Living Zoology

This is a post mostly for those who don't like AI narrated videos! A new video is out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnHlz...

Will you watch it? Will it get enough views and support so it will give us some revenue to continue doing our educational work? Let's see!

Also, you can of course go through our channel and check videos you almost certainly missed! We will give you here several videos, which we are proud of and very few people watched them. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Qom... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_m3-... 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_2NU... 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWlaf... 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3SMI...

1 week ago | [YT] | 25

Living Zoology

We announce that a new snake ID app, on which we worked with our IT friends, is out! Will you try it??? SNAKE NAME - IDENTIFY SNAKES app is available for download in Apple Store or Google Play on mobile phones!

Read the rest of the post first and check out the promo video please!
PROMO VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlhtc...

Please note that there are technical limitations which don't allow us to create an app that can determine all snake species in the world with 100 % accuracy. SNAKE NAME - IDENTIFY SNAKES has 78 % accuracy, which is the highest on the market. The app can recognize about 800 most common and famous snake species from around the world. However, there are about 4000 snake species on our planet.

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 39

Living Zoology

Hello everyone! This post is directly connected to the post from 2 days ago. First of all, thank you to those who shared their opinion and voted! We appreciate it. The result from the 350 votes is that 66 % hate AI voiceovers and 34 % like it or don't have a problem with it. While it may seem like this is a significant result, it is a tiny portion of the total amount of our subscribers or viewers. We currently have 354, 000 subscribers. We will now give you an insight into the performance of our videos. Please vote and let us know if you are a subscriber and how often do you watch our videos. So now let's go see some info you don't know:

Videos which mostly give us revenue in a long-term (Battles of the deadly snakes, some narrated documentaries etc.) are watched by non-subscribers. Only up to 5 % of views of these videos come from subscribers.

Most of our typical videos (just text and sound of nature) get a certain amount of views (usually not many more than 20k during the first months after posting) and at some point they almost stop getting more views and they almost don't earn us anything anymore. The stats show that it is because those who like this type of videos watch it (usually less than 15k people) and then these videos don't attract nobody else to watch. Since the beginning of this year we created 8 videos with our typical style. During the last month, they together earned 42 USD. They almost don't gain more views. From the long-term perspective, they are not a result we expect after spending many thousands of USD for traveling/filming and 3 months of full-time work at the computer. Most of all typical Living Zoology videos have the same history!

Recently we created two videos in which we did not put text but used AI text to speech tool (we of course wrote the text ourselves). These two videos constantly get more and more views (about 100 new views per hour) and together they earned us about 300 USD during the last month. These two videos are currently keeping our daily earnings just enough to be able to continue doing our work and be prepared for some filming trips in the future! Moreover, these two videos attracted almost 500 new subscribers to our channel (compared to a very low number of new members attracted thanks to 8 typical videos created since January 2025). And one last thing, these two videos have the highest percentage of views from the USA (and Japan). So it does not seem like all native speakers are strongly against AI voiceovers. And one last thing, these two videos have a surprisingly high amount of views from people older than 50 years. This age category usually does not have a high percentage in our viewers so it is great that we reached this audience too!

Now we will give you an example of the cost of getting the footage you watch on our channel. 5 months ago we posted this epic documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtA-8... It has a proper narration recorded in the studio. Only the costs of travel at filming locations were about 3000 USD, then we paid about 250 USD for the narrator and the studio, then about 100 USD for the music. 5 months after we posted the film, it has earned about 380 USD. Our regular videos are of course also a result of similar trips and in order to cover the topic of snakes worldwide, we try to do 2 to 4 trips per year! We don't have any external sponsors and pay the costs of everything from our pockets, so we obviously have to earn some money from our videos to be able to continue creating new videos. Otherwise I (Matej) would need to find another job. Apart from helping with Living Zoology projects, Zuzana has a full-time job as a teacher.

We love to make videos with text and nature sounds. It is always great to see how people who value nature like these videos. But, we also always wanted to reach a large amount of people and especially inspire those who are disconnected from nature. But, how we can do that? Well, by exploring ways how to make the content watchable for them. When shorts came to YouTube, we did not like them at all. We felt like we cannot educate anyone in 1 minute. We slowly started experimenting and nowadays we have a completely different audience watching shorts and main videos. Many viewers complained in the past that they don't want to read text. It is simply not interesting for them. We want to have a large impact and show as many people as possible that snakes are awesome. We don't have money to produce a professional narration for all videos. Solution? Let's try to use modern technologies for something good! If people who want us to make videos with only natural sounds all became members, watched every video and supported us in more other ways, maybe we could only do this type of content. But the reality is different. Most of our regular videos don't earn much and are not watched by wide audience.

We will of course not stop creating videos with text and nature sounds! Our goal for this year is to create more diversity of video styles. Also, we extremely appreciate support from members! Thank you guys, stay safe!

1 month ago | [YT] | 62

Living Zoology

We have a question for you. Many of you know that for years we make videos either only with sounds of nature and text, or from time to time we pay the studio and the narrator (only for long documentaries, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtA-8...). We use our voice only if it makes sense - in behind the scenes videos and similar. We think that our voice recorded at home simply does not sound good. Recently we decided to try to make some videos with AI voiceover to please those who for years wrote us that they refuse to read text in videos. We made two videos and so far they are successful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bahfG... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY_aR.... Please, what do you think about them? And what is your opinion about AI voiceovers? Before you answer, please read our point of view. Our costs of traveling in order to film our footage are huge. Paying a studio and a narrator for every video was never an option for us, it is too expensive. Our videos simply don't earn us enough so we could spend about 250 USD per video for a voiceover recorded in the studio. AI voiceover gives us a chance to make videos also for those who want to listen to narration while watching amazing snake footage. Thanks for answer!

1 month ago | [YT] | 41

Living Zoology

We spent 4 days in Croatia with the families of kids who, in the past, attended the forest kindergarten where Zuzana works. Educating people in person is very valuable for us as we have the chance to be an inspiration and show our passion for snakes and other wild animals. It was a big success. We found 7 snake species and everyone was excited! Now it is time to create some new videos so we can educate people around the world online!

Snakes from Europe deserve more attention. Here are our videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKbDS...

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1 month ago | [YT] | 152

Living Zoology

Spring is a dangerous part of the year for amphibians in Europe. Today we went for a walk in nature and we observed European toads while breeding. Many amphibians die on roads while migrating to their breeding grounds. Some time ago we created a video about a great project focused on building barriers that will prevent frogs and newts from dying on roads. We are pretty sure you haven't watched it, because it has only 2.8k views! ;)

2 months ago | [YT] | 25

Living Zoology

There is a new video on our channel! Which of the snakes shown you like the most? Go check out the new episode about snakes of India ;)

2 months ago | [YT] | 38