Your transparency is greatly appreciated. The fact that you have those rules and the integrity to be upfront about this is a great thing to see on the platform. As a viewer, I would say that your videos reaching a greater audience is awesome, your content deserves all the recognition it can get!
9 months ago
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Being transparent is one of the best qualities a YouTuber can have and we all greatly appreciate it! Your videos are always a great watch as well. When your channel blows up, I can say I was one of the first 50k!!!
9 months ago
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I loved both polygon videos. They were especially interesting since I had just finished a 3 week Olympiad number theory class where we studied some abstract algebra. I mostly watch your videos by going to your channel once in a while to see if anything’s new. You’re one of my favorite channels on YouTube and I hope you continue to prioritize the quality of videos over the frequency. If you need to optimize the thumbnails to get clicks, then I support that entirely because if more people saw your videos that would be amazing.
9 months ago
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I'm glad you brought this up. It'd been a personal issue of mine seeing YouTubers switch thumbnails so frequently and drastically. For example, there were so many Veritasium videos I refused to watch on principle because he seemed to haphazardly change the thumbnail lol. As a viewer, my gut feeling had been that, by doing so, the YouTuber was in a way admitting their video wasn't good enough on its own. Of course this sentiment doesn't acknowledge the many challenges you have to go through as a YouTuber and I sympathize with that. I have watched the majority of your videos and have observed the consistent honesty of your content and character. Therefore, I trust that you will continue to act as such while doing what you need to do to make a living. Thank you for giving us quality videos on Mathematics. As an aside, allow me to encourage you to express some more confidence in your craft. Your channel is not silly. You provide a necessary and prominent perspective amongst an abundant source of education on this platform. As you claimed, you make your living primarily on YouTube. This isn't a hobby for you. This is your profession. And you are extremely good at it, if I do say so myself. Once again, thank you! 😊
9 months ago
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I commented about this on the video itself, it’s fine, whatever you need to do to validate the huge amount of work you do for these videos, but it’s amazing that you were up front about it.
9 months ago
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This is such an incredible sentiment and I'm glad you are still holding on to your principles. Being at the mercy of algorithms sucks. I do find it icky when the clickbait gets too much but I wouldn't mind if it helps the channel
9 months ago
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I really appreciate your video first -principle. You have a unique and very clear way of approaching topics.
9 months ago
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What's funny is I watched a video or two of yours a while back (loved it!) but the algorithm hasn't gotten around to giving me more. This post itself (which YouTube did decide to show me) reminded me about your channel and I'm going to go check out a couple of your recent vids.
9 months ago (edited)
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No biggie, you’re still one of my favorite channels on YouTube, if you need to make the thumbnail more “attractive” to the algorithm I wouldn’t care, the content is always great.
9 months ago
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I have set your channel to notify my when you post a new video, as there is not a single one of your videos that I havent found to be fascinating, and more than worth watching
9 months ago
| 3
You're doing the right thing. (I've unfollowed many channels because of clickbait.)
9 months ago
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This isn't just YouTube or video production on the internet. Sure, YouTube massively skews things with its algorithm, but if you're a company selling a product, and it's the best product in the world but doesn't have a visually appealing or attention-grabbing pitch to prospective customers, barely anyone is going to even see what you're offering, let alone buy it.
9 months ago (edited) | 0
Personally the title thumbnail thing doesn't bother me a a viewer, I only care about the quality of the video itself. Looking forward to your next video.
9 months ago
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I mean thumbnails don't even have to be all that different from each other, just slightly different chunk from the content and see which works better
9 months ago
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As a chronic YouTube viewer, I don’t care if you pull faces for the thumbnail that aren’t in the video, just do what you gotta to get them views. Toss some big red arrows in the thumbnail, make the title a question, and educate some viewers.
9 months ago
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Your comment about the video about Gauss' heptadecagon and its follow-up then not getting as much traction - mind if I offer up my opinion? I watched it, because although I'm never going to understand even a fraction of what you were developing in the second ⅔ of the video, I like geometry (when I was a child I made up every single net in Cundy & Rollett, even the stellated forms). I've got to be honest here and say I also seek out longer videos to fall asleep to, because I have bad tinnitus and listening to something distracts me from that and enables sleep to come. So, I quickly realised I was out of my depth, and from this point of view I won't subscribe - there's no point! But because I liked this video, your comment here popped up in my feed. So then I was intrigued, and I thought I'd go searching for this video on Gauss' heptadecagon - took me ages to find it, because there's nothing about it in any of the titles, or in the description. So, now I'm also looking for a follow-on, and I wouldn't even be able to guess which one it is... There's nothing quick I can see which identifies it, and I've actually been quite persistent in scratting around trying to find it. So it might be down to the thumbnails, it might be down to the titles, it might simply be the algorithms being a lil b*tch, but when you say you did a follow-up and then make it so hard to establish a link from one vid to the next, I have to wonder if some of the reason it didn't gain traction is because it just simply didn't look like it, and casual viewers just don't have the enthusiasm. It's a shame, though, as your stuff is clearly quality, with really well organised development of ideas (I used to teach adults so I can at least recognise how you're building the topic up, even if I don't understand most of it!) and clear narration. Yours is a channel that really deserves to do well and I wish you all success.
9 months ago (edited) | 1
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