Making YouTube videos is hard, even if it doesn't look like it
2024-10-13
In case you recently took a look at my "Now" page , you already know it, for everyone else here's the gist of it: I recently produced an explainer video of my project BotvacCenter , it was rather successful with over 1.500 views and thus I decided to experiment with making YouTube videos for a few months and see where it leads me. To my own surprise, I already have quite a few thoughts to share after just publishing two videos and while working on a third. So let's explore why making YouTube videos is actually quite hard...
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but the average videos most people watch on YouTube these days or that get recommended to you by the algorithm are in almost 100% of cases incredibly well executed, polished beyond belief and also purposely designed to please the "YouTube algorithm" in order to get maximum views. What does that mean for the viewers? Their thumbnails and titles are at least a bit over the top to grab your attention, the first minute or so features open questions or promises to get you hooked and the rest of the video has a quick pace with lots of animations, fitting music and visual/audio effects to keep your attention until the very end and maximize watch time. We can't necessarily blame the video creators for this, since they merely adapted to YouTube demands in order to become successful, but these design decisions have a few major effects. First and foremost, they make the videos more addictive and greatly increase the likelihood of you overspending time on the platform since everything just seems so interesting and they flood our outdated monkey brains with dopamine.
But secondly - from the perspective of a new creator - they also make it incredibly hard to produce appealing and successful videos, since you have to compete with literal masterpieces everywhere. Sure, this shouldn't stop you from getting started like I mentioned in my article "Done is better than perfect" , but it certainly increases the time needed to produce each video - even to just make it somewhat competitive. As a rule of thumb, I have found that I spent about 1 hour in production for every minute of the finished video - and that's already quick, since I don't add any fancy animations et cetera. If you think about it actively, this might not sound too surprising, but if you just happen to switch roles from a viewer to producer and haven't really thought about it before, this information is nuts and truly creates a deep appreciation for all these people spending their time creating polished and informative content. This ratio of production time to video length can obviously greatly vary depending on the content you produce - a VLOG almost certainly takes less time to produce than a nicely animated physics explanation video or investigative documentary. But let's just take a look at my primitive workflow as an example:
Everything starts out with the video idea of course, which can be the hardest part for some. It's important that you as the creator like the topic, since a lot of your time will flow into creating the video, but it's also vital that you think about an algorithm-pleasing title and thumbnail concept. Love it or hate it, you depend on the algorithm to show your video to people and get their attention - so even science channels need to spend time thinking about this, but obviously not to such an extreme extent. Luckily enough for me, I have almost two years of blog posts to base my first few videos on and that makes the idea-finding process a lot more straightforward, since I have a portfolio to pick from. Once the idea is found, the next step is to research the topic and write the script. The research part is currently still somewhat minimal, since I have already explored the topics I currently create videos about, but writing a script that doesn't only read well, but also sounds good spoken out can be quite a challenge - especially for me as a non-native speaker with the tendency to build overly long and complex sentences that are hard to understand, like this one ;) But seriously, the script is the backbone of your video and deserves its fair share of attention.
After it is finished, the most frustrating, but also rewarding part starts for me - filming the A-roll of me reading out the script. Since I don't use a fancy recording setup (just my phone on a tripod with a wired lavalier mic), the preparation time for this part is quite minimal right now. For better or for worse, every second I save there is spent trying to memorize the script and failing to read it out correctly though - that's the frustrating part. But know what? I get better at it every time and that's really rewarding, since I literally see my progress while editing the whole thing, which is a perfect transition to the next part. Once the A-Roll is shot, I create a new project in my editing software Shotcut, which might be far from professional but gets the job done for me, and start cutting the A-roll removing long gaps and failed attempts. The goal there is to make it sound as fluently as possible and do the groundwork for making the video interesting. Before doing so though, I spent a bit of time editing my audio track in Audacity trying to remove background noise, normalizing the audio levels and removing pop sounds - a wise man once said that it's better to have crappy video with good audio than vice versa and I couldn't agree more.
Another rule of thumb is that something visual needs to happen in the video every 10, at most every 20 seconds to keep the viewer interested. That's the main goal I try to achieve while creating and editing in pleasing B-Roll of fitting images, graphs and concepts. I certainly don't manage to always achieve this goal yet, but at least I manage to make my videos watchable. A good test of your final result is to just watch it like you as a viewer would watch any other video and note down the moments you start to click around in the user interface or open a new tab, since you're not interested enough. These are the areas you need to improve before posting the final video. Another really helpful trick is to come back to a finished video after a few days and look over it again, since only time can reveal certain mistakes. Once you're happy with it though, you just need to create a pleasing thumbnail, which is its own rabbit hole I won't go over in this article, and description.
After a video is uploaded, the first two or three days are usually the most interesting, since they determine how the algorithm likes your video and thus how it will perform in the long run, but there can always be unexpected turnarounds even after weeks or months. With that said, I hope you enjoyed this brief overview of what goes into making a YouTube video and why it really is hard work. As always, feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments down below and have a lovely day...