Hey everyone,
In this issue, I wanted to talk about some thoughts I had while monitoring my most recent video’s performance.
This video was my best performing video to date. Records broken on views, watch hours, comments and ad revenue. It’s hard to describe how amazing it feels to being able to open the Youtube Studio app and see these numbers grow, even if you refresh it a few seconds after loading everything up.
But deep down, I knew I was looking for something else. I was waiting to see the numbers start to dip. I was waiting to see this wave go away.
With every high comes an inevitable low.
Being stoic to virality
This most recent video went viral. Usually that’s a cause for joy, but I learned a valuable lesson with regard to virality in a previous video.
I learned that I could be obsessive about metrics. I’ve had long stretches of time wasted because I was hooked on seeing how fast the channel was growing during a viral moment. With 20/20 hindsight, I can say I was making unrealistic predictions about the future and making plans I shouldn’t have been making.
Now that I’m a little bit wiser, I know that viral growth is temporary, but still useful. I still let myself get a little excited to see channel growth, but I remind myself that — successful or not — there is another video to be edited. It will sting a little when I see that the next video is not doing so well, but I remind myself that
To stick around in the educational YouTube game, my advice is to be stoic to video performance. If it goes well, great! If it doesn’t, there’s always the next one.
Resisting the urge to rush
I’ve also found that stoicism has helped me create better content as well, and this became especially apparent with the last video.
Historically, I definitely take a “done is better than perfect” type of approach to editing my videos. When I put myself on a regular upload schedule, I often felt rushed to get my videos done, and I was more than willing to overlook terrible audio or uninspired visuals in the edit. As long as I met the upload date, I was okay.
It almost sounds blasé to say that you should work harder on your videos, but there are always trade-offs you need to make. Working to perfect a video means you have to spend more time on it; with deadlines and outside obligations, something has to give. In the beginning, it was quality. That was probably okay when the channel was smaller. But now that there’s a sizable audience that watches, I want to give them a good experience so that they’ll stick around.
Thankfully, I decided a while back that I would switch from a regular upload schedule to a kind of “regular work” schedule. In other words, I work on the videos everyday for a regular amount of time, and the videos come when they are done. With more time dedicated to each videos, it just means slightly slower uploads.
I’m still working on this. I still find myself wanting to rush and break from my consistent workload because I want to finish. I’ll let it happen occasionally, but making it a regular event is non-negotiable. I remind myself to be stoic and let the quality of my work speak instead of the speed at which I do it.
That’s it for this week, see you next time!
Christian
🧐 What am I enjoying right now?
Show — I just finished Bequeathed on Netflix, and I’m eagerly waiting for Doctor Slump to upload a new episode. Bequeathed was nice, short and chilling.
Book — I’m still listening to Bernoulli’s Fallacy (note: my affiliate link). I’m paying special attention to the chapters on the idea of probability since I’d like to do a video on the Frequentist-Bayesian beef. But, it’s hard to refine why there’s beef in simpler terms. More on that later.
📺 Recent and upcoming videos
Recent: The most important skill in statistics — A video about Monte Carlo Simulation and how it can be used across varying levels of statistical ability
Upcoming: An explainer video about confidence intervals
Hey Christian, I also have a tiny YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUaOtnzPiHKSIAsM_Nu6-bQ) and this reflection resonates with me a lot. I would just add that the glimpses of big YouTube success can be taken as extra motivation to propel you through editing the next video - but that's about it. Publishing without expecting it to blow up is the best way forward (psychologically), imo.