If you aren't already aware, YouTube prioritizes watch time
meaning
YouTube wants to keep people on the site for as long as possible.
So, there's a few ways that you can try to do this systematically:
one is to create videos that are certain length that people will watch a certain
percentage of. So, if you have certain video length times a certain average
view percentage watched then, that will lead to a certain amount of watch time.
Another thing would be to have -- if you can't produce videos that that are that
long, then you produce shorter videos more frequently, and so as those short
videos get watched and you're producing more of them,
that watch time accumulates that way.
A third possibility would be to have shorter videos -- or even longer
videos -- however you want that maybe you can't release them as often as you'd
like, but then you can get more people to watch them, so even though it's a shorter
video, there's more views on it so video length times average percentage watch
times views will lead to accumulated watch time.
So one of those three things
is probably what every person is going to want to do to have a successful channel.
A lot of you guys watching and listening to this channel are fellow
video game musicians, but whether you are a musician or you just enjoy
listening to music, something you might realize is that out of all those
scenarios that I've described, each of those scenarios is kind of stacked
against us.
Making a cover song is kind of difficult so it's not like
someone can just make a cover song longer -- that takes time to arrange
and because it's difficult, it's not like people can just make more of them
I think that there are
some people who kind of do it as a once-a-week thing but even there there's
a lot of people are saying they used to be able to do it once a week and now
they're moving to once every other week that sort of thing
and a lot of people are more sporadic than that.
But...
then there's that third thing where
maybe we can't release that many videos and the videos can't be a
certain length but we can try to achieve a certain view count on each of those videos.
The problem is that even with cover music there has to be some kind of
way to get people to watch, and that is actually surprisingly difficult.
This is something that I have been trying to figure out my entire YouTube career:
how to drive demand for cover songs...and I haven't been able to figure it out it
seems to me that even though a lot of us would like to think that there's a wide
group of people who have this nostalgia for old video game music that we can
cover these great SNES era or earlier or you know even later pieces and that the
the audiences will just come to them, but I just don't know if that actually bears
out in a lot of ways, so one way of driving traffic to youtube videos is by
targeting youtube search but then you have to think about what are the terms
that people are searching for and I'm just not sure if people are searching for
specific songs from older games, and if they are, I'm not sure if anyone's
explicitly looking for a cover song instead of say like getting the original
soundtrack version, so by covering older games or more obscure game that's kind
of a limitation on search
And even though there are nominally communities
to discuss these games that there's the same issue of where there are just fewer
people on any given fan site discussing an older game than a newer game
So, for example, Chrono Trigger probably one of the best soundtracks of video
game history...I mean I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that...its reddit
community is pretty small overall so even if one wanted to get traffic from a
dedicated Chrono Trigger-loving fanbase I mean it's not really going to happen
there's not a lot of traffic there.
But then that leads to the other thing where
even if you find a perfect fan community, fan communities are kind of smart in
that they can tell when people are self promoting and they don't like it so for
the most part they ignore it or they will down vote it, and so there's this
kind of tension where we put this effort into each cover -- it's not just something
that we can do, and it's not...it's not low quality -- it's something that we've put
time into, it's our craft. And yet we can't even get people to
click because they don't want to click on any videos.
You post a photo...you
post a picture that you may or may not have done...you may or may not have
attributed to the actual artist and that will get up votes and comments and whatnot
but as soon as it's a video, it's just not going to happen so even targeting
these reddit communities doesn't seem to be a sure way of getting that traffic so
I've been trying to think and I and I understand that my strategy isn't really
I guess sound so to speak -- my last two covers have been from FEZ, which
apparently I should have realized is just completely suboptimal in terms of
all the factors that I've just discussed. So...it's an
older game; there's not a lot of people currently discussing it; it's not really
getting a whole lot of search traffic; it's probably not something that a whole
lot of people have as, you know, a critical part of
their I guess gaming history so it's not something that they're going to go back
and say hey I want to listen to a song from here.
but then I'm thinking about
other ways of choosing songs and it just those other ways haven't necessarily
made a whole lot of sense so for example I can say absolutely that my most
popular covers are from Undertale so that would lead to a hypothesis that you
want to cover a game that is a new and exciting and popular when it comes out
and that's kind of what I did but then I tried doing similar things with other
games like Final Fantasy 15 I have a couple of covers and even though that
did get a decent amount of traffic it wasn't a whole lot of traffic.
So...
it doesn't seem like just chasing after the most popular new game titles is
necessarily the way to build up that traffic base.
And then the thing that
really gets me is that different channels can perform covers from the
same game and get different levels of traffic and different levels of in terms
of how many subscribers they get or things like that and I know that part of
it is quality...like, I'd like to think that maybe it's just the people are
getting the most traffic are the best quality and the people who aren't are
not but I've seen some...not as good...quality YouTube videos that have somehow
you know, gotten up there so I don't know if there's necessarily one-to-one ratio
of quality to views, quality to watch time, that sort of thing
and it seems as well that some of the difference can be explained by well some people already
already have established fan bases and that makes sense: if you already have your
subscribers and they're going to watch or listen to anything that you do then
that that will help in the algorithm to you know keep things going
There's big talk these days about view velocity which is the idea that the quicker and
the more watch time a video can get in the first 24...72 hours...to a week that
will kind of determine how it performs over the rest of its life
no pressure, guys!
But it seems to me that even if I compare between youtubers of similar
channel sizes, similar subscriber bases, that there are still a difference in the
growth rate and I can't I can't quite figure out why that is. I don't want to
name names because the people who I have in my comparison group they're really
great musicians and I wish them the best of success but I know some people who
they release very infrequently maybe once a month or less and they may have
had...they certainly have fewer videos than I do
they started out with fewer subscribers and yet they are now ahead of me and I I
just I wish them the best success but kind of makes you want to
give up on it all and I know that's not the right answer the right answer is I
should be focusing on myself; I should be focusing on just kind of working at it
and kind of figuring out where the trends are and figuring out how I can combine
my own personal taste in completely obscure music that no one has ever heard
of with more conventional taste of games and music that people have actually
heard of to kind of come up with more things that people actually are
searching for or actually willing to listen to.
But...
I don't I don't know if
that's going to happen anytime soon, and as I mentioned I'm not going to be
producing videos, like music videos, any faster than I have been so it seems to
me that I happen to expand my channel by producing content of a different type
I've experimented with this on this channel before and I've actually found
some very interesting data from it. So every once in a while I'll do a longer
video that's not necessarily a music video but it's either something about
YouTube, something about reddit, something about the music creation process
something like that, and what I found is even though those videos don't get a lot
of views, they still blow my music videos out of the water in terms of watch time
because hey if you have a...if you have a 10 minute video and people are only
watching say 30% of that that's 3 minutes watch time whereas if you have a
2 or 3 minutes song and people are watching 50% of that
that's one to one and a half minutes like you can't beat that and even if...you
would need to get a lot more views on the music videos to match the extra
watch time on the long videos. But what I'm thinking is of doing more videos
about this process that has been going through, so all the things that I've learned
about YouTube analytics and how to use that to kind of assess your channel, all
the things I've learned about watch time and trying to promote on other platforms
because I'm a huge big fat nerd in particular for musicians I want to do a
series -- this is going to happen -- I just need to write it out and get everything
lined up with all my collaborators: a series on copyright and YouTube,
There's a lot of confusion regarding copyright and YouTube in the music space,
a lot of confusion regarding Content ID, a lot of confusion regarding what's fair use
what's transformative -- that sort of thing -- and I feel that for a musician
specifically this is something that we really need to know so I want to team up
with a lot of people I know that Carlos at insaneintherainmusic is very
interested in doing something; Sebastian Wolff of Materia Collective is really
interested in it; I'm pretty sure that Soundrop even tweeted that they would
do something with it...What I want to know primarily is does any of that seem
interesting? if you've actually paid attention throughout this entire video
thank you so much, and for any fellow musicians let's just try to talk through
what's working for you, what's not working for you, what are things that
you've learned, what are things that you struggle with because I know that I'm
not the only person that's in this boat because I know that I am actually pretty
fortunate and I actually have a pretty good number of subscribers and that
there are musicians who are way better than me who do not yet have the traction
that I have and so there's some...there's there's definitely this discoverability
problem that we all need to be working through together
So I just wanted to
kind of put those thoughts out there and I hope to hear from you soon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wf6_hv25rk
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