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Harriet Carker posted:I also tweaked the audio timing (still can't get the video 100% synced but I think it's close and there might not be anything I can do about it) and added some highlights from today's stream. I'm mostly just really happy that the music, the game, and my footstep sounds are all synced very well. I took the advice in this thread and added some daily goals - so far so good. I am routinely getting a few viewers and actually got my first chat message today! Thanks for all the advice. I'm having an absolute blast. Had a quick look at your last two highlights and the improved overlays are great. Whatever lag remains on the video is negligible now, I'd have to really be looking for it to notice. Re: chat—once you start getting more regular chat, you may want to include an overlay to show it on the screen. And then in terms of cameras...I don't know if this might be camera overkill, but I wonder if you could consider a third just as a devoted facecam to help build connection, because one is a footcam and the other is a bodycam, which means unless you're deliberately making an effort to do so, you never make eye contact with the camera. A lot of streamers don't do the thing that YouTubers who do talking head vids do (which is looking directly in the camera to fake direct eye contact with the viewer) but you usually still see at least 3/4s or 4/5ths of their face, and sometimes they will look at the camera from time to time to help build that connection. On my streams during banter, I have an overlay that brings up a selected chat on the screen as well, so people can see their names highlighted when I'm responding. I look at the chat window when I read it out but then when I'm answering the chat, I make a deliberate effort to look straight in the camera. I should mention that I have multiple layouts—so I have one layout when I'm actively doing stuff during the stream (share screen, face cam in corner) and then a different layout for just the banter (where my facecam actually takes up half the screen, and the other half is the stream agenda). This helps a lot in adding visual interest and variety to the look of the stream as well as segmenting different parts of the stream. Anyway, something for you to think about!
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Sep 16, 2022 15:46
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Leng posted:Had a quick look at your last two highlights and the improved overlays are great. Whatever lag remains on the video is negligible now, I'd have to really be looking for it to notice. Thank you for the continued feedback. I actually did add a chat overlay - it's just invisible when there are no messages. I did just get my first message from a random viewer though, so that was exciting! Leng posted:And then in terms of cameras...I don't know if this might be camera overkill, but I wonder if you could consider a third just as a devoted facecam to help build connection, because one is a footcam and the other is a bodycam, which means unless you're deliberately making an effort to do so, you never make eye contact with the camera. A lot of streamers don't do the thing that YouTubers who do talking head vids do (which is looking directly in the camera to fake direct eye contact with the viewer) but you usually still see at least 3/4s or 4/5ths of their face, and sometimes they will look at the camera from time to time to help build that connection. This is an excellent idea. I'll have to consider the camera positioning. My current struggle seems to be keeping people in the stream. I get about 15 people dropping in during a one hour stream, but rarely does anyone stay for more than a minute or so. I checked out some other streamers with 10+ viewers and a lot of them had trash audio quality and were also not very good at the game and I really couldn't understand why people were staying there. Maybe just a long time streaming has developed a community? Anyway I will keep streaming even if nobody watches so I guess we'll see if people come over time. I added a schedule so I hope that will help. Edit: can anyone recommend a microphone I can attach/clip on to the top of my TV? I could probably home brew something instead. I watched some of my recordings and my voice quality is definitely not great especially as I get farther away from the onboard webcam. Harriet Carker fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Sep 19, 2022 |
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Sep 18, 2022 20:56
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Hi! My friend and I have been making some videos for Youtube over the last few months, and I haven't really been sure where to share them. https://www.youtube.com/c/dirtygiveaway/featured It's obviously very heavily inspired by Space Ghost C2C, and we've dabbled in ebSynth videos that aren't currently up. It isn't really the kind of thing that excites the algorithm these days, but I would certainly appreciate any feedback/commentary!
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Sep 19, 2022 21:22
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Soapy_Bumslap posted:It isn't really the kind of thing that excites the algorithm these days, but I would certainly appreciate any feedback/commentary! Weeeell technically the thing that gets the algorithm excited is when it knows who the right audience is for your videos. I watched 3: the unboxing retro toys one (looks like a stream highlight?), the Pac-Man Doom one (looks like an ad to drive downloads?), and the DGA pilot episode (this one made me laugh). Scrolling through your recent uploads, you've done some longform vids, a bunch of shorts (but some don't look like they're properly formatted for shorts?), some shortform vids, a real grab bag of stuff. Your most popular upload is a clip that seems to be a reupload of someone else's content? I came away with the pretty clear understanding that I am not your target audience, but also no idea who would be your target audience or what your channel is about so it's hard to give useful feedback. What are your goal/s with the channel?
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Sep 20, 2022 02:13
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Leng posted:Weeeell technically the thing that gets the algorithm excited is when it knows who the right audience is for your videos. I watched 3: the unboxing retro toys one (looks like a stream highlight?), the Pac-Man Doom one (looks like an ad to drive downloads?), and the DGA pilot episode (this one made me laugh). Scrolling through your recent uploads, you've done some longform vids, a bunch of shorts (but some don't look like they're properly formatted for shorts?), some shortform vids, a real grab bag of stuff. Your most popular upload is a clip that seems to be a reupload of someone else's content? We're going to drive more toward the kind of thing we did with The Pilot Episode, ten to fifteen minute videos of that nature. Your comment confirms what I've been thinking, that the channel is kind of a big mess. It started out as twitch-related things and edit/shitposts, until we shifted focus. As far as shorts go, my friend thinks they're good for doing promos of things we have coming out, while I'm not sure what to think. We had been thinking of clearing out a lot of the older stuff, and I think just having had someone outside say it's unclear will be the final justification.
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Sep 20, 2022 02:50
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Soapy_Bumslap posted:We had been thinking of clearing out a lot of the older stuff, and I think just having had someone outside say it's unclear will be the final justification. The standard Channel Makers / Film Booth advice for this is to just unlist older stuff that isn't for whatever audience you're targeting. Basically it will clean up your uploads page so that when people look at it, they know what they're in for. As an example: generally if I find a new channel through whatever means and I like the first video I see, I will click through to their channel page to see what other kind of content they make. If there's nothing else that appeals from their videos, I usually don't come back. If there is, I'll check out a few more videos and if I enjoy the content, I generally subscribe. Currently your channel page just has uploads and the shorts shelf. I'd look into customizing your channel page with some different sections so people know where to start. Mine probably needs a rehaul but I try to have it organized by the different kinds of content I do, so people don't need to click across to my uploads tab to get a sense of what my channel is about. Shorts are weird. I haven't experimented with them but a lot of the YouTube education channels in the OP have, with mixed results. What seems to have happened is that in the past, doing shorts and longform vids on the same channel kinda screwed things up, because the algorithm couldn't handle shorts properly. That led to a lot of advice to do separate channels for shorts and longform vids. But YouTube recently announced changes to the algorithms for shorts to fix the problem and so a lot of people are getting back into shorts. Since you're still at the early stage of your channel, I don't think it could hurt experimenting with, but if you are gonna do them, you should optimize for shorts format. Don't just shrink down a horizontal format video and expect it to do well as a short; you need to cut it to vertical format and make it snappier.
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Sep 20, 2022 05:32
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I wanted to say thanks for all the advice in this thread. It took a long time and a lot of experimentation, but I'm closing in on 100 followers and regularly have a handful of regular chatters. I have improved my stream quality in nearly every way and I'm super happy with it now. How it started (unfortunately I just started automatically saving VODs so this is the oldest bit I have - I wish I has some recordings from the first few streams!) https://twitch.tv/videos/1750904804 How it's going: https://twitch.tv/videos/1819164091
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May 31, 2023 15:15
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Harriet Carker posted:I wanted to say thanks for all the advice in this thread. It took a long time and a lot of experimentation, but I'm closing in on 100 followers and regularly have a handful of regular chatters. I have improved my stream quality in nearly every way and I'm super happy with it now. Congrats!!! Your current stream set up looks so cool and is much improved over the old one. You're inspiring me to think about doing a refresh of my own overlays when I can get the head space for it.
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Jun 1, 2023 05:33
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Type of crit wanted: channel Any specific issues you want help on: Just a general critique, really. I don't think I'll ever get an audience - I can only really pump out one of these things every three months or so, so I can't imagine getting many views. But I'm really enjoying plugging away at a thing when I clock off of work. I wanted to start making video essays a while back. I started with this 45 minute thing on why Star Wars kinda sucks. It was the first video I made and there's a bunch wrong with it. The first three chapters are paced way waaaay too fast. Every single sentence comes in too quick and it feels massively rushed. Then I forgot about it for a year and made this thing on why I really like Subnautica. I've just released it, but I think the opening animation is a bit too long. It kind of comes off like the preamble you get before a recipe online. The main criticism I get from friends is that the music dominates the narration, which I think I agree with. I want the videos to be vibey, so I think the music should be high in the mix, but if it's a huge issue I'll rethink that approach. Any other criticism would be very welcome too. EDIT: I didn't follow the request format. 7seven7 fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Nov 17, 2023 |
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Jun 5, 2023 13:23
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7seven7 posted:Channel URL: Koi Callisto Hey and sorry for taking so long to reply. It's been a helluva month for me. Anyway! I had a quick look and by a quick look I mean I intended to skim through your Subnautica video and ended up watching the whole thing. It's really well done in every respect—storytelling, animation, choice of music, everything. 7seven7 posted:The main criticism I get from friends is that the music dominates the narration, which I think I agree with. I want the videos to be vibey, so I think the music should be high in the mix, but if it's a huge issue I'll rethink that approach. Any other criticism would be very welcome too. This is an easy fix because it's a sound mixing issue. I wouldn't change your music level or how you narrate, I would just up your vocal levels so it's more easily heard over the music. 7seven7 posted:I think the opening animation is a bit too long. It kind of comes off like the preamble you get before a recipe online. Considering the video as a whole, I don't think it is. I mean, perhaps you could make it a bit shorter, but the style of video you're doing is a vibe-y one and the story arc gets undercut if you don't have that lead-in. I think what might be the problem is that you've got a thumbnail/title mismatch with your intro. Your current thumbnail is a pretty awful screencap from the game with giant text that's trying to utilize a pun and then your title explains the pun. It doesn't really evoke the emotions of the personal story that ties the whole video together nor does it convey the sense of wonder and awe you get from playing the game. What's your current click through rate and retention rate for it? I'd expect both to be low, but I'd also expect that anyone staying past the first minute or so will probably watch to the end because it's high quality content. And 391 views in the first 10 days for what is basically a brand new channel is really good stuff. I think you've definitely got an audience out there and make 1 high quality video every 3 months doesn't preclude you from finding an audience IF it's a really great idea because not all ideas are created equal. Watch this interview with Paddy Galloway who explains it much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHhTKwclHCs
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Jun 16, 2023 02:50
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Oh hey, just realized this thread exists! I've been asking for advice from the editing thread but thought I'd peek in here as well. Here's my crit request: Channel URL: Swift Kick Industries Type of crit wanted: channel (I think? I only have two videos so far) Any specific issues you want help on: Not really -- fire away on editing, audio, pacing, narration, anything that could be obviously improved. Mine is a craft/maker-style channel, and I have zero ambition to make it anything other than a way to share things I've made. The first video was a Simpsons meme joke that got out of hand, the second one is much more like what I'm actually interested in sharing in the future: combination of different crafts, sometimes featuring vintage electronics. I don't know whether I have a theme in mind beyond Making Things I Find Interesting, because I'm a self-admitted dilettante when it comes to arts and crafts. It's less "here's how to make this specific thing" and more "here is how I mix techniques in different ways to produce something that I find cool." And to contribute: 7seven7 posted:[The main criticism I get from friends is that the music dominates the narration, which I think I agree with. I want the videos to be vibey, so I think the music should be high in the mix, but if it's a huge issue I'll rethink that approach. Any other criticism would be very welcome too. I really enjoyed the animation -- I think it truly sets off a channel vs. others. If I wanted to include something like that, I honestly wouldn't know where to start. It's a great hook and clearly custom. And even though I don't really play video games anymore I stayed through the whole video and you made a convincing case for Subnautica  I personally struggled with audio on my second video, so I can't offer a lot of advice there (although it didn't really bother me in your case).One thing I'll ask -- not a loaded question, I genuinely don't know -- is whether an essay needs to have a central thesis or some question it's supposed to answer. If the central thesis is "Subnautica is fantastic because of the awe it inspires" without it becoming a video game review, that's perfectly fair. But if you're going for a particular argument, it might need to be more explicit for dumbs like me.
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Jun 16, 2023 19:42
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Leng posted:Hey and sorry for taking so long to reply. It's been a helluva month for me. Anyway! Thanks! Your OP is incredible btw - it really cleared up a lot of things I hadn't taken into account. Leng posted:This is an easy fix because it's a sound mixing issue. I wouldn't change your music level or how you narrate, I would just up your vocal levels so it's more easily heard over the music. I think I've got the audio balance right on the next video. I've also gone back and had another pass at the mix on the Subnautica video and I think I've got it right this time. I don't think you can change the audio on a video once it's uploaded, so is it better to delete the old video and relaunch with the new audio? A few hundred views is probably worth eating, right? Leng posted:I think what might be the problem is that you've got a thumbnail/title mismatch with your intro. Your current thumbnail is a pretty awful screencap from the game with giant text that's trying to utilize a pun and then your title explains the pun. It doesn't really evoke the emotions of the personal story that ties the whole video together nor does it convey the sense of wonder and awe you get from playing the game. I definitely haven't mastered the art of thumbnails yet. So far everything else seems to come pretty easy, but I can't seem to get inspired about making them. I'll definitely do some reading before I finish my next thing. Leng posted:What's your current click through rate and retention rate for it? I'd expect both to be low, but I'd also expect that anyone staying past the first minute or so will probably watch to the end because it's high quality content. And 391 views in the first 10 days for what is basically a brand new channel is really good stuff. I think you've definitely got an audience out there and make 1 high quality video every 3 months doesn't preclude you from finding an audience IF it's a really great idea because not all ideas are created equal. Click through rate is 1.1% and retention is about 2:30 which is not great, I guess.  I watched that video and really got a lot from it. I've got a big list of ideas I pull scripts from, but I'm gonna refine it and spend longer developing them.Trabant posted:Oh hey, just realized this thread exists! I've been asking for advice from the editing thread but thought I'd peek in here as well. Here's my crit request: I watched all of your first video and a good deal of the second. I'm not much of a craftsman, so I don't have much to critique on that level, but I have to say everything here was really high quality. The pacing, the cuts, how long you linger on what you're doing before you move on. Audio levels sounded bang on to me. The background jazz with the brushed snares in the first video really sets the tone nicely and I also liked the more spacey beats in the second - it really fits the theme. Your cadence is good, you speak clearly, and you keep things interesting. I really liked the intro on the second video - especially the cross fade to the top down zoom. I honestly don't really have any notes - I enjoyed both your videos despite knowing nothing about the subject matter. The thumbnails are really good shots - super gorgeous and informative, but do YouTube thumbnails need text maybe? Trabant posted:I really enjoyed the animation -- I think it truly sets off a channel vs. others. If I wanted to include something like that, I honestly wouldn't know where to start. It's a great hook and clearly custom. And even though I don't really play video games anymore I stayed through the whole video and you made a convincing case for Subnautica Thanks! It was kind of fun learning to animate, but it was way too time consuming, so I'm not sure I'll commit to anything that long any time soon. I didn't notice any struggle with the audio on your second video - the music dips when it should and doesn't come up too loud between the narration. I think you nailed it. Trabant posted:One thing I'll ask -- not a loaded question, I genuinely don't know -- is whether an essay needs to have a central thesis or some question it's supposed to answer. If the central thesis is "Subnautica is fantastic because of the awe it inspires" without it becoming a video game review, that's perfectly fair. But if you're going for a particular argument, it might need to be more explicit for dumbs like me. I think maybe a fairly floaty video essay doesn't need a central thesis, but I'm not really sure. I don't necessarily want to commit to anything you could call discourse - I'm way to dumb to even attempt it. I guess I'm just trying to say "Hey I liked this video game" in a somewhat entertaining manner? I have thought about trying to make the narrative a bit more concise, but I'm really bad with words so I'm hoping I can distract away from that with pretty visuals.
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Jun 19, 2023 14:44
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Thank you for the feedback and the kind words!  I'm going to keep the stuff you (and a few others) liked in mind when I make the next one. I can at least try not to stray away from what's seemingly working.
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Jun 19, 2023 23:47
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7seven7 posted:I definitely haven't mastered the art of thumbnails yet. So far everything else seems to come pretty easy, but I can't seem to get inspired about making them. I'll definitely do some reading before I finish my next thing. Channel Makers recently put out a new guide to thumbnails that's pretty good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZSFgZhTfRQ So has Film Booth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv60Vww-YZ4 Colin and Samir's Creator Support channel also has a really good discussion on thumbnails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtozAfF1zmM&t=882s Trabant posted:One thing I'll ask -- not a loaded question, I genuinely don't know -- is whether an essay needs to have a central thesis or some question it's supposed to answer. If the central thesis is "Subnautica is fantastic because of the awe it inspires" without it becoming a video game review, that's perfectly fair. But if you're going for a particular argument, it might need to be more explicit for dumbs like me. Not specific to video essays but applicable to ALL videos. To get people to click, you need to know what your video is about and clearly communicate that in a thumbnail. To get people to watch to the end, you need to structure and pace the video so that every part of the video develops that core idea in some way. Most top YouTubers test video ideas before they film by considering whether they can encapsulate it in a thumbnail and if they can't, they basically don't film the video (because if they can't get it into thumbnail form, nobody is gonna click). I've been trying to do this myself with my last few uploads and it's pretty hard. I'll share what I did for my latest thumbnail (for a Q&A livestream happening in 2 days) in case it's helpful:  #14 - where I started. It's very ehhhhhhh and the background is boring and there's way too much text. I decided the background needs more visual interest so I put in a bunch of book covers that were busted as being AI generated as the background and went overboard with variants. #12 & #13 - I knew this was stupid even as I was doing them but I decided to try it anyway to confirm it was as stupid as I thought. Too much text, the top and bottom orange banner obscures the book covers even more, it's super busy visually, and why add the little recording red dot and "LIVE" when scheduled livestreams are presented differently on the channel anyway? These are overwhelming thumbnails: too many elements, the elements not clear at thumbnail size, the elements only be recognizable to people in my current audience who have watched ALL the previous videos I've done on the subject (bad bad bad for CTR and attracting a new audience), etc. #10 & #11 - had a more interesting, obviously book-related thumbnail compared to #14 thanks to the book covers, but it's still not really clear what's going on from the visual so I had to leave in the explanatory text ("AI BOOK COVERS") and then it was like, well who are these people? My viewers would recognize my face, but they wouldn't know who the guy is, so I put in an arrow and labeled him as the expert. Thumbnail still sucks. #9 - I realize the draw of watching this video/livestream is to hear from the expert I'm interviewing so I kept him big and gave him a label to emphasize who he is. My neutral photo conveys zero emotion, so I replaced it with a different photo of me pulling a YouTuber face and pose to convey confusion and made myself small. Then I got rid of all the small text. Much cleaner. Finally I stuck in a screenshot of the questions on an actual entry form for a book cover contest that recently blew up on Twitter. Better, but still very cluttered. #4 through #8 - I was stuck so I messed around with minor text changes and highlight colors, etc. Then I realized that the visuals in the foreground (the people, the Google Form questions) have literally nothing to do with the only background element that's clearly visible.  #2 & #3 - I got rid of the irrelevant book covers and put in my cover art (which my viewers have seen before) and is ALSO designed by the person I'm interviewing. Now there's a clear, cohesive story: I'm an author, I'm being asked questions about my cover art, I am super confused about how to answer, and here's my cover designer. Implication: if you're an author, you should watch this video because you're probably being asked these questions too and are worried/confused. But still too cluttered. #1 (current thumbnail) - First Google Form question gets canned because, y'know, there's an arrow pointing to the guy and also the second question encapsulates what the video is about. Now more cover art is visible and I can make myself a little bit bigger. There's 5 elements in total (cover art, the question, me looking confused, the person I'm interviewing, and who they are) which is still quite a lot. But paired with the title "Damonza Answers AI Book Cover Design Questions | LIVE Q&A"), it should be relatively clear what you're in for if you click. Not sure what the CTR is going to be, but I'd hope for it to be somewhere between 5-10% for my core audience and hopefully settle somewhere between 3-5% once it gets pushed out to a wider audience. My last upload is sitting at around 5.9% (better than usual) though impressions have tapered off. (My most viewed video has a 6.4% CTR as a reference point.) 7seven7 posted:I think I've got the audio balance right on the next video. I've also gone back and had another pass at the mix on the Subnautica video and I think I've got it right this time. I don't think you can change the audio on a video once it's uploaded, so is it better to delete the old video and relaunch with the new audio? A few hundred views is probably worth eating, right? 7seven7 posted:Click through rate is 1.1% and retention is about 2:30 which is not great, I guess. The only edits you can really do post upload is to trim out parts of the video in the YouTube editor. I'm not surprised by the low CTR (that's all due to your thumbnail + title) but the retention is interesting. If you post a screenshot of your retention graph, we might be able to figure out what's happening based on the shape and the drop out point. Honestly, I wouldn't worry about reuploading. Everybody's early uploads will never be as good as you want them to be, and yours is still very watchable. I think if you fixed the thumbnail/title, you'd still get views on it as-is. But if you are going to private/delete and reupload/relaunch, I'd do that after you figure out a new thumbnail/title so that it gets a clean start (and possibly maybe some re-edits if your retention graph shows sections with dips or sharp drop-offs). Trabant posted:Channel URL: Swift Kick Industries I skimmed through both your videos and I'd say that you need to signal more clearly what style of video you're going for because you've paced and shot it like a "how-to" style of video and less of a "here's a cool thing I wanted to try and make and this is the story of how I got there". Couple of concrete suggestions for you. Thumbnails/titles: Your current ones are clean and minimalistic which can often work for craft channels because the object is usually the draw. But there's no story in them so I have to look at the title for context, and neither "Sneed's Feed & Seed - a tribute in miniature" nor "Seiko Pyramid Clocks: a custom display case build" really suggest one either. The thumbnail of the first video actually spoils the punchline of your joke and I don't know how much overlap there is between the people who would get that joke and the people who would want to watch the video. The most obvious thumbnail format that jumps out at me is the side-by-side vs comparison with a screencap of the original vs yours. In your first thumbnail, you already seem to have this instinct because you've taken the photo from the same angle. A quick example I whipped up in Canva:  I don't love the font choice but I'd go with whatever you're using in your channel logo if it's clear enough to be read. There aren't any hires images of the Simpsons screencap, so I would probably go and find the episode and take a screencap myself. Alternatively you could run it through an AI upscaler, if you're ok with that. Second thumbnail is harder because you're referencing a specific part of the Bladerunner aesthetic but it's not a direct tie-in to the movie so you can't really use the same gimmick. But I think I would try to reference it somehow, maybe just with your Photoshopped movie screencap with an arrow pointing at the object and pair it with a title of "I made a Bladerunner-inspired talking clock" or something like that to hook potential viewers. Pacing/structure: Make your hero shots of the final result longer. The first video is ~15 mins yet you spend 10 seconds or less on the final result and then the video ends immediately—it felt like I blinked and completely missed the end so I had to rewind and pause to get a proper look. The second video is better, but you've then got a weird end segment where you tag on the 4th speaker clock and go through the process there. FYI with any build-type videos like this, people generally click off as soon as you've got the final result montage, so I'd suspect your retention graph has a sharp drop off right around 15:19. Comparable channels: Go look at the top 10-20 videos on the Nerdforge channel, which started out as a "how to" style of channel and has grown into a craft/entertainment/personality channel. You don't have to appear on camera, or pace your videos like theirs, or do video ideas like theirs, etc, but do look at how they're packaging their videos (especially if they are doing projects that have some tie-ins to popular media) and how that's shifted over the last five years. Leng fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Jun 20, 2023 |
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Jun 20, 2023 05:00
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Leng posted:<words of wisdom> Leng, thank you for the insights! (and for being the load-bearing poster itt) If I quote/replied to each point you made, this post would be fantastically obnoxious to read, but suffice it to say you gave me plenty to think about. The big one is on how I position the channel but I'll touch on some of that below. A few of thoughts from my end: - The thumbnail you suggested is perfect and I'm bewildered as to why I didn't think of it. It's probably because I was going for the gag reveal but since I already spoil it with the title... well, why not show it in the thumbnail too. Hope you don't mind if I steal & tweak the concept? - Also, 100% on the glamour shots, esp. on the Sneed's video. Missed that opportunity and realized it shortly after uploading. - The "bonus" part of the video -- the fourth clock -- was something I was always going to include but maybe it could've been a Short instead. It doesn't seem to have hurt retention on its own though, at least based on what Studio shows me:  So it doesn't dive after the final display case shots, but it also hovers at ~20% for the majority of it, which is... uh, bad? No clue. - I've considered showing the final product up front, as I know some maker-type channels do. Might go with that. It could hook those who are interested in how I went about it, but make those uninterested click away immediately. - I actually subscribe to Nerdforge along with... 292 other channels what the gently caress I need to prune that so I can see why you'd suggest looking into them. But if I'm to compare what I was going for, subconsciously or not, it's probably a mix of Adam Savage's Tested, Boylei Hobby Time, Laura Kampf, Make Something, and Wesley Treat. Very few of them post strict how-tos, and I didn't intend to do so either. - That said, I've been thinking my style is more descriptive than prescriptive, but I do see how my shots/pacing are closer to the latter / how-tos. I'll need to think about it some more, esp. given how most of my inspiration comes from personality-driven channels. Finally, on this: Leng posted:Most top YouTubers test video ideas before they film by considering whether they can encapsulate it in a thumbnail and if they can't, they basically don't film the video (because if they can't get it into thumbnail form, nobody is gonna click). This is the finished project and the subject of my next video, a turned + carved wood sculpture I'm calling Janus: https://i.imgur.com/QeRsVVF.mp4 The entire motivation behind the project was roughly "This could be cool" and I think it worked out on that front. I also think it would make for an interesting video too: I haven't seen other items quite like it -- most "carved wood sculpture" videos out there lean towards realistic, not abstract -- and I can probably take a decent photo to make it look fairly dramatic in the thumbnail. But beyond that, it's still very much a selfish choice of what interests me. I guess given that I'm only planning video #3 gives me more freedom to  stuff that I'm happy with vs. someone doing this for a living?
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Jun 21, 2023 17:07
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Trabant posted:- The thumbnail you suggested is perfect and I'm bewildered as to why I didn't think of it. It's probably because I was going for the gag reveal but since I already spoil it with the title... well, why not show it in the thumbnail too. Hope you don't mind if I steal & tweak the concept? Go for your life! If you pay attention to your niche and even more broadly speaking to just YouTube in general, there are set conventions for thumbnails and formats, etc. The "vs"/comparison one gets used a lot. Trabant posted:- The "bonus" part of the video -- the fourth clock -- was something I was always going to include but maybe it could've been a Short instead. It doesn't seem to have hurt retention on its own though, at least based on what Studio shows me: Retention is correlated with video length. Really long videos tend to have a lower retention by nature. To give you an idea of the spread, here's some retention charts for my videos: 20-30 min video Tier ranking review format, 23:49 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbgwNfAd3TM):  Detailed book review with chapter summaries & takeaways, 29:13 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGyrO42tgTo):  Video essay/commentary on current event, 22:54 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av64WXh_f80):  15-20 min video Another detailed video essay/commentary on current event, 18:17 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACQZvQ_Qwwk):  News update/commentary video, 15:49 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjnVygTyxIM):  Vlog, 18:43 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL7m8C1pK60):  My most viewed video, an analytical deep dive on a trending topic, 14:23 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9D37-3xrWQ):  8-10 min video Video essay/deep dive, 9:43 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xoqx_GUxoE):  Product/service review, 8:03 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUaOA9jkBbo):  5-8 min video Listicle, 6:05 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tKn4EaIiLo):  Skit, 5:43 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0qjsbRxRFY):  Vlog, 6:21 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tPJVVKLu1w):  <5 min video - these are all skits, I don't do anything else for short vids 4:49 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnteQz7mMhI):  2:59 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSMufge7dhU):  1:07 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyc8fN7JNT4):  There are variations due to individual videos but across the board you can see that it's generally harder to hold someone's attention for a longer span of time. For a funny, tightly scripted skit, I've got close to 80% retention across the board (the sharp drop off at the end is when the screen goes black, which people take as a cue for the end of the video). But you can see even when we start getting to 3 mins, retention starts dropping to somewhere between 30-40%. The first 30 secs are the most critical and probably a 50% drop off rate is average. Higher than that means you're doing good with your hook and it's matching the promises you made in your thumbnail/title. I have some 1+ hour livestreams where retention is like...15% or less. So, 20% for a ~17 min video isn't bad. You could be doing better but it's not bad! Trabant posted:https://i.imgur.com/QeRsVVF.mp4 "I make cool things" is 80% of maker YT channels. YT is hard work and a long game, so anybody who's making videos that don't interest them will burn out pretty fast. You can totally (or, more accurately, :justfilm:) and then do the thumbnail/title after. But I would do the thumbnail/title BEFORE you do the edit so you can structure the edit around the story you're telling with the thumbnail/title, if that makes sense.
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Jun 22, 2023 05:15
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Leng posted:Go for your life! If you pay attention to your niche and even more broadly speaking to just YouTube in general, there are set conventions for thumbnails and formats, etc. The "vs"/comparison one gets used a lot. Thank you Here's a quick & dirty one I made: Need to play with it a bit more, esp. the text, but I like where it's going. Leng posted:But I would do the thumbnail/title BEFORE you do the edit so you can structure the edit around the story you're telling with the thumbnail/title, if that makes sense. Yup, it totally does! I guess I'll share mY pRoCeSs on the two vids so far, because I'm sure it's rear end-backwards and curious how it compares to those of others: 1) Decide what to make 2) Film the build process 3) If it turns out how I imagined/hoped it would and seems like it might make an interesting video, shoot intro/outro/B-roll/etc. footage <-- the third video is at this stage 4) Edit the footage down to <20 mins (what felt like a good threshold but I'm not married to it) 5) Write script, record voiceover, choose music, make thumbnail I'm aware that the script ought to be the starting point, I just don't know if a maker-style video can truly follow that. For me at least, the build is fairly fluid. It makes a lot more sense to me to reverse the process flow because I can then talk about what happened. And it works for the intro/outro because they can be shot independent of the build itself.
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Jun 23, 2023 14:42
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Didn't realize this thread was here! I've had off-and-on ambitions of building a proper YouTube channel for awhile that keep getting sidelined by other obligations, but I think I'm at a point to put some actual effort and attention into it so I'm attempting another run. Channel URL: Drew Plays Games Type of crit wanted: Specific video feedback & general channel aim https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZI23OHO8vk Any specific issues you want help on: Would like feedback on the video above. I spent longer than I probably should have on this video but I was trying to feel out & establish a tone to use moving forward. I have a bullheaded aversion to just doing things normally and wanted to take a slightly different approach to the oversaturated genre of "mediocre guy in his 30s talking about the games he liked when he was young," even if I'm still very firmly in that category. I would describe the end result as a store-brand Jeremy Parish, or a miniature "babby's first Noah Caldwell-Gervais video," but I also tried to be conscious of building a few short jokey segments that can stand alone(ish) as YT Shorts/FB Reels/TikToks/etc. Main things I'd like to know are: does the weird b-roll in lieu of standard talking head stuff work, and is it actually additive? And, is the presentation and my dorky analysis actually decent enough to work for a wider audience who has no pre-existing interest in the specific game I'm covering? Moving forward, I've got a rough idea of focusing on semi-obscure racing games, because that's an area I'm interested in that hasn't been mined completely to death that I've seen, but it's also super demoralizing to dump a bunch of hours into videos that get seen by 6 people. I'm not necessarily looking to turn YouTube into a full-time career, but I would like it to at least evolve past the "shouting into the void" stage and would like to know how viable that is with this type of content. Super appreciative of any feedback, thanks y'all!
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Jun 26, 2023 15:04
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SchwarzeKrieg posted:Channel URL: Drew Plays Games Just how wide of an audience are you aiming for? Because while I did/do enjoy playing racing simulators in arcades, I don't actually enjoy playing them on emulators on a PC. I'd probably guess that I'm not actually part of the audience you're aiming for though my husband might be. (He plays a lot of racing games so I will get him to have a look and see if he has any comments.) Anyway, first crit (as with most crits) is on the thumbnail/title:  THE BEST RACING GAME YOU FORGOT ABOUT? San Francisco Rush N64: Does it Hold Up in 2023? This is really, really, busy. Let's go element by element, in the order that they draw my eye, keeping in mind that I know zero things about racing games other than "oh yeah, I've heard of GTA and Gran Turismo and I'll jump on one of those racing car/motorbike machines if we're at an arcade":
Not sure what your CTR is but I would not click this video. It's too confusing, it's ~20 mins long, and I don't know what I'm supposed to get out of watching it. I saw a thumbnail before/after change recently on another gaming channel in a thumbnail analysis video. Can't find it now, but basically it was like a video on a special item unlock or something, and the original thumbnail had the actual screencap and a title that said exactly what was unlocked. The after was the same screencap but with the player character and item blacked out and replaced with a "?" and the title was something vague like "I FINALLY DID IT!" to create interest. On the video itself: your presentation is good and it looks like your content is mostly voiceover. I'd be curious to know what your retention is like in the first 30 secs, cos your entire intro is...30 seconds and there is no hook. Especially with hover play now, put your hook in the first 5-10, max 15 seconds. Treat every video like it's gonna be watched by somebody who has no idea who you are. This is YouTube, we are not meeting face to face at a dinner party, I'm here for <entertainment/education/nostalgia> so I don't really care to be hearing about you, you, and more you, unless the reason why I'm here is for connection, in which case I'd probably be watching vlogs or a let's play or something. Give me the thing that I clicked for, so I know that it's not click bait, otherwise I'm going to click off immediately. Two things that strike me as a bit odd: 1. The b-roll switching to just your mouth talking in one corner and your mic in the other. Every time it pops up, it's weird, because I don't understand why you're switching away from gameplay footage to this. If it was a full view of your face, then that would make sense, because then you're looking at (your camera which feels like you're looking at) me and then I get a sense of personal connection like you're talking to me. But it's not. So it's weird. Because it feels weird to be staring at your mouth or your mic so I do neither and stare at the out of focus blank wall in the middle, which is even weirder, so now I'm looking away from my screen to look at something else. 2. Sometimes you make gameplay footage and other stuff smaller than the video size so you can have your animated background scrolling. It's extremely distracting. The gameplay footage is pretty fast already because racing game, then I have to listen to your voiceover which is saying different stuff, and then there's this animated thing scrolling around in the background. Makes it really hard to concentrate on what you're saying. SchwarzeKrieg posted:Moving forward, I've got a rough idea of focusing on semi-obscure racing games, because that's an area I'm interested in that hasn't been mined completely to death that I've seen, but it's also super demoralizing to dump a bunch of hours into videos that get seen by 6 people. I'm not necessarily looking to turn YouTube into a full-time career, but I would like it to at least evolve past the "shouting into the void" stage and would like to know how viable that is with this type of content. Most niches are doable. The basic thing to remember with diagnosing your analytics is this: Not getting views = your thumbnail/title suck (impressions and CTR will be low) Not getting retention = your video content doesn't match/live up to the promise in your thumbnail/title (there'll be a big drop off in the beginning and hardly anyone watching to the end) Right now, imo, your problem (like most of us) is with your thumbnails/titles. You've got 250+ views on this video which is pretty good for a channel of your size. Check your reach analytics to figure out whether they're coming from browse/suggest or search, noting that the current content strategy you're going for with this video would work better if you aimed for browse/suggest traffic over search. You may also want to consider unlisting all your other videos so that they don't continue to attract more viewers who might not be interested in your new videos. Because your channel is a real mixed bag of stuff right now, with some real car reviews, then some non-racing game reviews, what looks like two father/son let's plays, and then the racing game stuff. YouTube automatically scans your title, thumbnail, description, and what you actually say in the video for keywords anyway, so this is why if you say "N64" or "Nintendo 64" a bunch of times in your video, you probably don't need to put it in your title/thumbnail because YouTube will already know it's a video about an N64 game (you can always put it in the description if you want to make sure). Same with San Francisco Rush, especially because it's a spoiler for your hook. Anyway, hope that's helpful!
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Jun 28, 2023 13:35
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That's the exact type of feedback I was looking for, thank you! Just to follow on up a couple points:Leng posted:Just how wide of an audience are you aiming for? Because while I did/do enjoy playing racing simulators in arcades, I don't actually enjoy playing them on emulators on a PC. I'd probably guess that I'm not actually part of the audience you're aiming for though my husband might be. (He plays a lot of racing games so I will get him to have a look and see if he has any comments.) Oh I certainly don't expect a "wide" wide audience with that sort of content, but I follow a handful of channels in a vaguely-similar "reevaluating relatively obscure older games" niche in the 100-300k subscriber range that regularly bring in 50K+ views on the lower-performing videos. I don't expect those numbers of course, but kind of use that as a rough framework that there is an audience for it beyond people with preexisting interest in the game being covered. FWIW I kinda view the target audience as the intersection between car nerds and gamers, who exist in a reasonably large quantity and I feel like there's not an overwhelming amount of content that caters to them outside of something like the simracing community, which isn't necessarily where I'd like to be. I've had consistently decent engagement with the sporadic car content I've created on various platforms over the years, and wildly inconsistent but occasionally great engagement on gaming content. I'd like to find some kind of middleground between those two worlds. Leng posted:[Great feedback on the thumbnail & title] Totally fair! The people/monsters are all from short asides/gags in the video (except for the cars which are from the game), the idea being that "wtf does Burt from Tremors/Tim Robinson/Random Lovecraft Tentacle Monster have to do with a racing game?" would be intriguing enough to click even if they don't recognize the specific characters (and trigger an "aha!" when they appeared). That definitely isn't how it's actually panned out, though! I'll chop the "Does it hold up?" and maybe the name off the title and rework the thumbnail because yeah, the CTR started out below 1% although it's been very slowly creeping up. Weirdly enough, the highest CTR on my channel (9.1%) is one of the older car videos with a randomly generated thumbnail from the video. The other video I did in that 'series' with a similar title and a 'proper' thumbnail is 3% lower ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Leng posted:[Great feedback on the video itself] Yeah I made a lot of deliberately weird choices with the camera footage here with the lingering opening shot, oddly-framed speaking footage, etc. I figured it would be a love or hate deal and that's exactly how it's played out, but with more leaning toward the "it's weird and offputting" end of the spectrum than I would've liked. Will try to either pull it back to something more typical or at least execute in a less bad way next time, hah. Good call on the different types of footage being confusing. The stuff with the animated background is all outside footage from other videos and the stuff in the CRT-style border is my gameplay footage. I did an abysmal job communicating that and that delineation is probably pretty unnecessary in the first place. Leng posted:[Great general feedback and advice] Without responding to every point because, like Trabant said above, that would be intolerable to read, I greatly appreciate the insights and you taking the time to give feedback. I especially didn't realize that YT scanned the thumbnail and video content for keywords, that will definitely inform my approach moving forward. Thank you! edit: Changed the thumbnail, adjusted the title, and used YT's trimming tool to cut out a chunk of the long intro shot
SchwarzeKrieg fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Jun 30, 2023 |
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Jun 29, 2023 18:40
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SchwarzeKrieg posted:The people/monsters are all from short asides/gags in the video (except for the cars which are from the game), the idea being that "wtf does Burt from Tremors/Tim Robinson/Random Lovecraft Tentacle Monster have to do with a racing game?" would be intriguing enough to click even if they don't recognize the specific characters (and trigger an "aha!" when they appeared). That definitely isn't how it's actually panned out, though! Oh, I see. Yeah, that kind of thing can be fun to weave throughout the video, but making it the focus of the thumbnail will usually tank your CTR, because you're trying to create intrigue with a bunch of disparate gags which are NOT the main focus of your video's subject and that means you risk attracting the wrong viewers. SchwarzeKrieg posted:I'll chop the "Does it hold up?" and maybe the name off the title and rework the thumbnail because yeah, the CTR started out below 1% although it's been very slowly creeping up. Weirdly enough, the highest CTR on my channel (9.1%) is one of the older car videos with a randomly generated thumbnail from the video. The other video I did in that 'series' with a similar title and a 'proper' thumbnail is 3% lower ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This is SO MUCH BETTER. It's much clearer what kind of audience you're going for and I hope you'll see an uptick as a result. SchwarzeKrieg posted:I especially didn't realize that YT scanned the thumbnail and video content for keywords, that will definitely inform my approach moving forward. Thank you! Yeah, Rob from the VidIQ channel did an experiment a little while back where he specifically mentioned a very odd keyword a number of times in a video and proved that you could find it in YouTube search afterwards because of the auto transcription that YouTube does for closed captions. I can't find the specific video right now but it was an impressively vague keyword that was unique and nobody else would have had it at the time (now, of course, after he published his video, you'll find other things as a result of people piggybacking off it).
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Jul 1, 2023 00:38
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Leng posted:Not specific to video essays but applicable to ALL videos. To get people to click, you need to know what your video is about and clearly communicate that in a thumbnail. To get people to watch to the end, you need to structure and pace the video so that every part of the video develops that core idea in some way. I really tried to take this on board with my new thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH7K-EyINYY I laid out the script in a hopefully much more thoughtful way, edited it down to roughly equal lengths, then tried to make each section flow onto the next. I think I got the audio balance a bit better this time too? The vocals are a little fried - I tried to clean them up but I tried my soundcard's auto gain and I think it came out a little crispy. Hopefully it's not noticeably cooked. The video's done the best out of any I've done so far and I'm just up to 40 subs. Absolutely stoked about that, but I still pulled only about 500 views. I'm gonna make the next thing about something a bit more relevant and see how that does. At the moment I'm pushing these things out about one a month. Leng posted:Channel Makers recently put out a new guide to thumbnails that's pretty good. These were all absolutely excellent watches and I recently went through and redid all my thumbnails with it in mind. I think they're better without being too corny. But they could definitely still use some work.  I really like this, but I don't think it's YouTube-y enough  This one isn't too bad I think?  This one sucks Do they convey a message a bit better than the old ones? I'm still not sure that I understand the brief when it comes to thumbnails but I had some nice comments on my editing on the Vampire Survivors one. This thread is an amazing resource - thanks OP! 7seven7 fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Aug 26, 2023 |
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Aug 26, 2023 04:00
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7seven7 posted:The video's done the best out of any I've done so far and I'm just up to 40 subs. Add one from me to that -- really enjoyed the video edit: forgot to post my own most recent one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mybgpl-228E The thumbnail can probably be improved, but I'm trying to avoid text so... Keeping it as-is, at least for now. I'm pleased with the final reveal though (timestamped). It's interesting: I think it's my most esoteric video so far, at least in terms of having no general (pop or otherwise) culture connections, and it's getting fewest views. But it's also 10 percentage points higher for "average percentage viewed" over my other two videos. Maybe it being shorter helps, maybe it's that those who care about weirdo sculptures will stick around longer, maybe it's both? Trabant fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Aug 26, 2023 |
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Aug 26, 2023 23:24
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Trabant posted:Add one from me to that -- really enjoyed the video Awesome - thanks! I watched your new video and there was a lot that I liked. I feel like you pair your music beds really well with the subject/theme of the piece you're making. I liked that your beds felt very meditative and serene whilst you're working with the wood. The pace of the narration is great and it feels natural with the timbre of your voice. The only criticisms I have are that I would bring the first notes of the first music bed right up to the start of the video. This might just be a personal taste thing, but dead air at the start of a YouTube video makes me want to click away. But those opening notes and the opening shots would really intrigue me if paired together. I also feel like the thumbnail for this one might be a bit of a miss. I like that you don't have text on them, but in this case I don't think the shot of the final product tells me enough about what the video will be about. But a simple title with a nice font and heavy tracking would give me a sense that something real good is about to be made. That said - I enjoyed the vid and have no other criticism to offer!
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Aug 28, 2023 17:12
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Hey everyone, weird tangent, but I'm a programmer and I was wondering if anyone is interested in this dumb thing I made. http://thepys.com/ I watch a lot of Youtube and I realized the discoverability sucks on that site. I keep seeing channels get stuck in a purgatory where even when they make a good video, Youtube doesn't show it to anyone because it would rather recommend the channels that already have 1 million views. So I thought it would be funny to create kind of a public broadcast for Youtube videos. There are multiple channels and anyone can add any video to the schedule. Videos are just played in the order they are received, so it's not beholden to any algorithms or anything. Is that something any of you would use? I built it on a lark over the weekend and I don't know if it's worth pursuing or if it would even help people out. I personally would just like a constant stream of stuff to watch while working, but I don't necessarily care about the quality of that stuff.
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Aug 30, 2023 23:56
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Tummyache posted:Hey everyone, weird tangent, but I'm a programmer and I was wondering if anyone is interested in this dumb thing I made. I dig it, these types of pages have existed in the past (and current though goontube’s viewership has fully calcified it seems so an alternative tube page and culture seems dope)
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Aug 31, 2023 15:07
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As one of those calcified goontube users I would say that having a ton of rooms off the bat is probably not great. Think about it like a multiplayer game with a low population and a lot of available game modes. I'd also look into having some library of content that plays itself when no users have input anything. Right now I look at the site and just see test patterns on every channel. And not to push on the "it should be just like goontube" too hard, but what's the value to me as the user adding videos? Without a chat there's no riffing or community possible. It's just a page that sometimes plays a video I wanted to see. If I watch YouTube by myself it's always I video I wanted to see.
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Sep 1, 2023 03:33
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Papa Was A Video Toaster posted:As one of those calcified goontube users I would say that having a ton of rooms off the bat is probably not great. Good points, I was definitely thinking of the prefilled content so the channels don't look all empty. I'll reconsider the chat thing or some other kind of interactivity. The original intent was for people to have some method of discoverability, so smaller channels got the same shot as larger channels for people to watch their stuff. I assumed less confident youtubers would rather not have a chat riffing on them. I tucked a discord link in there as a half-measure so people who wanted to riff could, but people weren't forced to subject themselves to the riffing unless they wanted to. I'll do some more work on it over the weekend, thanks for the feedback.
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Sep 1, 2023 16:46
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Hi thread, I've been a shadow editor for a few creators I know for several years and recently badly derailed the PYF Tweets thread answering questions, so I'm going to hang a shingle here in case anyone wants my insights. For context I've been editing video since 2004 when I was in high school. I did a little paid work for student films in college, but my side hustle in social media videos started when I met a Disney YouTuber at Disney World (I'm Orlando local) in 2017. We hit it off and I ended up having lunch with them, and they mentioned that due to a family emergency the video they were shooting that day wouldn't be published for probably several days, which they were bummed about because it was the first day of Food And Wine. I mentioned that I had experience in Premiere Pro and ended up with their day's raws in my inbox on the mere promise that I would try. I have a terrible, nonexistent sleep schedule and ADHD, so I edited the video overnight and had a prelim in their inbox by sunrise. The response was great, and after a few edits and a video call I shipped them the final and they published that day. We didn't discuss pay, I was helping a brother out of a jam and their thanks was enough, but they paid me more than fairly and I was thrilled. I've edited perhaps a dozen videos for them since, as well as a few others who they shared my info with. I also got a job as a Social Media Manager for a branch of a mortgage company in 2019, which was fun and allowed me to learn the demographics and strategies for the different platforms. During that time I did real estate photography and videography for our partners, as well as talking head style videos of my boss which I shot and edited as style parodies of popular movies. Those were good enough to get me a few more creator contacts. Unfortunately my boss made a $20m whoopsie just at the turn of the pandemic and every salaried employee at the branch was mysteriously terminated during the first quarter of 2020, and then the CEO found out and fired the branch manager too. Beans. I still do shadow editing for a few channels, but the reality is that my services are only worth it for channels that are large enough to monetize but too small for employees or contract editors. There are a couple marketplaces for these services, but my experience there is that they pay very poorly and tend to be amateurs with unrealistic expectations, like getting a 30 minute edited video out of 35 minutes of raw footage, or paying $30 for four hours of work, so I don't do that. Right now I'm working full time fixing up a house for sale and working on videos for myself or existing clients in my spare time, but if anyone wants to ask about editing or my limited understanding of the voodoo under the hood, ask away. Shit Fuckasaurus fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Oct 11, 2023 |
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Oct 11, 2023 16:24
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I too did not realize this thread existed until it came up in the PYF Tweets thread. I'm on YouTube as SardonicSays I primarily focus on game/show video essays I picked up YouTube largely as a covid hobby. Video essays are like, the ultimate form of posting, I love it. Even if I'm pretty sure I spent longer working on certain videos than their total watch time.  I got exceptionally lucky this year and one of my videos got picked up just enough by the algorithm, comparing and contrasting Classic MST3K with Netflix-Era MST3K and I was able to get monetized. Of course what a lot of people don't know is you have to hit $100 to get an actual payout, so that's the next big milestone I'm looking for. In terms of channel issues, I know exactly what my main problem is: lack of focus. I've admittedly been very inconsistent, making videos mostly on topics that struck my interest, this has led to slow sub and overall channel growth as people aren't sure what they would be subscribing to. I don't think I'm prepared to unlist any videos at this point (except one which you can probably guess), but I'm definitely going to focus down on at least just show/game essays going forward, at least until growth looks better. It's all well and good to make videos as self-expression, but it does get awfully depressing if few are actually watching them. Fortunately I've found that well-performing videos can cause people to go back and look at the older stuff, which is a good feeling. Sardonik fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Oct 11, 2023 |
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Oct 11, 2023 17:48
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poo poo Fuckasaurus posted:Hi thread, I've been a shadow editor for a few creators I know for several years and recently badly derailed the PYF Tweets thread answering questions, so I'm going to hang a shingle here in case anyone wants my insights. Oh god, so many questions, but I can't get them into anything coherent at the moment (also the ADHD). So I'll just start with some basics about getting started with editing (and the social media stuff too): any good tutorials/books/videos/etc you recommend to get an overview and get started? Like, what's a good way to get some insight into the process, so I can start getting my hands dirty and practice?
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Oct 11, 2023 21:05
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FouRPlaY posted:Oh god, so many questions, but I can't get them into anything coherent at the moment (also the ADHD). So I'll just start with some basics about getting started with editing (and the social media stuff too): any good tutorials/books/videos/etc you recommend to get an overview and get started? Like, what's a good way to get some insight into the process, so I can start getting my hands dirty and practice? Absolutely! First, bear in mind that I learned editing almost 20 years ago and in high school and with the benefit of minimal time and money pressure, so this will be a slow boat method: First, learn the tools. Doesn't matter which ones, pick a set and start moving because most of it's transferrable and more importantly the software isn't getting less complex. I was fortunate enough to have access to a library of computer books, and I learned Premiere (not Pro as it was new and I didn't have access) on a Mac through a book. I believe it was O'Reilly but all I can say for sure is the cover had a frog on, and that's not a recommendation as I don't know how good the modern books are. Doesn't matter. You can fill any gaps in knowledge in the future, and all you need is basic tools. Get a running copy of an editing program and a tutorial and learn how to do basic cuts, overlays both static (text) and dynamic (video or motion graphics), and adjusting color balance. Find a tutorial that gives you project files for your chosen toolkit if possible, I did not have this luxury except when I bought magazines with CDs that contained that type of stuff. You don't want to learn from a single source, even if it's authoritative, authorized, or expensive. This is because there are many ways to accomplish any given task and some will feel better. For example, I use minimal keyboard shortcuts in Premiere Pro, in spite of my desk being littered with cheat sheets. This results in me taking somewhat longer to edit videos than many professionals, however I pretend that taking more time gives me a better feel for the project. Reality is that my face has never met a grindstone it didn't wanna destroy itself on. Additionally, learning from creators in the space carries risk, as those folks have an income to think about and you're a competitor. They have incentive to make the tools seem hard to use, or to structure their tutorials inefficiently, or to deceive you about what's important so you spend lots of time watching their videos and never manifest as a threat. Wanna know what's important? Publishing content people want to watch. Wanna know what's not important? Anything that isn't that. Once you have basic tools, make things. The things, they will be bad. Doesn't matter, you'll feel that way forever. Every creator I know would rather die than watch their videos from two years ago. You won't be the exception and you shouldn't try, because you two years from now has a successful, monetized channel and you from today is a pretender to that very throne. You don't have to publish everything you make, in fact don't put that evil on yourself, but you must finish it at some point. I used high school and later college projects to give me deadlines. My first real edited production was an Indiana Jones style parody for a math class project in middle school. It featured my buddy Doug swinging from a vine rope we made over his pool like five times for no reason other than to get our loving investment out of the vine rig. Everyone else made mechanically simple videos and spent their time developing them, my team wrote a script the night it was assigned and spent the duration building props and a camera boom made out of 2x4s. We shot the entire thing in the last 2 days of the project window on a Handicam and edited the dailies via VCR transfer after determining that digitizing our raws made them look (even more) like crap. I hate Indie Jones and the Temple of Calculus. It is the worst thing I have ever done. It sucks and is bad, and more importantly, if you've attended Coral Springs Middle School and had my math teacher at any time after me, the project was introduced to your class via that very film. He has it on DVD now. He paid money to transfer it to DVD. He loves it. He's shown it to other teachers. They love it too. They probably have copies. I try not to think about it. If I had the guts to go down and rip it, I'm confident it would do gangbusters on YouTube. It's basically outsider art. And his love for that film, and the other teachers' love for that film, is what I credit with literally everything else I've ever done in the space. Whatever you do, do it boldly, especially if it's wrong. Make style parodies. Make a shot for shot recreation of someone else's video. Music videos are a great choice. Shoot and produce in grayscale if color balance is intimidating. If you get the raws into the editing suite and the audio is garbage, don't fix it unless you want to. Don't do anything unless you want to. But do something. Don't feel compelled to publish it, but at the same time don't be afraid to publish it. Don't forget that YouTube allows for private videos, and you can use that to show us what you've done if you want. I'll make a separate post on the social media and what you need to get started here in a bit.
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Oct 11, 2023 23:12
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TOOLS Whatever the gently caress you have on hand, who gives a poo poo. An absolutely disgusting number of creators got their start with a two year old iPhone as their only equipment. An even more disgusting number of people with gold and diamond play buttons still shoot on a phone. If you make content people want to watch some of them will watch it through the lens of a webcam from 1998 edited in Windows Movie Maker, and you can use the dopamine hit from watching the number go up to justify moving money from your leisure budget into your getting equipment budget. Starting from a two year old iPhone, these are the upgrades I'd suggest in no particular order, along with when to make them: A hand held stabilizer - buy if you're shooting from the hand, as soon as your video stability is impacting your ability to make the edits you want to make. This is a necessity for me because my hands shake in certain positions. Look up reviews and buy whatever you can afford. A tripod/monopod - Again, as soon as you feel like your shot stability is capping your edits. Get a cheap one that's well reviewed. My favorite tripod ever was built for a projector and pulled out of the trash at a school. My favorite monopod was a walking stick I bought at the Grand Canyon Visitor's Center, then my dog chewed it so I used my dad's belt sander to level the top and then screw on a connector from a monopod I bought of Amazon that broke because it was made of 3-ply tinfoil. Both have died noble deaths (the tripod was run over by a car, the monopod was stolen by a dog and brought into a lake where it chose not to float). I have a few of each nowadays, and I buy them cheap because it allows me to take risky shots without feeling bad about risking expensive equipment. An appropriate mic - Boom mic if you're shooting a talk show or sitcom style, directional for talking heads, lapel mic for talking heads in spaces with too much ambient noise for a directional. One of the biggest and cheapest steps up in quality for outdoor talking head videos (I call them walkie talkies and am mocked mercilessly for doing so) is having multiple mics recording simultaneously, ideally lapel feeds on our star(s), a directional for anyone who's not our star(s), and a non-directional to capture ambient noise. You don't need to do this, any phone mic is sufficient alone for more than you'd expect, but I personally feel it's the best bang/buck ratio specifically because so few people do it. Being able to "explain" a weird glance off camera in an otherwise perfect shot by turning up ambient for a half second beforehand, well, nobody else will care but if you care you'll feel a lot better about it. Software - Doesn't matter, anything can make something that someone would watch. Initially use something free and get comfortable with it, then upgrade when you want to do things it can't. I recommend Premiere Pro as soon as you can, just because it's never going away, there's a lot of tutorial content for it, it can do anything that the others can do and more, and if push comes to shove you can market that skillset separately. Licenses are expensive, feel free to either yo ho ho it or find a .edu email address to gain access to student pricing. Be aware that Adobe does audit creators from time to time Wait that's waaaaaaay to broad. Let me explicitly qualify that last statement: Be aware that Adobe once supposedly got Mad As Hell at Linus Tech Tips specifically for using student licensed software while in possession of a diamond play button. It got fixed. Nobody went to jail you won't either. Neither LTT nor Adobe mentioned it because it looks bad for both. I once had an Adobe auditor show up at the university I worked at, the only one I've seen in the wild. We showed her a spreadsheet showing how many installs we had That's it. You don't need a boom, you don't need a drone, you don't need nine cameras. Remember that your star time is valuable, even if your star is you, and just try to ensure that time is not wasted. Shoot a couple takes. Record redundant audio just in case. Get a second camera (a used iPhone off Facebook Marketplace with a cracked screen, no one will know), offset it at 90 degrees from the first, or 45 if you hate your nose. Drop or raise it a foot, again largely depending on how you feel about your nose. Smash cut to the second camera feed if you need to cover an edit or an absent minded face touch or to swap between takes. If you can't get the audio to line up or whatever, slow down the video from the second feed by ~20% and desaturate the color and people will think you know what you're doing. Don't be afraid to smash cut to a talking head in your editing suite if you want more words in a shot you can't re-do. Look to Climate Town for how to leverage this effectively, then recognize that he is or has a better editor than me and that you can do well with way worse. When editing, focus on video. People just do not care at all about audio as long as it's comprehensible and mostly lined up. Subtitles are a big deal nowadays, so do them if you feel like it to drive the deaf-but-in-denial Millennial market (I am deaf but not in denial about it, subs plz). If you disagree, watch any "reality" TV show and watch them butcher together a 15 word sentence from 6 separate takes to make everyone sound like loving Bumblebee from the first Mike Bay Transformers. Ask your friends who have never thought about audio in their lives if anything feels wrong about it. Most people can barely tell. You wanna edit audio to sound smooth and natural? gently caress yeah do it. Stop the moment it stops being fun. If you want to feel dirty inside, make deliberate errors like overlaying audio that obviously don't line up with your mouth movements in a single shot. Comments about your perceived incompetence are ENGAGEMENT, baby, and you and I will know it was intentional. Again I recommend driving any purchase based on what you want to do. Got a raging boner for sweeping boom shots? Modern drones can not just emulate them, but do things a boom would find impossible. Buy a drone. Take the shot. The moment you stop having a genuine desire to edit that shot, stop. If you never want to use the drone again, sell it if you want to, or keep it if you don't. You are not permitted to feel bad or dumb for having bought it, and that applies to everything. Let me know if you still feel bad and I'll come loving fight you. Equipment is a distraction. Make videos. Share them. Take the feedback to heart, but get as much as you can. Learn to tell the difference between someone who loves you and is being critical because they want to see you succeed (me, I love you all, let's get diamond play buttons together) and someone who is critical because your poo poo just isn't for them. Curate your feedback circle. Stuff Made Here makes technically terribly edited videos most of the time but they're carried on the strength of the script. To be clear, I love Stuff Made Here and would buy a ticket to Australia tomorrow if he offered to let me stand in the corner facing a wall for 10 minutes while he tried to murder me with his beyblade. Play to your strengths. Make things. Shit Fuckasaurus fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Oct 12, 2023 |
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Oct 12, 2023 00:14
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SOCIAL MEDIA. This is the part I'm least versed in, so here's a huge grain of salt 4 u:  Before we get in, let me tell you a secret most people don't know. All Social media sites check for "legitimacy" to some degree in an effort to stem the Scammer Tide. Different sites use different checks, but generally you want your information to be identical across your platforms (name, email, etc) and that's enough. If you have a website or an entry on a Maps service and link it they'll check there too, so try to keep them all the same. Don't do jokes here, listing the White House as your address is stupid suspicious to the Platforms, and appeasing the Platforms is your only goal here. They are your Pantheon now. Put respect on their name, by which I mean park your preferred name on every platform you so much as smell, ASAP. This will prevent scammers from parking them and loving up your empire, as well as ensure that you have a Jacebook account or whatever if it turns out that your demographic is absolutely feral for Jacebook (Jacebook is nothing, i made it up just now). Also a word of caution, this post is going to be demographically heavy. I will be referring to people by ethnicity, race and gender, over and over again. If that makes you uncomfortable, know it makes me uncomfortable too. I'm sorry. It's also the unfortunate reality of targeting a demographic. If that's cool, barrel straight on in, but skip to the REAL ACTUAL CONTENT heading if you don't want to hear my story, we're doing this like a midwestern quiverfull mom's bad recipe post because I decided that just now. It's the post I want to write. THIS IS A HINT. IT'S NOT EVEN SUBTLE. MAKE THE CONTENT YOU WANT TO MAKE BECAUSE AT LEAST THEN YOU'RE MAKING SOMETHING. In college I learned Hootsuite (an app which can schedule posts for you and do other things, none of which matter at all it's for scheduling posts) because I was part of the bike club and nobody was responsible enough to make the toosdiegh night ride post on either Monday or Tuesday to remind people to come. These posts were so successful that I ended up setting up a few clubs in the same way. Unpaid on all fronts. On the strength of that, my only social media experience, I got a Social Media Manager job at a Mortgage company. Want to follow in my footsteps? Just loving apply, it's not like that job title has real requirements or meaningful certifications and they're going to hire an rear end in a top hat, why not you? While working for the Mortgage company I made the most successful branch Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest accounts in the company's 20 year history, each by several orders of magnitude. I credit Hootsuite and Adobe Spark exclusively. I then built a shared asset library in Adobe Creative Cloud so that all the other branches could steal my poo poo, but mostly to convince Corporate to get everyone on a centrally-paid Adobe account (sharing between accounts on the same plan is one-click, sharing between independent accounts is some sort of dystopian loving nightmare that never ever worked). I built a variety of Spark templates in our corporate colors, and when I'd get bored or when I was a passenger being driven to a shoot I'd look at accounts from other companies in our space and adjacent spaces that were successful at social media and create the assets I'd need to be able to create similar content. Eventually I got a real boy budget, and so I'd do things like dress up my loan officers in costumes and paint a pumpkin in the corpo colors and take like fifty shots of each of them as well as the group and various subgroups. Later still I became the Social Media Manager for the entire company for about a week before I got fired for my boss' mistake. I am a dipshit, you can do this. The single most successful post we ever had was my boss in a blue and white (corporate colors) Santa suit, talking about a house he was in. It was mostly successful because his wife hit him in the head with the boom mic. That house did not sell as a result of our social media or through us. That was common. My boss was an egomaniac who cared way less about conversion (making money) than the numbers at the bottom of the post, so that's what I optimized for on the branch accounts. He did the Ice Bucket Challenge in the year of our lord 2019 and he got ice stuck in his shirt, panicked, and passed out. He hated it. He demanded that I didn't post it. His wife (our accountant) demanded I did. I'd rather face laws than claws, so I did. The following day his passed-out rear end was his Profile picture on every platform at his request because the fucker did numbers. I also managed the socials of every single one of our branch's dozen or so agents and a handful of our most valued Realtor partners. Social media, you see, is worthless, so you can trade it for things it's federally illegal to pay money for, like Realtor/Financier partnerships. The whole world runs on crime and technicality. Anyway, I set up Hootsuite instances for each of them, then worked with them to create a customized version of our corpo assets (for our employees) or co-branded assets (for our Realtor partners) to suit their personality and preferred posting style, then banged out posts for them a few weeks at a time and scheduled them. These were "heartbeat" posts, meaning that they were background noise to keep the channels active. For agents, the heartbeat cadence was whatever they preferred. For Realtors it was 3 a week, MWF. Then I'd edit any video or photo they took, slap some of the graphics on them, and post those out as primary content. This worked spectacularly. A word on engagement. Humans do not like watching someone look uncomfortable, especially someone they plan to process the most expensive purchase of their life through. Looking comfortable and natural correlated with way better performance, and way better conversion more importantly. This may be the case for you, or not, depending on what you intend to do with your poo poo. My best performing Social realtor was a black native Jamaican who I, a fat white guy who grew up in South Florida, found nearly incomprehensible. He did crazy numbers with talking heads, had dozens of conversions, and built incredibly strong relationships with his customers and partners. I went to his house on Thanksgiving at his request specifically to shoot them laying out the table, sitting down, and having a performative "family" conversation. I couldn't identify half of what was on the table, but it was delicious, and also the single best performing Agent post of 2019 company-wide. It also opened him up to a whole new demographic, older white couples, who were previously essentially a non-performing demographic for his posts. He signed a deal for a four million dollar property soon after, which he attributed to that post and me. You see, most of our deals were teardowns, fixer-uppers, and investment properties (this is code for "the worst looking house on the block"). It also helped that the boss' wife was Jamaican, so we got a lot of mileage out of talking heads of the two of them and it drove the impression that we were a Jamaican friendly company where people could speak normally and comfortably without being judged, which to be fair we were but only for the one specific Agent. Our worst performing Agent on socials was a guy with who spoke perfect, coached English. Every picture and video he ever took looked like it was at gunpoint, and even staring at a script, even with a teleprompter, he could not speak seven consecutive words on camera without pausing and looking like he had just poo poo himself. He also insisted on doing those videos. It didn't matter, because he made 400 cold calls a day and made fuckpiles of money hawking lovely little duplexes to flippers. I mention this so that you understand, bad socials can only really hurt you if good socials are the goal. If the goal is Youtube success, poo poo out whatever on the Faces Books and then base your future posts on what does well, or less-poorly.  REAL ACTUAL CONTENT Each social media site is a totally different beast with different preferences and algorithms. Unfortunately they change so often that any guidelines I post will be pretty much the broadest of possible strokes. Full disclosure I am basically paranoid and don't use social media on personal accounts, even though I have one of the most common first+last combos on Earth. I do still do some things professionally in the space, but only for people I have an existing relationship with and even then only in desperate times. Anyway, a post that does well on Instagram will not do well on Pinterest, etc etc etc. I mention Pinterest a lot because it was highly relevant to the Real Estate space due to demographics. I'm going to use it as an example because it's very different from anywhere else, so it has to have the most unique strategies for success, and I have deep knowledge of it because we used to make $mountains with it. In all likelihood you will park a Pinterest name then forget about it forever unless your target demographic lines up, because it is laser-focused. Based on numbers I just pulled from a variety of sources as well as the data my idiot CEO used to pay marketing companies for (don't, do not, do not it's all lies), Pinterest is still somewhere between 60 and 80% female. Female users dominate engagement, with around double the time spent on the platform per week. Past here the numbers get way more fuzzy, which is impressive considering the 20 percentage point range I just posted like meaningful data. Critically for our real estate success, the median Pinterest user is part of a household that makes over $100k a year, and is between the ages of 25 and 35. This is the core market for real estate sales, and the fact that they are women is a significant bonus as the majority of home purchases are driven by a woman, most commonly a female partner but surprisingly often a daughter, parent, or friend. The primary audience is largely Caucasian, though not disproportionately given the demographics of the countries where it's most popular. Asian ethnicities, specifically Asian-American ethnic groups are overrepresented compared to the same demographics. Are you loving uncomfortable yet? God knows I am. Unfortunately it pans out. Weaponizing Pinterest was the single most effective thing I ever did for conversion by miles. It's not a Real Estate listing site, so you can photoshop everything to hell and back and get away with it. Misrepresenting a property's condition on an MLS (Multiple Listing Service, which is where Realtors have to post houses) is grounds for revocation of your MLS contract, revocation of Realtor status, and a lifetime ban (if you get caught lmao). Photoshopping on Pinterest is a borderline requirement. Crime and technicality wins again. Look at trending and popular tags and post things that fit them. This necessarily means posting simple pics that would not perform well on other sites, like a cold shot of a pool or fireplace with actual humans in the picture (another MLS no-no). We sold a 2 million dollar house as a direct result of a picture of my boss' wife sitting on the most incredible stone fireplace you ever did see. The house we sold did not contain the fireplace, as the fireplace was in a lodge in Minnesota which was not a home at all. Didn't matter. They reached out to our email, I handed off the deal to the Jamaican guy I mentioned earlier, and he sent them pics and a short walkthrough video of a house he happened to be standing inside at the time. They bought it without having set foot inside. Weaponizing platforms works, but you can never feel clean again. I will never feel clean again. I scrub so hard. It doesn't help. I won't be touching on demographics much past here, I just wanted to give you an example of weaponization. In general, your goal will be much simpler. You're looking to convert users of one platform to viewers of your content, regardless of platform. If Youtube is your chosen platform, this means making a Facebook user watch a video, any video by you, by whatever means necessary. You're not looking to convert users of one platform to another, just get your content in front of them on whatever platform you can. Never link people offsite directly, as nobody wants people clicking out of their horrible trap. Meta in particular loving hates that and will do all sorts of lovely tricks like transparent rehosting, throttling all your content, wasting your ad spend on people who fit your target audience but Meta knows won't give a poo poo, don't do it. If you make videos, cut shorter versions for your non-preferred platforms if you want to apply conversion pressure. Facebook does optical character recognition and voice-to-text on videos, so it's hard to hide from them. Some people get around this by wearing those Creator shirts with the Youtube logo and channel name. Some make banners. Some try to make their URL look all hosed up like a lovely captcha. Do any of them work? God alone knows, but for small, non-established accounts Meta seems to punish the entire account and all linked accounts (Threads, Insta, Facebook, Whatsapp) for a time after an infraction of this unwritten rule, so my personal recommendation is to match your account names across all platforms, put a Youtube logo somewhere, and hope for the best if any of those platforms matter to you. Ultimately your socials will establish rapport with users and hopefully, maybe lead to conversion to your preferred platform. Like I alluded to above, squeeze gently. To maximize your success, every post on every platform should be substantive enough that a person who sees that post as their first engagement with your content will immediately understand who you are and what type of content you put out at a bare minimum. Also know that the vast majority of exposures will not engage, but Facebook also looks at the amount of time a post is visible in a feed for popularity, so your content on socials should take time to engage with. This incentivizes inscrutable posts somewhat, so let your inner cryptid out. The above info often means your social media content will be shallow and re-tread the same points over and over, and definitely involves breaking kayfabe (if you do a halloween special with a mask on, your Social videos will involve you taking off the mask or having the mask off regardless of if that occurs in your preferred platform content). Facebook won't know, but this is a squeeze too. Your base on Facebook should see a post of yours, be reminded of your preferred platform, and go there "organically" (Youtube loving loves it when people search your channel name, did I mention that? Pretty sure Boylei Hobby Time's success is based primarily on this because he is wacky successful given his operating scale and post cadence. Also I love him and he should post more). Anyone not in your base will see them as incentive to find out more about you, which they can do on-platform or off. Your commenters will say dipshit things like "I love your Youtube videos" and you can Love or Like react to them to highlight them and bring them to the top. Once a video has run its course, make a gif of a money shot from the video and post it on your socials to drive Share interaction. The Share button is your secret goal, as it is the absolute strongest tool on every platform and on Facebook specifically Shares are treated as separate posts of your content (meaning any throttles you've encountered are reset for that instance of the post), so a Share has ludicrous power, and a Share from a user demographically dissimilar to your base can drive engagement that Fecebook would normally never give you. Do not ask everyone on your Friends list engage with your content inorganically, especially if they don't normally engage with other peoples' posts, as this is known to stifle posts badly when done at scale. Don't worry about your many and varied grandmas who like everything you post though, as not only are they likely outside your normal demographic and also Facebook seems to know about Grandmas of this stripe and doesn't seem to care much. Plus, Grandma is going to miss some, or angryface React at your blasphemy, or comment on every third post asking how your cat is doing, and that's organic enough. A brief word on Reactions: Like and Love are safe on Facebook and always positive. Other Reacts may have varying effects on posts, but it's unclear because of how goddamn much static every Social Media platform uses. Don't talk about this with social media people, blood feuds have been sworn over varying opinions and will be again. Just use the Like-est Reaction u got and you'll generally be safe. Even though you likely hate it, saying "slam that like and subscribe button" or "I'm gonna count these fuckin' jellybeans but first drop a comment with your guess" are unfortunately effective. Obviously need to be tailored per-platform but it is what it is. Generally younger audiences are more receptive and older audiences are less so or even reject it, so again consider your target demographics and act appropriately, but basically every successful YouTuber engages with the "like and subscribe" bullshit either verbally or as a motion graphic. You can be counter-culture about it (Folding Ideas used to ask you to join the cult of "Like, Comment, and Subscribe" for example, AvE makes jokes about it usually for another) but it's probably a good idea. gently caress this poo poo is long. I don't know if I hit everyone. Congratulations everybody you've now passed my 4 hour Realtor Social Media training course we used to use as bait. Now you can use the Partner graphic in your listings and I'll do a free house photo/video package for any home you want once a month so long as you've sent us a deal this year. Great job. Bad news is, statistically 90% of you will not be Realtors this time next year. Ah well, wanna buy a house? Shit Fuckasaurus fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Oct 12, 2023 |
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Oct 12, 2023 02:39
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Oh hey, my link to this thread has brought life into it! I take full credit  I do, however, also take full blame for never replying to this critique: 7seven7 posted:Awesome - thanks! First off: thanks for taking the time to watch my nonsense and for the kind words! Also, I apologize for whiffing on my response. I do see what you mean by the odd moments of silence. I prob need to move away from keeping the entire track intact and just cut in/out of it as the video requires. Why have I insisted on keeping the songs in their entirety in all of my videos so far?  As for the thumbnail... I don't know, it still seems like some dark magic. Even the broad "maker" category of YouTubers I truly enjoy watching will go with big text or YouTube Face or big arrows pointing at things. I click on those videos despite the thumbnails, not because of them. Sardonik posted:
 This is 100% the case with me. I make stuff across my idiot hobbies simply because I want to, and sometimes I think it might make a decent video so I record the build. There's little to no overall theme per se. I suppose it's just a reflection of how I approach my hobbies so... I think I'm OK with that, even if it means the views stay low.poo poo Fuckasaurus posted:SOCIAL MEDIA. Well that's an interesting insight into how sausage is made!  ---------- And since it's adjacent to social media: I'm curious how everyone shares their videos? Or at least how you did back when you only had a handful of uploads and subscribers? You've just uploaded it, maybe shared with friends and on whatever social media account you've set up, and... Then what? I ask because it seems to me that the best way to get people to view and provide feedback on the with is to post the links on forums dedicated to the topic/hobby in question. SA is actually a good example of that for me, as are crafts subreddits. You do run the risk of running afoul of anti-self-promotion rules though, esp on Reddit, so there's that limitation. But it still seems like a more useful way to get good engagement rather than shouting into the
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Oct 12, 2023 06:38
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poo poo Fuckasaurus posted:SOCIAL MEDIA. This is amazing, thank you for posting!
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Oct 13, 2023 15:31
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Ethics_Gradient posted:This is amazing, thank you for posting! You're extremely welcome! Especially with the social media stuff I'm just glad it might help someone. I spent hundreds of hours studying it and was extremely surprised at my success, especially compared with the relative lack of success that others (including those I was learning from) were experiencing, so I guess I might have some degree of natural talent here which I sadly can no longer use and be happy about it. At least if I'm giving y'all tools to do things rather than doing them myself I don't have any of the dirt and blood on my hands, being employed in the field was absolutely awful and I'd go home feeling less clean than when I fried chicken for 8 hour shifts at Publix. I've heard that better, more ethical jobs exist in the field, but when I went looking I couldn't find any, everyone just wanted ridiculous success in no time at minimal cost, which is impossible. This stuff takes time, and you need to do it well for awhile for the algorithm to notice and start growing your posts for you. Like I said, I'm pretty good at Youtube save for thumbnails. I consider myself to have mastered Facebook and Pinterest in 2019 as well, but with every passing day that I don't use the platforms those credentials diminish in value. I was also good at Twitter, though I wasn't allowed to text post or comment without corporate approval (corporate rules, a previous Branch Manager had to be let go for touching the poop on Twitter) which super-limited our success at that time because of the algorithm's preference for accounts to do majority text posts. Twitter died, by the way, the algo changes so frequently and so radically that nobody can teach you Twitter anymore. We used Instagram but Realtors are much better positioned for Insta success, so mostly I found a young lady who was extremely good at Insta and also a Realtor and used her as an example in my classes in exchange for teaching her the package we used (Hootsuite, and the Adobes: Spark, Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, AfterEffects and Indesign) and co-managing her Facebook way, way more than I did for anyone else. If any of you have any questions I am around and available and happy to help. Especially on direct questions I'll always explicitly qualify my confidence in the answer and I won't just make poo poo up and mislead you, because that's honestly way worse than no answer at all in this space. Like above I'll try to give good examples of channels or pages I'm aware of that exemplify any given point.
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Oct 14, 2023 03:33
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poo poo Fuckasaurus posted:SOCIAL MEDIA. God, any and all social media promotion is scary and way outside of my realm of understanding, so this is mega helpful to me. Thank you so much for taking the time to dump all that here. My new thing is out and I've finally figured out how to get high-res thumbnails onto YouTube. I still think my thumbnail concepts need work but I'm getting closer hopefully. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__eYV6Ruf-M Any criticism would be greatly appreciated. I feel like I'm getting quicker at these, but I'm stuck on a style that's enjoyable to make but I have no idea if it's enjoyable to watch. I don't really feel like I'm improving so any pointers would be taken on board! 7seven7 fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Oct 14, 2023 |
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Oct 14, 2023 22:01
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howdy thread! after a bit of severe burnout working on my game I've decided to start a streaming sideproject using a program I threw together in a game engine. here's the first experimental stream. I'd love any feedback or ideas as I'm pretty darned new to streaming, especially regarding interacting with chat. thanks! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pbYBu99Llo
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Oct 14, 2023 23:16
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Wow, thanks so much for all of this! I've been busy over the last few days, hence my delay, but this was exactly the sort of thing I was looking for: a great overview to identify the areas that I can start poking at. As you say, you gotta get in there and get your hands dirty, so this gives me the insight of how to do just that.
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Oct 15, 2023 22:22
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