewhat-well-known voice actors.
Yes, but the reason he's giving away money is for views . It's why charity for views is in my opinion kind of degenerate - arguably using poor people to make money but saving face because giving away money.
I think a more positive way to think about MrBeast's behavior of giving away money isn't that he's doing it for views, but that he's doing it for fun.
There is a documentary about how actor Bill Murray will occasionally spend a bunch of money on a random stranger that he meets in public.
I see this trend of rich YTers giving away free money as evidence that the creator economy has lowered the barrier to entry to philanthropy, in the same way that the assembly line lowered the barrier to entry to car ownership.
No longer do you have to be a cutthroat oil baron to have enough disposable to make it rain on a stranger every now and then. You can just get YT rich and famous.
Now, I say this having only viewed one of his free money videos. But from what I saw the participants were well treated and appeared to be having fun.
I would argue that he is strictly the better guy than a chocolate factory owner who is otherwise indistinguishable from Willy Wonka but who just pockets all the cash instead.
That's an interesting question. Here is my amateur psychoanalyst take on Wonka. This is based on the Gene Wilder version of Wonka. It is the one with which I am most familiar.
Wonka was a shut in with sociopath tendencies. He hates other people because they're infinitely less intelligent than him. They see him as magical because of the things he creates, but to him the inventions are obvious. Other fictional characters with this trait: Rick Sanchez, Elwood Ralson.
He is a creative who wants to quit his job (maybe he got bored, or just got more interested in his Great Glass Elevator). But he doesn't want to close his business, because if he does that then the chocolate world will be taken over by the uncreative people that he hates. He doesn't care about his customers, he just cares about the creative process of chocolate-craft. Also, he loves his employees because they share his love of hard work, and he probably feels like a parent to them since he saved them from the horrors of their homeland.
He wants to find someone to take over his business. Someone who he knows will be capable of the creativity that he is. He hates children a little bit less than adults, so he concocts an elaborate factory tour/job interview because it was the only possible way for him to interview children.
So my answer the question, is Wonka the good guy, is yes. Because he worked hard to ensure that his creative process for chocolate-craft would continue to exist in the world after he was gone. He is an inventor that loved his invention.
Plus any harm that could have possibly be done to his factory guests, could easily be undone by his "magic". Just like Rick Sanchez.
How is he using "poor people"? Everyday people are "poor people"? I think that says more about you than him.
Yes, the views fund what he gives away. But until you or I start dedicating our lives to making money to give away, I don't think either of us has a leg to stand on and criticize him [for this specifically].
If you watch the larger section of the video, you can see there's a whole section labeled as his 'Evil Mr. Beast' persona. Literally at the end of the teaser section he says "I could keep going, but they might believe it" https://youtu.be/YhRRny_sHYw?t=92.
They also hit on subjects such as people claiming Mr Beast ruins people's lives by giving them gifts for which they can't afford to pay the associated taxes. And he makes it clear how he will buy back items so the person just ends up with cash, to pay the taxes and keep. Or they can keep it or sell it themselves.
You can certainly argue his satire was in bad taste. I'm not trying to gas up Mr Beast or claim that he doesn't engage in attention-seeking behavior. Such as this, look at how we're over here talking about him, spreading his brand.
But, as long as he's using that brand to drive views, to have fun making videos and engage in some sort of neo-grassroots philanthropy I don't see how he's the plague of video content.
To be honest, Oprah's content in my opinion was miles better than Mr. Beast's. She was at least conducting interviews, having conversations etc.
At least her videos weren't, "look at minecraft funny game - my friend made a poop sound hehe" or "omg look at kiddy pool filled with ORBEEZ FUN TIME"
Candidly, with a hilariously not successful youtube but a solid career - I find it funny to imagine Mr. Beast "spending hours" coming up with "next level content" which in reality you'd be better off just paying a 7 year old with jolly ranchers to do.
Even if he was only giving away money for views (something I disagree with along the same lines as others) - why is that a bad thing exactly? How is it malicious to actually help people?
Not the person you are replying to, but here is my view of this.
From all I've seen and know about MrBeast, he is an upstanding guy doing great things that help others. I absolutely respect that and believe it is worth of praise.
However, I find the content itself to be absolutely not my cup of tea. Not in a sense that i find it bad or distasteful. There are tons of other "YT philanthropy" influencers that make content that feels either distasteful or exploitative (even if it might not actually be), but his content isn't that. I just struggle to find it interesting enough to watch. I tried a few times, but it simply cannot hold my attention at all.
This isn't MrBeast's fault, as he clearly has a massive audience that enjoys watching his content. It just simply isn't the content for me.
He’s giving away a lot of money and being helpful and doesn’t seem like a bad/malicious person. Still the content is so low tier (not production values) and just doesn’t appeal to me.
>I think too many educated / computer science focused creators get demotivated when they see the kind of low brow "viral" content that's plaguing youtube currently
new content creators should try to not be discourage by this. at youtube's scale there will always be viral lowbrow content because that's what the majority of general public wants to consume. if your content is good and consistent the relevant people who follows your area will eventually find it from their algo.
I certainly agree - I still think most creators underestimate the necessity of putting in some leg-work to understand your audience and attaching your channel to a niche that has an existing audience at all.
Something that I ended up doing by accident was identifying a niche that a) was low risk (nothing political etc), b) had decent reach, and c) ended up with most of my traffic coming from "browse" and not "search".
Initially, I had no idea traffic coming from "browse" was indicative of content that would likely drive more long-term value outside of "news" videos.
Ironically, videos that feature community drama unfortunately still are my best performing videos.
> many educated / computer science focused creators get demotivated when they see the kind of low brow "viral" content that's plaguing youtube currently (yes, I mean Mr. Beast).
We're talking about a platform whose first big success was "Charlie bit my finger". There's some useful information there but it's never been Wikipedia.
Nice I have subscribed. I think any content about AI would probably do well with all the hype around GPT-3 at the moment. Yes speaking in front of a camera is really difficult. There is literally hours of recordings of me trying to say the same thing over and over again that gets cut.
I would be cautious about going down this road. For context, I have YT channel with >12k subscribers that is also for technical content. When I was similarly early on, I found myself in a similar place, thinking a lot about growth and metrics. I came to realize that I was playing the game that YT wanted me to play, to their benefit.
Since chasing "more" never ends, and every surpassed hurdle results in yet another one in the distance, it can quickly lead to burnout and asking yourself questions like, "why am I even doing this?". Worse, focusing too much on the metrics can cause you to do things that are ultimately counter-productive. For example, making a ton of videos optimized for clicking so that I could get 1M subscribers and monetize with ads is clearly a thing YT would like me to do. But to do that, you lean a little more into click-baity things, and start choosing topics based on their likelihood of being successful from a metrics perspective. And since frequency matters, you maybe cut corners on videos because it often makes more sense to put out more of lower quality than less of high quality if the objective is maximizing metrics. But then what are you left with, and are you proud of it?
If I could do it again, I would spent more time on answering the "what's it for?" question, and then ignore the metrics unless your answer ends up being, "To become the Mr. Beast of X". In my experience, the best benefits have been 1/ the serendipitous view that impresses someone and leads to a real-world opportunity and 2/ pride and reputational benefits in having the best video on a particular topic that then becomes the standard, and adds lots of value to lots of people. Those benefits are realized by taking care and making the best videos you possibly can, not by optimizing the metrics.
Almost all channels, even the ones technically focused, are now using clickbait thumbnails to the point that I installed a firefox add-on to replace the original thumbnail by a random thumbnail from the video. Not always at the advantage of the youtuber...
> "To become the Mr. Beast of X"
Not knowing Mr Beast this sentence sounds more like a pornhub advice :D
The announcement that he was the highest-paid YouTuber was literally the first time I had heard of him as a YouTuber. I had occasionally heard reference to his name on some other social media platforms, but never in any context that made me curious enough to find out what was going on.
I'm not a huge YouTube user. But I'm not a complete neophyte. I probably only go on about once a week. I've been on the site for... 14 YEARS?!
WHAT THE HELL?!
Anyway. YouTube is well known for keeping people in very, very specific bubbles. Those bubbles are so strong, you will have a very hard time to get out of them even if you don't want to be in them!
Still trying to figure out how to get YouTube to stop suggesting videos of people streaming their crappy Call of Duty sessions. I don't want to watch any game streaming, let alone CoD, and YouTube keeps sending me videos of people acting like they're gods when really they were just lucky this one time, or obscuring what really happened, or straight up cheating. It's maddening. Downvotes do nothing. Editing my history does nothing. I'm stuck in this incredibly stupid bubble.
I've been on YouTube for as long as YouTube has existed, but mostly use it to watch music videos, movie trailers, the video versions of podcasts I listen to, and sometimes a tutorial for DIY stuff I'm trying to do around the house. The only place I have ever even seen the name "Mr. Beast" is on Hacker News, and since I have never read those threads, I have no idea who he is or what he makes videos about.
He is currently the 7th most subscribed to YouTube channel, and the second most subscribed to if you're caring more about individual, personality driven channels than broader ones.
That you've never run into him on YouTube speaks to how the recommendation system works; given what you've watched, there's not a lot of reason to recommend him to you, so even though he's extremely popular, he's not clogging up your feed.
I just saw an article about how he averaged $1 MM a week in profit on his videos last year. He's probably not a billion-dollar brand yet, but he's probably at more than half way there.
Thank you for the warning. Yes it can get pretty addictive checking the numbers all the time. I have no intention of becoming the next Mr Beast so there is no worry there. I have a big list of technical topics I want to cover but there is definitely a worry that no one will watch them. I have been releasing 2 videos each week but I will likely cut this down to 1 once I have grown a bit more. Otherwise, I can definitely see it leading to burnout.
I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for their subject, but titles like '8 Data Structures in 10 minutes' make me lol.
Practically speaking the engagement-centric approach this post appears to advocate for is likely to fail in the long run, if the goal is to build something lasting and not just a short-term experiment. For example, one of the more successful and lasting computing tutorial Youtubers is TheCherno, basically focusing on C++ and game engines and graphics. Clearly, a lot of effort goes into each post, and even though they're perhaps not as frequent, over time they do very well:
I started posting videos regularly from March this year (probably had 10-20 subscribers before, now have 150+)
>If you watch some of my earlier videos there are a lot of “um’s” and “ers”...started with writing full scripts
I trained myself to go silent instead of ums/aahs/ers. I then changed how I recorded videos a bit so that I can simply use https://github.com/noisetorch/NoiseTorch to remove all the silent portions.
>Writing full scripts did have the benefit that they could more easily be converted into blog posts.
I'm kinda opposite. I was already consistently blogging and have now started adding videos (mostly for short tip posts, haven't tried for longer posts yet).
You can start out by adding purposeful pauses. At the end of a point you want to really hit hard, build in to your script you literally standing there and just thinking “pause,pause,pause,pause”. Then you get more comfortable doing it and can add it in with differing lengths where needed. Eventually with work you’ll start replacing ums with pauses.
Also, purposefully slowing down can help since you likely talk too fast when nervous anyway.
Not the OP, but for me it just took a bit of mindfulness while presenting, and the realization that your pauses seem way more unbearably long to you than they do to your audience.
Not sure if there's some technique to it. I got very conscious about the ums and aahs and practiced forcing myself to stop and stay silent. I was recording short videos (1-15 minutes) about 3-5 times a week and I guess just delibrate practice helped me.
For those doing this, be sure to check the settings and have someone watch the result - if you're "showing screen" it can be fine but if you're "showing face" and the end result makes you look like you're flickering in and out of existence and spazzing, it can be entirely distracting.
Good point about showing screen vs face differences. I do screen recordings - it is a bit jarring sometimes even after adjusting how I record taking into account that I'll be pruning silent parts.
I found the same thing when I was blogging and also running marketing for my small business.
How successful it was was almost directly dependent on my time commitment. These sorts of things almost always have a compounding sort of growth that benefits from lots of attention in a consistent timeframe.
The algorithms are also primed to show users something they already recently searched for or a profile you recently watched.
The odd content will rank well on Google and have maybe ~1-10yrs of extended viewership or traffic. But today's internet rewards newness.
This seems to encourage quantity over quality. I just imagine writing frequent blog posts and think the quality of insight (not writing, necessarily) would be inversely related to frequency of publishing.
This makes me think a text generating AI would (sadly) be a highly effective tool. I say "sadly" because I think about the front page of google's search results for something and all you see are meaningless blog posts which are written with buzzwords to satisfy SEO.
You may be doing it wrong, no sarcasm nor insult intended. You shouldn't be sitting down and racking your brain to generate one from scratch. You build up a set of functional templates, then poke over the templates for which one happens to fit this video best. It's one step up from the classic Mad Libs game [1], except you can tweak the stock phrases a little bit, too. I fully expect that all the biggest YouTubers either have, or have had, a literal list of title templates to use. You can of course build your list up in about 15 minutes of doomscrolling YouTube. (Possibly without being logged in.)
The clickbait is the result of an evolutionary process. You can't beat it de novo, you can only harness it.
It's one of the reasons it's so infuriating to some of us. "I Clicked This Link And You Won't Believe What Happened Next!" + Shocked Face is so easy it's almost insulting.
Not the GP, but I didn't click and rather decided to check the comments for a summary. Thankfully someone usually adds that for clickbait title articles.
Clicking on the headline on HN is still clicking on the headline.
It's a mystery, people are tortured by mysteries. "How the Contents of this Tiny Green Box Completely Changed My Priorities!"
There were one or more homeless teen spare-changers that loitered around Pioneer Square in Portland, OR in the 90s who would tell people riddles, and charge them for the answers.
They explained in a video why they do it… Most creators are explicit in why they do it. If they didn’t - their channel wouldn’t reach as far as it did otherwise.
Oh, I completely understand why they did it. And why they have the thumbnails of a person looking shocked at whatever the subject matter is.
But I hate it. The change is a tangible downgrade that cheapens the channels who do it. I'm glad for them that they have a larger reach, but I'm no longer a part of that reach because I can't stomach the chintzy thumbnails and titles designed to appeal to first-graders. I voted with my feet on that change.
same here. i straight up ignore these videos, no matter who posted it.
if you have to have an arrow pointed to something in your thumbnail. or have to make a shocking face, you do not value me or my time.
there are many other videos to watch. i have ignored many that follow this rather dumb trend. and i still can get to the bottom of my watch later, guys.
It's more like not reading a book because it has a flashy cover.
Sex sells but I won't buy a book about physics that has a woman in a bikini on the cover. It's about the signals you send as an author.
"Don't judge a book by its cover" is a lie-to-children; there's some truth to it, but if I were making a list of sayings we tell to children and how truthful it is, this one would actually be rather far down my list. Judging things by their cover is generally effective. The horde of exceptions stampeding into your mind and encouraging you to hit "Reply" and start to list them are exactly that: Exceptions.
There are, admittedly, rather a lot of them. I look over at my bookshelf and I could show you some myself. Nevertheless, it really is a better heuristic than a lot of people would care to admit.
Part of this is because covers have a lot of intentionality in them. People deliberately imbue them with information. I don't ignore them. Mind you, I might not come to the intended conclusions... to take one clear example, the intentional message being sent by romance book covers and the one I receive are fairly different. Nevertheless, in the end, both I and the publisher are generally satisfied by the transaction, even if they might prefer I buy it anyhow, I'm not in the target audience and they know that.
They made no assumptions about the content. They simply expressed a distaste for the cover.
To continue the analogy, there are plenty of physics textbook manufacturers, and not all of them decide to use sex to sell their textbooks. Choosing to not engage with a blatant marketing tactic and picking another textbook is a perfectly valid action for someone of any age.
As you pointed out above, presentation matters. Quite a bit. The tricky bit is that "matters" works in both directions. And the only method I have - that any of us has - when it comes to discouraging clickbait... is not to click.
Choosing to use what agency I have available to me is hardly childish.
I haven't posted it here yet as a "Show HN", because I don't think that I'm far enough along. But I have averaged more than one video a day since I started.
Disclaimer: This is 100% live coding in Vim. You are my rubber duck. I make mistakes. The most recent video will be going up soon, in which I track down a memory leak.
Last night I added "if..then" statements, but that video is not finished editing yet.
I don't have a massive following, and since I don't do the "fast paced, instant gratification" type of videos, I doubt that I'll ever develop a large following. But that's not the point. I wanted to put this out there simply because I thought that it should exist.
Also worth noting: This is not a copy of the "Crafting Interpreters" book by Robert Nystrom, although I think it's a great book!
Because sometimes it's about the journey as much as the destination.
Also, because it shows how software development actually happens. It shows how to solve syntax errors. How to think through problems. It shows the power of the tools. It demonstrates my ability, and also my lack thereof. It's why I love programming.
If you only want to see the finished product, then fine. There are plenty of products already in existence. But if you want to see how it's made, then you can now see that, too.
That, and I'm amazed at the power of things like Bison, Flex, Doxygen, ICU, Vim, etc., and it's a way to show it off.
It also shows how to approach the organization of a large project, and a few gems with the Makefile (in my opinion).
I know it's not for everyone, but I love stuff like this! I've watched people live code game engines, etc., but I couldn't find anything about coding a programming language. So I'm creating it myself.
I've learned a lot of shell and editor techniques from pair programming that I couldn't have picked up by cloning projects on GitHub and might never have stumbled across on my own. Sometimes they're even in the manual, but I haven't read the whole Vim manual. (Have you?)
James Hague wrote a thing about "coding as performance" 14 years ago that I think about pretty often: https://prog21.dadgum.com/28.html He's talking about cases where getting something crappy running fast is what matters most: "If you can write a program to solve the problem in less time than the tedium of slogging through the manual approach, then you win." I did this yesterday: I was trying to track down a segfault a coworker wanted more information about, and so I threw together a quick Python script (specific to this build of this program) that reformatted GDB's backtrace into something a little more comprehensible. It's dirty and probably nobody else will ever see it, but many people could have learned useful things if they'd had the chance to watch.
It can be entertaining to watch people who are much faster than I am.
That said, I've almost never watched anyone livecoding on a streaming video platform or on YouTube.
Same reason people watch video game players play games. Seeing exactly how experts do things, in real situations, can be valuable if you're trying to attain your own mastery. And entertaining if not.
Some people watch football, golf, or billiards. Some people watch poker or chess tournaments. Some people like to watch carpenters work or houses be remodeled.
I like to watch other people code. I assume that somewhere in the world there's other people like me.
In 2021 I did a live stream every Saturday for 52 weeks straight. It was actually a lot of fun as I was working on my side project most weekends anyway and I wanted to start streaming it. By the end of the first year I had about 1K subscribers, but most live streams still got the same viewership, if not less. I'm closing in on year 2 now and passed 2K subs recently.
I echo some of the comments here about posting videos about things you want and not trying to play the YouTube game. Every time I have tried I've felt greasy, and it rarely helped.
Even for my non-live stream videos, I almost always do them all in 1 go with no editing. It helps me get good at speaking, is more natural and take a lot less time to finish.
My biggest problem has been motivation and time. I feel like I have a lot of videos I want to discuss, but doing the videos requires a certain energy that I've had trouble firing up lately.
I've been contemplating creating YouTube videos like the Khan Academy ones, but for a niche area. The aim is to help students understand the subject, so I don't need a camera. But I do need some form of a touch device where I can write, draw graphs, show text, etc. and just record that. And there will be no monetization.
This is what I use - An inswan document camera is $99. itube studio is $20. Connect the inswan to your laptop. Now you can use regular paper pencil to write, draw graphs, show text, pictures etc. Use PhotoBooth to make a video, which is an mov. Then use itube studio to convert it to "Youtube" mp4, which has the right codec etc, & then upload to youtube.
Thanks! I was hoping to use my iPad to do the drawing, etc. as my drawing skills are non-existent. Is there a way to "screencast" an iPad screen and convert that into a video?
YouTube is definitely a platform where posting very often on a consistent basis is the easiest way to succeed there.
But at the same time it's also one where becoming successful often means suffering from crippling burnout, since it's very difficult to keep that schedule up without sacrificing everything else in your life, and forcing yourself to post content when you really didn't have any good ideas left. I know a lot of people that quit altogether because of that, or because of related issues (like getting RSI style hand injuries from working on stuff too much).
≥ To begin with, your video is only going to be shown to your subscribers.
Not the case for me. I have two channels. One where I post stuff and another where I watch stuff. The channel that watches stuff subscribes to the channel that post stuff. It almost never show my videos. I have 303 subscribers and 7 views on my last video.
YouTube is broken as heck. At least 10% of my subscribers should be shown my videos.
It's an interesting read, and good luck if that's what you want to do.
But for me it feels like you work for youtube.
You setup your room for them,
Record hours of content for them,
They even tell you you need to do it on a weekly basis if not daily...
And all for no pay,
Or the priviledge of getting small change and forever fearing being "de-monetized"...
Youtube is comprised of one big ocean and a land with millions of tiny lakes:
1. A homogenous demographic that drives the growth of most major channels
2. A heterogenous demographic of niche hobbies and educational material
Your channel can never go viral if you cater to group 2. Each interest group is tiny. At best, you will get some of group 1 watching your niche channel out of osmosis.
Group 1 is mostly children. Despite what youtube reports, most billion-view videos are kids videos. Most users are children. There is a reason Beluga, pewdiepie, and Mr.Beast are top channels. If you aren't hawking that sort of thing, youtube is not a good market for you to grow in.
I post a new video about once a month that demonstrates a particular feature of my new data management system. I think short (5 to 10 minutes) videos are the best and focus on how to do one thing well. My latest one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va5ZqfwQXWI) compares a few simple SQL queries on a moderately large DB table (22 columns, 7.6M rows) on SQLite (with and without indexes) and the same queries run on my system which doesn't need separate indexes (spoiler alert: my system is much faster).
This article would also make for a good video, me thinks! I actually tried clicking your first screenshot, thinking it was a video summary of the article.
I've done a number of these kinds of experiments across a variety of platforms, and over the 1-month period, the numbers looked very similar.
The problem is that it doesn't scale. After that first month honeymoon period, the numbers don't grow as fast. After 3 months, they basically stop growing. "Just consistently post" is not a sufficient recipe for "success".
This is true of any platform to be honest. You could be a terrible writer and still do well on sites like Medium or Substack. Be a terrible musician and do well on Spotify or SoundCloud. Be a terrible artist and do well on all sorts of platforms.
Whether people like it or not, the production values involved in a piece of work have only the loosest correlation to whether it'll do well.
By way of thanking you for this informative little summary of issues involved in creating YouTube content, I went ahead and subscribed. I'd be interested to hear from you in a few days what impact this HN post had on your subscriber numbers.
"Engagement" on YouTube typically means likes/comments on your videos.
It is well understood that the YouTube algorithm treats engagement as a significant positive signal to recommend your video to non-subscribers (or even, with enough traction, on the home page).
Not to my knowledge. Youtube's analytics generally don't give computed magic numbers like that, they give information like "number of comments per minute when the video released" or "average watch time" or "ratio of likes to views".
The exact way these numbers are combined in the algorithm isn't revealed (and I assume is ever changing).
Big thanks for writing about your experience here, I've been thinking about doing this at some point for passive income, including livestreaming open source SaaS apps I want to build. This gives me a little hope! It was also good to know I need at least 1,000 subscribers!
I’ve heard the argument that YouTube rewards consistency, but I am anything but consistent with my videos [1](every 1-3 months) and I haven’t noticed any negative consequences.
[1] YouTube.com/stuffmadehere