Making YouTube Videos is Hard
Making videos on YouTube is hard for various reasons. Part of the challenge is overcoming peoples’ lizard brains and keeping their attention throughout.
One area I struggle and lose viewership is when I talk about “caveats” in a lot of my research-heavy videos:
I like to talk about caveats because not everything I say is technically correct. Maybe I’m over-selling it, simplifying it too much, or maybe I just think something is plain cool (even if there’s other tools out there that can do it much better). Other times, there are ethical considerations I feel the need to talk about too so I don’t misguide someone.
But honestly, sometimes, I just feel the need to clear the air and provide some basis of reality while discussing new ideas I’m excited about. Grounding ideas to reality helps to frame them, which is far better in my opinion than talking about them in the abstract in some void. Lots of things are cool and awesome, but we only care about the ones that take root from the reality we live in.
In my last video, most people left around here:
… which is a real shame. I tried to be clever and tease that the final results were just after the caveats to get people to stick around:
… but people didn’t take the bait!
Part of me, tells me that people care just about research and nothing about the caveats. Which I can understand as far as primitive lizard-brains go. So, maybe I should give up on the whole caveats thing in my videos and stick to pure research (or push the caveats section to the end), but I just think they’re too important to ignore.
YouTube is hard because, as I’m realizing, you’ll spend almost all your videos overtime trying to get stuff, “just right”. You have some ideal in your head, but you don’t get there right away and even then, it’s still not quite “right”. Stuff like this.
I’m going to keep experimenting on my production to see if there’s a way I can keep the caveats in an engaging way. I haven’t reached the production format in my head for an “ideal” research heavy video quite yet, but every video I make, I feel I get closer …