221–230 of 304 posts
Maybe just me, but I'm not really excited for established YouTubers to sell more stuff and expand their empires. It's already a winner-take-all game of attention. The beauty of YouTube is finding like a retired professor who puts up their lectures on an account with a couple thousand subscribers. It is not having a click-bait worthy thumbnail, over-produced video, and barely learning anything while being mindlessly e…
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> but part of me recognises that if your goal is to sell , then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing. The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want? Is there a way for YouTube to compensate for clickbaity titles and thumbnails? Are they incentivized to do so? Thinking back a…
Just to add, most of us AREN'T trying to become big YouTube viral influencers. My channel has 2.5k viewers and all my videos were done because I want my in-class students to have a resource to review at home. I got my doctorate and a career as teaching faculty to teach students, not become another Computerphile. I love the channel and link it regularly, but again my passion is in helping people learn in the classroom…
I’d be curious to learn if there’s any pain points or things you wish you could do faster in your process. Happy to chat offline :)
Structured Content sounds great, but we already have that: add a number to your video title.
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> "The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want?" Regardless of what we as a society want, and even if YouTube never existed, it's the reality that salesmanship is always important to some extent. Persuasive communication is important even outside of business: it's key for academia to get grants, it's important for non-profits to get funding and…
> Persuasive communication is important even outside of business. You said "outside of business," and then gave three examples of _asking for money_. You could have said "in dating," or "in electoral politics," but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech. > you can play the game with some ethics instead of not playing at all and losing out. In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketpla…
No, I didn't: the third item I listed was "it's important for individuals who want to improve their lives (even in relationships)." Relationships include both romantic and friendship. The second item with non-profits also mentioned recruiting volunteers, not just fundraising.
>"but even in those examples, "persuasive" speech verges on "coercive" speech.
Persuasive speech includes: if I ask a friend to hang out with me and go to a conference, it's great for the both of us because we'll both enjoy it together and learn. There's no threat or coercion here, it's a win-win that is communicated well. The non-persuasive alternative would be: "There's a professional event this Thursday, we should go" with no further explanation.
> "In a darwinian competition, eg "the marketplace of ideas," ethics will always lose out to money. To play is to lose."
Ethics has value in many contexts. Certain non-profits can struggle to raise money due to having a bad reputation. Significant ethical misconduct can lead to scandals and arrests of executives. Highly unethical companies end up paying premiums to applicants due to struggles with recruiting.
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> "The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want?" Regardless of what we as a society want, and even if YouTube never existed, it's the reality that salesmanship is always important to some extent. Persuasive communication is important even outside of business: it's key for academia to get grants, it's important for non-profits to get funding and…
Sales and politics are not avoidable, I agree with that. While a scientist might have to dreadfully deal with salesmanship now and then, it shouldn't be affecting the day to day. We have procedures to isolate these things from core business, so we can focus without the hyper-selfawareness of salesmen. If you have to be constantly getting the most eyeballs, attention, upvotes, in everything you're doing, it will chang…
You've made a good insight with an interesting solution. You might already be aware of this, but for an academic perspective, Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan framed this with the famous assertion "the medium is the message," [0] in other words the method of delivering a message strongly influences how that message is drafted. The reasons align with what you've written: the incentives caused by YouTube algorithms do pressure creators to create more clickbait content.
Perhaps human curation can be an initial way to get more viewership for quality channels that don't try as much to game the algorithms. Recommendations on HN and other forums have led to the discoveries of such interesting channels, though this would have limited impact versus change on YouTube's end.
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Having good thumbnails and tiles is just marketing. If you want to sell or get the word out about what you are offering it helps to have a good marketing effort. Yes, creating the material is a lot of work, but that doesn't mean that marketing is something that doesn't need hard work.
> Having good thumbnails and tiles is just marketing are you seriously going to pretend that optimizing for the most cringy thumbnails , because its a race to the bottom on Youtube, is marketing? this is a ridiculous take.
I don't see how it's not marketing? YouTube is willing to promote your video for free and asks you to upload some promotional material for them to use.
A lot of noise in the signal over there. I find YouTube to be full to the brim with absolutely brain-rotting stuff like "Brightside!", "Quickfacts!", "Get smarter every day!", and stuff that is more on the dumb trivia side than actual, usable knowledge.
I produce Music Tech-based educational content on YT. It started as a hobby and sideline to my main work (which at the time was classroom teaching of the same content). While I'm no longer working in classrooms (pandemic plus other reasons led to this), I'm still producing content, which I think is of good quality and worthwhile. The issue I have with it is that I refuse to produce attention-grabbing clickbaity title…
I'm a creator too. I'm small on YouTube (3,880 subs; 6.4k views and about 293 hours watched in the last 28 days), but have a (relatively speaking) large Discord with 3,800 members. I have a mailing list of about 1,600. My goal and focus is to sell, but it's to sell a big package around the idea of IT education. I want to sell to people who want the interaction and community, not just the knowledge dump. And I'm the s…
Quite a few really good coders and designers publish on YouTube, but their courses are hosted elsewhere and can be promoted as an affiliate.
This sounds like you will now have to talk to these creators directly and make direct “deals”, or worse - not be able to affiliate with their courses at all.