Owner Pipsqueak Animation, Founder Our Next 4 Years, Director/Producer/Writer, Co-Chair PGA Animation Committee, (Let Us Animate Your Project!)
2 Steps Forward, Half Step Back… Creating a successful piece of IP is hard work no matter what platform you target. YouTube is no exception. And while YouTube has its own special set of challenges (namely, an opaque algorithm), it also gives creators the unique ability to experiment in real-time with their audience. I’ve talked before about how YouTube provides reams of analytics on every video to help you figure out what’s working and what’s not. I love looking at the data and find it helpful as both a serotonin booster (wow, look how many people like our video! We better keep making them!) and to understand where we need to improve. But I’m always wary of misinterpreting noise for signal. That’s a slightly techy way (hey, I’ll always be an engineer at heart!) of saying that it’s easy to read too far into the data and draw unwarranted conclusions. For example, we’ve released a couple of videos that didn’t perform well over the first 24 hours, so we’ve taken them down, tweaked something small, and re-released them. And until this weekend, we’ve always had much more success on the second upload. Often by a factor of 10 or more. But this weekend, we had our first flop. We released our 8th video early Saturday morning, and when we saw no uptake all day Saturday, we took it down, made some fairly significant changes to the video (plus thumbnails, titles, descriptions and keywords), and tried uploading again Saturday night. Our performance was even worse! It was frankly a bummer. We’ve seen nothing but straight-line improvement on all metrics for months, but it’s also a good lesson. Past success does not guarantee future progress. But because we released the video on YouTube, we see this failure as a chance to experiment. We took down the video again and at some point soon we will re-release testing out new theories about why the algorithm didn’t serve it up to more people. We have a strong inkling the video didn’t resonate because we started this video with strong negative (sad) emotions before presenting the fun and positive solution to our kid’s problem, but we can’t be sure. Perhaps when we post the third time, it will perform like our other videos and we’ll draw a different conclusion. Or more likely, we'll steer clear of introducing anything negative in our song intros in the future! Either way, we'll have learned something. In the meantime, we continue production on more videos and celebrate the growth we have achieved this week. We are now over 900 subscribers and over 250,000 total views. Not bad for our fledgling, no-budget channel. Have questions? Drop me a comment. I’m an open book. #YouTube #indieanimation #brandbuilding
awesome!
Virtual Content Creator | Unreal Engine Tech Artist specializing in Motion Capture, Animation, Virtual Filmmaking, Character Rigging, Environments and Lighting.
7moYou’re doing great!