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Has spent the last two years of his life making YouTube his fulltime activity. It’s opening doors and gaining popularity – here’s his most popular YouTube video:
Nine-hundred thousand hits!
The paper that is being demonstrated in this video has been inspired by the original YouTube video – he recommends the use of music and seeking copyright free sounds. He gets maybe 30, 40c per ad view.
What is YouTube looking for? For regular subscribers and “channelfication” – after quality, not one-off hits. The building of a brand enables YouTube to sell the brand to advertisers and it makes it more valuable.
Some of the actions that YouTube is taking is investment – they cannot commission content, but they do have prizes, have contests and have kickbacks. They sent 40 YouTubers to London for the Olympics, and thus facilitated his ability to make content.
They are also taking part in algorithm revisions – viewing time and filtering. Try to optimise watch time and find out how many minutes someone watches on YouTube; for example, long content that is actually watched all the way through and change the rankings in terms of searches. They know to the second when people stop watching your videos. Each individual subscriber is looked at and they promote in subscription fees.
- Networks: Machimima, Maker, Revision3 (“we take your advert revenue, you make video, we pay you X and promote you across other channels and build viewership”). A living threshold would be around 2oo thousand subscribers, if they were fully engaged.
- Creator spaces in London, Tokyo, LA: (not “studios” but essentially what they are; editing booths, green screens, etc.). YouTube have paid for this space and they don’t want the creators to pay for it. Have to move people up the quality ladder, so they help people do this – have to be a partner and book in, however.
- Gold YouTube Pay Button: if you reach a million subscribers (about 105 of these), you get this – in a frame!
- Prizes – the next gurus, educational videos.
- $3.6 billion in 2012. It’s becoming a big business and they want to keep growing this.
Science on YouTube
- Vsauce – part of an organisation that was brought by Google
- Minutephysics – highly successful
- Smarter Every Day
- CGP Grey
- Vihart
- Sixty Symbols / Periodic – 4 or 5 times as much as when doing journalism but works very hard to get content out
- Scishow – funded by YouTube
- Crash Course
- Khan Academy
- Engineering Guy
- Universities – often not very big, perhaps an institutional mindset?
Some people find patrons; YouTube also suggests bids / proposals. People enjoy learning about science and make vids because they want to.
Vidstatsx – YouTube and who is rare – most people use this and it’s a statistics website that allows rankings of subscribers, views and channel views [he's passed Hillsong in terms of vidstatsx!]. Often it’s due to longevity; channels that have been around longer. Point made about convergence between TV and online content – how online content improves and TV content starting to mimic online content. Although “HowToBasic” is growing in popularity – a bit of a one-joke-wonder.
Partner Program – revenue sharing for non-partners is available; generate revenue from uploads by monetising videos; upload custom thumbnails, customised clickable channel backgrounds and link to other places. Applying to be a partner has become easier, it used to be harder / depended on people finding you. Currently there’s about a million partners globally and they’re trying to expand that.
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