Yup.
It’s a labor of love. I’ve been told I need to start cutting up my videos into shorts, and I may do that at some point, but right now I can’t be bothered. My stuff isn’t really intended for gen z’ers with no attention span anyway.
I got told shorts is the way a hundred times. Then I actually started doing high production quality shorts. Even though I really love making them, they don’t get much traction either. lol … you are totally right it is a labor of love
Yeah, I know there are a few things I can do to help my videos gain traction: Make a custom thumbnail, add hashtags, use chapters… and I do that, but apart from that, I think consistency, authenticity, and patience are the most important qualities in being a content creator.
My best-performing video is a small tutorial for “teaching” YouTube’s algorithm to stop feeding you AI Slop, after all. I think people really want authenticity.
Is this about a video you (op) made? If so please link it here and I’ll give it a watch. I love long form content and have plenty of time for videos in the background while tending to a newborn
It’s not just one video. Content Creation is brutal out here.
But here is the latest one, since you asked :)
No please. Do not reward this kind of posting. People are just going to flood the fediverse with this kind of engagement farming. If they want to get eyes on their content they are welcome to post it in the relevant communities, ideally with a disclaimer that they made it.
Reddit was filled with posts like: “no one cares about my neurodivergent differently abled nieces art project 🥺👉👈”
Let’s not encourage that here.
I must admit, I also enjoy long form content, however… I’m suspicious of the handle being, toasterbotnet, and a watch toaster url watermark……
I’m totally not a virus. I’m just a toaster. trust me bro.
no but seriously. my website does not do shady things. ToasterBotnet is just a funny name. I’m not out there hacking toasters or something. Just making videos and shitposting memes.
Congrats on the new baba! God I miss that smell. Nom nom nom.
I feel that. I spent 80+ hours making a lore video a few years back which never got any views. Saw someone else literally just read off the games wiki on a video and they got some numbers.
At the end of the day you gotta decide if you wanna chase the algorithm or just do it for the love of the game
You gotta do a little marketing for it honestly. I found out about the YouTuber MeatCanyon in 2019 when I saw a post about a funny Star Wars video he made on Reddit. I subscribed to him when he had less than a 1,000 subs and now he’s very successful.
Plenty of long form content gets views, I have issues finding things under 20 minutes in my subscription feed in youtube
Very much this. In the last few years, a lot of the youtubers I follow have moved from 20 minute-ish videos to 50 minute-ish videos, and I don’t like it; most of the time the video could be a lot shorter. The worst perpetrators will have 1 hour videos where half of the content is rehashed from older videos, and after each new video follows a week of daily shorts from said video.
Yeah, the middle length 10-20m looks like it’s dead. People are moving into podcast or 40m rant videos which are a lot better per hour. I’m going to give a shoutout to Tom Nicholas and NileRed which make excellent +1h content.
I found out awhile ago those arrowverse shows are still going.
they all started to suck as soon as AT&T bought time warner
I remember there being a bunch of people saying this in the YouTubers subreddit.
What they never quite grasped was this : the algorithm tries to put videos in front of people it thinks they will want to watch, with the goal of getting people to watch as much YouTube as possible, with one of the metrics used to make this judgment being whether the people who have been recommend the video have watched it, and if so, for how long.
If “the algorithm” doesn’t like your video, it’s because the people it has been recommended to have either not watched it, or have watched a very short amount before clicking away.
In other words, your video was shit.
“The algorithm” prioritizes short form content over longer ones due to their ability to serve ads. And studies by these companies have repeatedly shown that despite what people say, most people prefer shorter content over longer ones.
People would rather watch an okay 30-second tiktok than a good 4 minute video.
Which is nuts to me because I can’t stand them. I love watching documentaries and long form videos. And that’s why I don’t use YouTube anymore.
That’s not quite how I would phrase it. It’s not that the video was necessarily shit, but your audience was bored by it, and it doesn’t take a rocket-scientist-algorithm to figure out if people are bored by your video or not.
YouTube is still mostly a platform for entertainment, even when a video is supposed to educational. “Good” videos won’t get algorithm’d if people are bored by the video and/or your thumbnail + title don’t draw people in. Make an entertaining video that draws people in and it won’t matter how long your video is (granted, a 4 hour long entertaining video is a lot harder to make than a 2 minute video.)
Source: videos I’ve made that have and haven’t been algorithm’d.
