365 Days Later

Thumbnails of my produced YouTube videos

A year ago, I shared my first YouTube video on my YouTube channel. My initial goal was to share videos about using Craft, but later came videos about using Micro.blog. Here are some notable facts:

  • 52 videos about Craft were produced;
  • 5 videos about Micro.blog were produced;
  • All videos totalling more than 13.5 hours of watch time;
  • My YouTube channel has 813 subscribers as of now;
  • Two subscribers gave me money as a sign of appreciation.

I feel I’m now on par with all the things I wanted to talk about regarding Craft. Future Craft videos will touch on new features and tweaked workflow. I still have much work to do for Micro.blog video series, though.

At the initial pace of new subscribers, I set the goal of hitting a thousand subscribers in the first year, but I’m sad to report that I won’t make it. The pace of new subscribers has slowed quite a bit.

This video production journey is full of learning and lessons. Over time, I settled on a production style I’m happy with. I finally found a way to get better sound quality. I recently added iA Presenter to get cue cards showing on my screen while recording (read “iA Presenter — A Different & Clever Take at Presentation Software”). My workflow is stable now and is supported by this Craft template (you can download and use it if you are a Craft user, BTW). Finally, I started using Play.app to gather all my video links in one place. This provides a quick way to refer to past videos whenever needed.

I also produced videos about other apps like Capacities, Inoreader and Anybox. Some of these videos take the form of a 60 minutes session with the app as a first-time user. It’s fun as there is no script supporting those experiences.

Today, I will record a video about the WWDC 23 conference. The video will complement my recently published article on the same subject. It will be my first foray into tech news and commentary. I’m not planning to do many of these, but WWDC is significant and needs some of my production time attention.

YouTube reminds me every day why I hate algorithmic timelines. Suppose I open up YouTube and click on one video about long-range airplanes. The minute I’m done watching the video, my timeline becomes full of airplane-related videos. YouTube completely washes out my timeline with what the algorithm was programmed to show me based on my consumption behaviours (and probably based on some other weird and highly questionable factors). I hate it. One video and boom, my YouTube universe flips elsewhere. Disclaimer: I’m a paying subscriber so I never see an ad. This behaviour is infuriating.

Targeting the First Thousand YouTube Subscribers

My goal when I started doing YouTube videos about Craft (and now Micro.blog) was to reach a thousand subscribers during the first year. At the current rate, I won’t make it. Am I sad about this? No. Is it nagging me? Yes. Why?

I think there are a lot of Craft users out there, and I think they could benefit from watching a few of my videos. That’s the whole purpose and “raison d’être” for my YouTube channel which was (and still is) to help users get better at using Craft or learning about Craft if they are not currently using it. Is my absence from Twitter to promote my content making any difference? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows.

I still have some time left before June 6th, but I’m being realistic here.

As a fan of meteorology, I was fascinated today by this visible satellite imagery sequence of east North America. We can observe clouds at different levels in the atmosphere for the same geo area that travel in different directions. Just look at the cursor for where to observe the phenomena. This is not exceptional, but it is fascinating nonetheless.