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!
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