Issue 14: The statistics of being on YouTube for one year
Time flies when you're endlessly editing
Early issue this week. I wanted to highlight a channel milestone that I just passed this week. I posted my first video on the Very Normal channel on April 9th, 2023, so it’s been officially one year since I started making content regularly.
Here’s the numbers
We’re just going to get into the meat of things. Over the course of a single year…
I posted 36 videos, adding a total of 311 minutes of statistics content to Youtube
The channel took 212 days to reach YouTube Partner status on November 7.
The channel has attracted 29,385 subscribers.
I worked with 1 inbound sponsor
(Re)started a Substack to accompany the channel, sending weekly emails to 364 people
Here’s what I learned
1. It’s hard
I knew that Youtube was going to be hard. I feel a constant background hum in the back of my head asking me, “What should I do for the next video?” Needing to constantly edit videos sucks, and I keep giving myself long scripts to edit through. Balancing it with my research is an ongoing struggle.
A silver lining of all this added work was that it forces you to prioritize what you do each day. If I wanted to do research and content creation, then I needed to figure out concretely how these would fit into my schedule. If I didn’t, one or both didn’t happen. But because I wanted it so bad, I put in that effort to fit in what I could.
But all that being said…
2. It’s incredibly gratifying
I like teaching. I’m not the best at it, but I learn a lot from writing my scripts and challenging myself to try to make things as understandable as possible. Statistics is infamously opaque, but I like trying to clarify all the concepts that haunted me when I was first learning them.
And it’s a great feeling when you hear in your comments that some concept finally “clicks”. I’m very grateful for these comments because I myself am a lurker; even if I get a lot out of a video, I don’t usually like or comment. I save these for the days where I’m not feeling great or encounter rude person in my comments.
I could keep making the teaching videos at my own pace until an entire statistics curriculum is built up. However…
3. It can’t be purely education
If you want to grow your own educational Youtube channel, then my opinion is that you can’t just teach concepts. When it comes down to it, people just don’t come to Youtube to learn statistics, unless they’re stuck on a problem or not sure how to do an analysis.
My first videos were almost purely educational. I viewed them as the notes your TA would give you before the start of their discussion section. They didn’t get a lot of views, but I didn’t mind so much because I was still trying to figure out what I was doing.
I will be forthright: I wanted to earn money from my YouTube videos; it definitely was not purely a desire to make statistics more accessible. My main fear was that I wouldn’t be able to reach YouTube Partner status with short, educational videos, so I shifted part of my focus to making videos that would teach you something “cool” about statistics. With videos like my submission to a famous competition or this one that pushed me into Partner status, my goal was to make people think “oh that’s cool”, rather than “okay now I can use this idea better in my own statistical work”. These videos require a lot more thinking on my part, and the reality is that I can’t neglect my other responsibilities to do more of these types of videos.
On that note…
4. It’s critical to make it work for your life
Early in Youtube, I thought that I wouldn’t succeed if I wasn’t consistent with my uploads. I started with a weekly upload schedule, and it quickly became an awful experience. I was stressed. I was staying up late multiple days in a row, ruining my daily schedule. Thoughts about quitting were frequent.
At some point, I decided that strict consistency in uploads was not tenable. What I opted for instead was consistency in effort. I make sure to schedule time everyday to some portion of the process: writing, planning, editing, etc. When a video is ready, I upload it the next day. It turns out that it takes me about two weeks to do this, so that’s the rate that it happens. Maybe I’ll take a break day after an upload, but the next day, it’s back to making content in some form.
Maybe this has hurt my potential channel growth. I’ve concluded that it’s not worth it to worry about “potential”. My belief is that if my videos provide value, then people will stick around. For me to make videos of value, the process cannot encroach on my whole life.
What’s next?
The channel will keep chugging along. On purpose, I’ve catered my content to people who already have statistical training. This has ended up confusing a lot of people, so my plan is to come up with another format that caters to those with less statistics exposure. I think it’d be a cool idea too to come back to videos teaching concrete statistical skills. I’m always open to ideas too.
Finally, I’m learning how to make my own course. It’s a different way of thinking about teaching, and it’s been fun working through this process.
Thanks for joining me on this journey, I’ll see you in the next one.
Christian
Current State of The Channel
😵💫 What am I working on right now?
Working out a video for an alternative approach to sample size calculation
🧐 What am I enjoying right now?
Book — I started listening to Daniel Priestley’s Oversubscribed. I have no idea how to approach digital products, and I’ve heard that this book is good for developing how to think about them. Very different from what I usually listen to, but I’m learning a lot.
Thing — Physical 100 got a second season on Netflix. I was rooting for that one crossfitter, but then he did a heel-turn and took advantage of the sumo wrestler. Instant villain.
📺 What are my recent videos?
Edutainment — The better way to do statistics: a video explaining how Bayes’ Theorem is used in statistics. Bayesian statistics are not the usual in coursework, so lots of students don’t get exposed to these ideas.
Explainer — Explaining Power: a video explaining what power is and the different factors that influence it. My take on a prevalent power visualization in many statistical textbooks.
📦 My other products
I personally wrote guided solutions to problems from the first chapter of Andrew Gelman’s Bayesian Data Analysis. I wrote this guide to give advanced self-learners the insight to develop their statistical problem solving and implement some of these solutions in R.
Heads up! Some of the links on my issues are affiliate links, so I may get a small amount of money if you choose to buy something from these links. I only put links for stuff I actually use and consume.
Hey Mr Very Normal, this was an inspiring and a relatable article. I especially appreciated the part about "consistency in effort, not uploads". In my life I also noticed that tying the time to an end result eventually brings burnout. Whereas tying time to effort means I give up some control and let the process take me where it deems suitable. Anyway, good luck in your endeavors :)