Another Roof

I've always believed in quality over quantity when it comes to videos. All my favourite channels follow that approach. I'm so grateful to all of you for your patience, and to those who show up for every video. Thank you!

I bring this up because I'm deep into the research for my next video, but it's a *huge* topic. I'm planning for my next video to be an epic -- over an hour, potentially longer than two hours, in order to cover everything at the level of "no missing steps" detail I like. Because of this scope, it'll be a while before it is released, so just wanted to let you all know and thank you in advance for your patience. It's a topic that's fun, fascinating, and affects all of us!

In the meantime, what was your favourite 2024 video of mine? It's easy to get obsessed with metrics like view counts, but I like knowing which videos viewers *value* and *enjoy* regardless of view count. Enjoy the stupid square images that YouTube, a video platform, forced me to upload.

2 months ago | [YT] | 71

Another Roof

Join me tomorrow for my final video of 2024, a sort of spiritual sequel to my Countdown video. Thank you so much for watching my videos -- many more to come next year!

4 months ago | [YT] | 91

Another Roof

I've had a lot going on with the start of a new academic year and switching editing software, so thank you for your patience! Join me this Sunday when I'll be premiering my latest video!

5 months ago | [YT] | 152

Another Roof

Thanks to everyone who has watched my latest video on the Golden Ratio, Pi, and numerology! I hope you enjoyed it. I’m so excited for next week’s video, which is a collab!

Apologies for the long post but I want to be transparent about something: I’m trying out YouTube’s “test and compare” feature for thumbnails. I know this is reasonably common practice among YouTubers but I want to be honest and upfront about it and share some feelings about YouTubing as a whole.

Coming up with eyecatching titles / thumbnails is the only part of YouTubing that I hate. I have personal rules, like not to pull a face which doesn’t appear in the video itself, highlight surprising things but don’t lie etc — stuff you’d think any reasonable person would do but many channels plainly lie to bait viewers. I follow these but still, making thumbnails is not what I enjoy about making videos. (While I’m being transparent, the one time I broke my face-pulling rule was for my Sherlock video because I cut the footage that used the magnifying glass!)

As an example, I made a video recently about Gauss’s Heptadecagon which did well with 200k+ views. I think many people who watched that video would also enjoy the sequel about polygon constructions. But that sequel video got 40k views and stagnated quickly. A friend of mine didn’t even know that I’d made the sequel because they didn’t see it in their feed, despite how they are subscribed and loved the first one! Perhaps the title and thumbnail didn’t resonate with viewers and therefore YouTube didn’t recommended the video as widely.

Playing the thumbnail game, it seems, is a necessary and sad aspect of building a career on the platform and reaching more viewers to inspire with mathematics. This is especially true in the current algorithmic climate which values frequent uploads. Meanwhile I’m still trying to make it with the old fashioned low-frequency high-quality approach — which is risky because as the example illustrates, sometimes hundreds of hours of work can go broadly unseen.

To clarify, I don’t just make videos to get views. I make them because I love sharing stories about mathematics. YouTubing does form a growing portion of my income though, so I need to be realistic about how the videos are marketed. I’ve seen some of my favourite channels devolve into view-chasing, where the video content suffers for the sake of maximising views. I’ll never do that. For me, it’s always video first and then decide how best to market it, rather than marketability first then making a video around that.

I hope you understand my decision to trial this feature — thank you so much for subscribing to my silly channel!

9 months ago | [YT] | 333

Another Roof

Today marks two years since my first video! Can't believe it's been so long but here we are 24 videos, 55k subscribers, and 3M total views later. Thank you so much for choosing to follow me -- many more videos in the pipeline!

10 months ago | [YT] | 319

Another Roof

...but WHY are the only constructible regular polygons those with side number equal to a product of distinct Fermat Primes and an arbitrary power of 2?!? Find out -- as many of you canny viewers already know -- on 5th June, when we'll embark on an epic climb of field theory, polynomials, and other construction impossibilities.

11 months ago | [YT] | 326

Another Roof

I hit 50k subscribers today! Thank you so much to all of you, and welcome to all who subscribed following my heptadecagon video. Look forward to more videos soon!

1 year ago | [YT] | 370

Another Roof

Channeling my inner Ancient Greek mathematician in next week's video, where I'll present one of my favourite results in all of mathematics!

1 year ago | [YT] | 248

Another Roof

Currently editing my next video and can't wait to share it. Hoping it'll be done by next week! I cover something that's been in the news lately and offer my opinions, so brace yourself for that -- thanks as always for your patience!

1 year ago | [YT] | 186

Another Roof

I'm hard at work editing my next video. Have I been YouTubing long enough to have a "classic" type of video? If so, I think this is it -- taking a deep dive into a specific problem like I did with Countdown or Hertzsprung's Problem. Can't wait to share it with you before the end of January!

1 year ago | [YT] | 251