Summarizing my YouTube experiment
2024-11-23
In case you missed it, I published an explanation video about my DIY SLAM stack BotvacCenter in September, it got surprisingly many views (over 1,500) and thus I decided to use the opportunity and experiment a bit with producing YouTube videos. Today, this experiment is coming to an end after three more videos and some fascinating insights. So, let's take a look at what I learned and talk about why I'm stopping my video production for now...
First and foremost, I want to highlight the immense effort that goes into the funny or educational 10-minute videos most of us watch on YouTube. Many believe that Youtube is an easy dream job - you just talk a camera for a few minutes, add some cuts, upload the video and become successful. But the truth couldn't be further away - most time is actually spent with research for the video, writing a script you can read fluidly off and post-producing the footage. Cutting a pleasant to watch video with the right peace needs a lot of talent and knowledge about video editing, animation, sound design et cetera. Actually filming the video is a whole other struggle you can spend countless hours with, but the gist of it is that the 1 to 2 hours per minute of finished video I spent is already quick. The videos of many popular creators can easily take several hundred man-hours to get from the idea to upload and that's something we overlook way too often. So, my first takeaway is a much greater appreciation for all hobby and professional content creators that do this on a regular basis.
Secondly, I finally understood hands-on what some many creators preach: Production quality has virtually nothing to do with the success of individual videos and finding the right niche is key for becoming successful . Don't get me wrong, good production value matters of course and can set your channel apart from others, but it's almost impossible to predict the performance of an individual video. In fact, it's often exactly contrary to what you expect and doesn't reflect the work you pour into it. What videos you produce is much more important than how you produce them - at least once they are at an acceptable level that people enjoy watching. This is why finding your niche is so important - it allows you to work on the right thing. You need a space with real demand, but not much competition yet - making it really hard to find one. From the performance of my videos, I can tell you that my niche is certainly not in the productivity segment (although I really enjoy making these video), but in the interception of hardware and software (like in the first two videos I made).
Another aspect I still struggle with is determining the scope of a video and how to start it . It's evident that you need an interesting introduction, because otherwise the people will just click away. But actually figuring one out that's interesting for someone not familiar with the topic is really hard. On the same page is the scope problem. How many fundamentals do I need to explain in order to allow many people to understand my video, but not bore the more advanced watchers at the same time? To be fully honest, I still don't have an answer to this question and probably tend to explain a bit too much - at least according to my watch statistics. All of these struggles can be sorted out with trial and error in order to gain experience of course, but that takes a lot of time and is probably why only a tiny percentage of all YouTube channels blow up - most people just aren't willing to spend the effort needed to get it right.
On the note of not spending effort, let's talk about why I'm stopping my video production. As I mention on my "Now" page right now, it's easy to lose focus by doing too many things at once (having a job, studying, networking with people, blogging, doing YouTube and some other activities) and overload yourself. As a result, either the quality of what you do or you will suffer. In my case, I tried to get everything done properly, worked immense overtime and sacrificed heavily on sleep, good nutrition, exercise and sometimes even social activities. That's nothing I can or want to do for an extended period of time and thus I had to get a clearer focus once again. YouTube needs a lot of time, is just an opportunistic experiment for me and turned out to not be a passion of mine, so it has to go - together with some other smaller activities.
With that said, I hope you find these insights at least somewhat interesting and enjoyed hearing a bit of "insider knowledge" about being a YouTube content creator. As always, feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments down below and have a lovely day...