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Greeting Everyone, This is the second part of "How to be successful in youtube", and I hope you enjoy it as It took me a long time xD
There is only one rule for length.
o ¦and ito s not o Shorter is bettero or o Dono t go above two minutes.o Ito s this:the material of your videos must match the runtime.
If your videos have 15 seconds of material, it should be 15 seconds long. An idea, expressed to its full extent in fifteen seconds, placed in a one-minute video is a boring video. If your video has five minutes of entertaining content, guess what? It can be five minutes long and people wono t get bored.
Io ll prove it to you o TubeMogul put out data from fifty web series as to what the audience drop off numbers are between the first episode and the second. They found that across these webseries, there was a 64% drop off. So if you had 100k views on the first episode, you could expect 36k on episode two. These first episodes ran the gamut of lengths, from 2 to 12+ minutes.
So leto s look at RedLetterMediao s Star Wars reviews o each of the nine parts clocks in at almost ten minutes o definitely on the longer end of things. Conventional o shorter is bettero thinking would dictate that, surely, people would get bored watching these, and would not click ahead to part two. If the conventional thinking were true, then logically the audience drop off would be greater than the average of webseries o i.e. greater than 64%.
But looking at the other parts, this is not the case. In fact, RedLetterMediao s Attack of the Clones review outperforms the average o part 2 only has a 48% drop. And by part 8, ito s performing on the average with a 62% drop. The stickiness of these videos I attribute to the fact that, frankly, theyo re incredibly entertaining, and keep people interested for the entire length of the review. The whole thing is an hour long, but he had an hour of content.
But looking at the other parts, this is not the case. In fact, RedLetterMediao s Attack of the Clones review outperforms the average o part 2 only has a 48% drop. And by part 8, ito s performing on the average with a 62% drop. The stickiness of these videos I attribute to the fact that, frankly, theyo re incredibly entertaining, and keep people interested for the entire length of the review. The whole thing is an hour long, but he had an hour of content.
The online viewing experience is the most distraction filled viewing experience known to man. When I get an IM notification or a Twitter update or a Facebook message notification, it takes quite an engrossing video for me to not simply click over to see what my friends are saying. So as a video maker, ito s up to you to create engrossing content at an appropriate length.
But in general, when in doubt, try and trim. You need to develop your o sense of boredomo o thato s why our videos rarely go above two minutes. Not because we dono t want them longer, but that the single ideas we have for them cano t support a much longer length.
Hereo s a good way to tell o get a friend or parent to sit down and watch one of your videos right before they have to do something o get to an appointment, cook dinner, etc. Play it for them and watch them. The moment they start to fidget a little, or dart their eyes around the room towards the clock is the exact moment they get bored. Do this a few times, and youo ll start to understand when things are beginning to drag.
So leto s say you have a video youo re proud of, that your parents can sit through, and looks pretty good o where do you promote it?
Youtube Is Big, The Internet, however, is much bigger.
Too many people make the mistake of playing solely to the YouTube subscriber crowd. The fact is, the most popular channels get views far in excess of their subscriber numbers. What does that mean?
The Annoying Orange has 2.5 million subscribers, but he gets more than twice that many views on average per video. And if you drill down his stats, he only gets a few hundred thousand views from subscribers. Whato s this mean? Do those few hundred thousand subscribers watch each of his videos ten times each? Not likely o those views are coming from other places.
One of the first things we think about when we put out a new video is o Who else might be interested in this video?o Blogs are always looking for content- if you present an interesting video, they'll be more happy than happy to put it up and expose you to their audience.
Dono t forget online communities. Are you a part of any discussion groups or forums? What about your Facebook friends? What about submitting it to link aggregator sites like Reddit? I have an account on a popular Price is Right forum just because of our Price is Right video. When entering an online community, pay attention to their internal rules o figure out the right forum to post in, follow their guidelines, and be courteous, and stick around for some discussion. You shouldno t be ashamed of promoting your video assuming your video is the kind of thing that forum would want to see, after all. The Internet is the worldo s greatest time waster, and thereo s always room for another diversion.
So the next step after you finish a video is to make a list of places outside YouTube that the video might be a good fit for. That means expanding your browsing palette o start reading more blogs, hit up more sites, and start getting a sense as to what kind of videos fit well and where.
Network with your peers:
Find friends, find other channels in your city, and of equivalent subscriber count and viewership, and work with them.
Realistically, youo re going to have one hell of a time working with any of the more high-end YouTube guys, simply because I know for a fact that everybodyo s incredibly busy with side projects, and getting their own videos out. Your request probably is one of thousands from other like-minded people.
A good way to look around you is the tracking site VidStatsX, which is independent of YouTube, but culls data off Googleo s APIs. You can find your subscriber rank as well as channels with similar numbers as you. More important than just raw sub numbers are people with comparable 30 day averages, simply because thato s an indicator that ito s somebody whoo s working on their channel, rather than letting it stagnate.
If you can, go where the people aren't:
I have a philosophy about life I call the fire escape philosophy. You know how youo ve heard horrific stories about fires and how everyone tried to rush through a single door, and as a result, people get stampeded and trapped. Such stories always like to point out how, less than ten feet away, there was another door that led to safety or something.
Morbid, yes, but the idea is basically this o if thereo s something that a lot of people are fighting to do, you can join the fray, but ito s often easier for you to go somewhere else.
In terms of YouTube, it means this o while you can certainly try daily vlogging or doing makeup tutorials, there are a lot of other people doing that very thing. So that means ito s much harder for you to stand out. Ito s not that you cano t stand out o if you started a makeup channel that was genuinely hilarious and totally amazing, youo ll find an audience for sure o ito s that ito s much harder to. If you dono t want to fight that battle, try to do content thato s different than whato s out there.
Io m not saying o dono t vlogo or o dono t do makeup tutorialso o in fact, if thato s what you love doing, then by all means you should do it. But if you go down that road, dono t be blind to the fact that youo re fighting two battles o one to get a dedicated viewership, and another to differentiate yourself from other people with similar content.
TL;DR:
Figure out what you want from your channel, and dedicate the necessary time to achieve that goal. Find content that you personally love making or love watching, and experiment to see where that overlaps with what people want to see. Be consistent with your videos. Find your peers and collaborate with them. And make videos for the Internet as a whole, not just for YouTube.
As you can tell, ito s not revolutionary information Io m imparting here. And unfortunately thereo s no quick easy path to success. Ito s a lot of work, and you have to honestly ask yourself how much youo re willing to put in.
But if you can find that magic overlap of videos you love to make and videos people love to watch, YouTube can be one of the most creatively rewarding experiences of your life.
Good luck! And let me know if you have any questions or feedback in the comments below. Thanks For Reading, and be sure to give me a diamond and subscribe for my work if you want to see more of this!
Sincerely,
~ MinerDiner123
There is only one rule for length.
o ¦and ito s not o Shorter is bettero or o Dono t go above two minutes.o Ito s this:the material of your videos must match the runtime.
If your videos have 15 seconds of material, it should be 15 seconds long. An idea, expressed to its full extent in fifteen seconds, placed in a one-minute video is a boring video. If your video has five minutes of entertaining content, guess what? It can be five minutes long and people wono t get bored.
Io ll prove it to you o TubeMogul put out data from fifty web series as to what the audience drop off numbers are between the first episode and the second. They found that across these webseries, there was a 64% drop off. So if you had 100k views on the first episode, you could expect 36k on episode two. These first episodes ran the gamut of lengths, from 2 to 12+ minutes.
So leto s look at RedLetterMediao s Star Wars reviews o each of the nine parts clocks in at almost ten minutes o definitely on the longer end of things. Conventional o shorter is bettero thinking would dictate that, surely, people would get bored watching these, and would not click ahead to part two. If the conventional thinking were true, then logically the audience drop off would be greater than the average of webseries o i.e. greater than 64%.
But looking at the other parts, this is not the case. In fact, RedLetterMediao s Attack of the Clones review outperforms the average o part 2 only has a 48% drop. And by part 8, ito s performing on the average with a 62% drop. The stickiness of these videos I attribute to the fact that, frankly, theyo re incredibly entertaining, and keep people interested for the entire length of the review. The whole thing is an hour long, but he had an hour of content.
But looking at the other parts, this is not the case. In fact, RedLetterMediao s Attack of the Clones review outperforms the average o part 2 only has a 48% drop. And by part 8, ito s performing on the average with a 62% drop. The stickiness of these videos I attribute to the fact that, frankly, theyo re incredibly entertaining, and keep people interested for the entire length of the review. The whole thing is an hour long, but he had an hour of content.
The online viewing experience is the most distraction filled viewing experience known to man. When I get an IM notification or a Twitter update or a Facebook message notification, it takes quite an engrossing video for me to not simply click over to see what my friends are saying. So as a video maker, ito s up to you to create engrossing content at an appropriate length.
But in general, when in doubt, try and trim. You need to develop your o sense of boredomo o thato s why our videos rarely go above two minutes. Not because we dono t want them longer, but that the single ideas we have for them cano t support a much longer length.
Hereo s a good way to tell o get a friend or parent to sit down and watch one of your videos right before they have to do something o get to an appointment, cook dinner, etc. Play it for them and watch them. The moment they start to fidget a little, or dart their eyes around the room towards the clock is the exact moment they get bored. Do this a few times, and youo ll start to understand when things are beginning to drag.
So leto s say you have a video youo re proud of, that your parents can sit through, and looks pretty good o where do you promote it?
Youtube Is Big, The Internet, however, is much bigger.
Too many people make the mistake of playing solely to the YouTube subscriber crowd. The fact is, the most popular channels get views far in excess of their subscriber numbers. What does that mean?
The Annoying Orange has 2.5 million subscribers, but he gets more than twice that many views on average per video. And if you drill down his stats, he only gets a few hundred thousand views from subscribers. Whato s this mean? Do those few hundred thousand subscribers watch each of his videos ten times each? Not likely o those views are coming from other places.
One of the first things we think about when we put out a new video is o Who else might be interested in this video?o Blogs are always looking for content- if you present an interesting video, they'll be more happy than happy to put it up and expose you to their audience.
Dono t forget online communities. Are you a part of any discussion groups or forums? What about your Facebook friends? What about submitting it to link aggregator sites like Reddit? I have an account on a popular Price is Right forum just because of our Price is Right video. When entering an online community, pay attention to their internal rules o figure out the right forum to post in, follow their guidelines, and be courteous, and stick around for some discussion. You shouldno t be ashamed of promoting your video assuming your video is the kind of thing that forum would want to see, after all. The Internet is the worldo s greatest time waster, and thereo s always room for another diversion.
So the next step after you finish a video is to make a list of places outside YouTube that the video might be a good fit for. That means expanding your browsing palette o start reading more blogs, hit up more sites, and start getting a sense as to what kind of videos fit well and where.
Network with your peers:
Find friends, find other channels in your city, and of equivalent subscriber count and viewership, and work with them.
Realistically, youo re going to have one hell of a time working with any of the more high-end YouTube guys, simply because I know for a fact that everybodyo s incredibly busy with side projects, and getting their own videos out. Your request probably is one of thousands from other like-minded people.
A good way to look around you is the tracking site VidStatsX, which is independent of YouTube, but culls data off Googleo s APIs. You can find your subscriber rank as well as channels with similar numbers as you. More important than just raw sub numbers are people with comparable 30 day averages, simply because thato s an indicator that ito s somebody whoo s working on their channel, rather than letting it stagnate.
If you can, go where the people aren't:
I have a philosophy about life I call the fire escape philosophy. You know how youo ve heard horrific stories about fires and how everyone tried to rush through a single door, and as a result, people get stampeded and trapped. Such stories always like to point out how, less than ten feet away, there was another door that led to safety or something.
Morbid, yes, but the idea is basically this o if thereo s something that a lot of people are fighting to do, you can join the fray, but ito s often easier for you to go somewhere else.
In terms of YouTube, it means this o while you can certainly try daily vlogging or doing makeup tutorials, there are a lot of other people doing that very thing. So that means ito s much harder for you to stand out. Ito s not that you cano t stand out o if you started a makeup channel that was genuinely hilarious and totally amazing, youo ll find an audience for sure o ito s that ito s much harder to. If you dono t want to fight that battle, try to do content thato s different than whato s out there.
Io m not saying o dono t vlogo or o dono t do makeup tutorialso o in fact, if thato s what you love doing, then by all means you should do it. But if you go down that road, dono t be blind to the fact that youo re fighting two battles o one to get a dedicated viewership, and another to differentiate yourself from other people with similar content.
TL;DR:
Figure out what you want from your channel, and dedicate the necessary time to achieve that goal. Find content that you personally love making or love watching, and experiment to see where that overlaps with what people want to see. Be consistent with your videos. Find your peers and collaborate with them. And make videos for the Internet as a whole, not just for YouTube.
As you can tell, ito s not revolutionary information Io m imparting here. And unfortunately thereo s no quick easy path to success. Ito s a lot of work, and you have to honestly ask yourself how much youo re willing to put in.
But if you can find that magic overlap of videos you love to make and videos people love to watch, YouTube can be one of the most creatively rewarding experiences of your life.
Good luck! And let me know if you have any questions or feedback in the comments below. Thanks For Reading, and be sure to give me a diamond and subscribe for my work if you want to see more of this!
Sincerely,
~ MinerDiner123
| Credit | Me |
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