Issue #25: Should you be afraid of "falling off"?
YouTube and PhDs turn out to have their similarities
The TLDR
📺 What’s happening with videos?
Recent — The Essential Guide To Hypothesis Testing: a video on doing and talking about hypothesis tests. Trying a new thing where I’m avoiding too much statistical theory; geared the video more towards statistics’ end users.
Upcoming: The biggest beef in statistics
📰 What is this issue about?
The channel took an L, but in the end, it’s alright
🧐 What am I enjoying right now?
Book — I’m reading Ross and Pekoz’s A Second Course on Probability to learn probability. Still on the first chapter, but I’m slowly getting used to all these math ideas.
Thing — Just finished The Gentlemen on Netflix. There’s nothing exciting nowadays after The Frog.
📦 Other stuff
I wrote guided solutions to problems to Andrew Gelman’s Bayesian Data Analysis. It’s for advanced self-learners teaching themselves Bayesian statistics
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In this issue…
I wanted to talk about a recent L that I took for the YouTube channel, and whether or not, it matters.
My first 10/10
If you’re not familiar with uploading videos to YouTube, then it’s worth giving you some context first.
When you upload a video to YouTube, not only does it give you real-time metrics on your video, but it also ranks it. I think it ranks videos in terms of views, but I’m not sure.
What you want to see is a 1/10. This indicates that this video is the best performing video among the past 10 videos you’ve uploaded.
I bet you can figure out what a 10/10 means.
My last video — How statistics helps make life-saving medicines — was my first 10/10. And honestly, I was pretty bummed out about it at first. This format is supposed to expand the channel’s reach, but it was an outright failure in that regard. I thought it would be interesting to people, but that just wasn’t the case this time around.
In the time since that video came out, the attention to the channel has been slowly declining. I’ve seen news of YouTubers in the past who fall into irrelevance because their videos just aren’t hitting like they used to. They are “forgotten” by the algorithm. I feared that I had already started being irrelevant. As the common YouTube comment goes:
“No views in 1 hour, bro fell off”
I gave myself a few days to think about it, and these were the conclusions I came to
It’s okay to not be optimal
To be clear, I’m not ashamed of the video. I think it would be useful for people who are interested in the intersection between biostatistics and clinical trials.
What I had not really thought about was the alignment between my interests and my subscribers’ interests. It turns out this was just not something they liked, so the video died on the algorithm grapevine.
I knew in the back of my mind that something like this could always happen. Up until now, it just hadn’t happened yet.
There were a few things I could have done to triage: 1) change the title sooner (which I did eventually), 2) try to work my thumbnail to be more appealing or 3) expand the reach of the video by posting to other social media.
But I didn’t do any of that. It could be considered as being “optimal'“ on YouTube, but I just don’t have the time to do that. The videos need to stand up on their own merits without extra help, and that’s a reality I accepted when I started YouTube. I was not going to give up my Ph.D just to get explosive growth on the channel.
It’s okay to not be optimal on YouTube. So long as you accept that it might not grow as explosively as you want, it should be okay because…
Education is a long game
Like magic, this podcast episode by Cal Newport came out this week at just the right time. For those that don’t click it, the main message is that it might take 10 years to get very, very good at something. In other words, don’t sweat the small stuff.
An occasional 10/10 shouldn’t get in the way of building up a large library of educational content. Cal’s podcast was a good reminder that it takes time to do great things.
When someone who’s interested in clinical trials tries to look it up on YouTube, hopefully they’ll see my video and get the information I need. I don’t know when that’s going to happen, but the important part is that the content is there. I’ve done my part.
And that’s been my guiding principle throughout the lifespan of my channel. As Ali Abdaal once said:
“If your work can help at least one person, share it”
Education doesn’t enjoy the same virality as interesting stories or competitions, but it has staying power. The fundamentals of statistics won’t change radically, and there will always be an inflow of people who want to know more.
My ultimate goal is to reach 100K subscribers on YouTube. There’s nothing special about the number other than the fact that I can get the plaque that I’ve wanted since high school. All I need to do is get it. It shouldn’t matter how long it’s going to take to get there.
This leaves me to my last question.
Should you be afraid of "falling off"?
I’m of the opinion that if you’re in the education game, then the answer is no.
There may be times where your videos will not garner the same attention they used to. That’s okay. You just have to keep making content. Some of it should be educational, others should be dedicated to extending the reach of the channel.
Maybe there’s an argument to be made for doing enough to keep drawing attention to your channel. It’s a part of growing a channel. but the main core is still having good content.
I’m still not perfect at presenting statistics content. I’m still not sure who exactly I want to present to. Other statistics users? Just practitioners who just need to be taught enough to not abuse it? Still figuring that out.
The ultimate fall off is to stop trying to help people.
Here’s to more 10/10s in the future and hopefully more 1/10s
Christian
I've watched most of your videos, and they're all 1/10s in the way described here. Top quality and the voiceover over the animation works really well.