I have made some videos and they rarely break 1000 views. But they have contributed in me getting multiple jobs in my field as they demonstrate that I actually know some of the stuff I claim to. The videos also make it clear I can express myself clearly in english amd communicate technical concepts. So not every channel needs a huge audience, sometimes the right few viewers are enough.

> i dont know what drives people to want to make videos when the odds are like that

I used to write tech How To articles on my site around 15 years back, just to help other people. Then adsense came along and I made some money but the primary motivation was to learn and share my knowledge with others.

yes except here the view counts are dreadfully public reminders that hours of your work can go to get like 10 views if it doesnt please the algorithm… do what makes you happy i guess but i dont get it

Two years back I started a podcast[0]. By all "viral" metrics pov, it is a failure - didn't get thousands of downloads, no first page hits etc. But I became a better conversationalist.

Now whenever I interview people in my professional life (I'm a CTO and have to interview people for top level positions), they routinely tell me, they had their best interview. For long, I couldn't trace it back to the podcast. After many people compliment me, I asked one what made it a better interview. He said, you let me explain my project and you listened. That is when it clicked. Those are the skills I learned as a podcast host.

I paused the podcast last year, because I got covid and for other personal reasons. With this feedback, I'm going to restart the podcast.

Not all creative projects have to make money directly. There could be 2nd order benefits, which we may not see immediately.

[0]: https://jjude.com/podcast

I did similar but with one main difference! I bought a block of Overcast adverts in a relevant category. (https://overcast.fm/ads)

It was still doing hundreds of downloads per month a year after the last episode (podfaded unfortunately, my co-host didn't have any more free time after having a kid). The folks clicking the ad seemed to enjoy the show and from there word of mouth took over.

Like you say not everything needs to make money, but that worked for me(tm) in terms of growing the audience. YMMV ofc, could have just been lucky.

The biggest thing I got out of it (aside from dopamine in the moment of course) was the speaking skills. Just being able to project my voice better, better formulate my thoughts, etc. Well worth doing in hindsight.

What a great epiphany. If you are looking for guests and I am a fit for your criteria, I would love to be one.

Well, I've subscribed. It's called `Gravitas WINS Radio` for anyone else looking.

These days you can probably just replace "algorithm" with "audience". Make videos the audience wants to watch all the way through and the algorithm will love you. I'm 90% sure I've pinched this off mrbeast in an interview somewhere, he seems to know what he's doing.

E: Aye, this one. Timestamped but I'd recommend the entire video if you're interested in YT nerd stuff https://youtu.be/6pMhBaG81MI?t=472

It was the same 15 years, write a good article and then pray (or use SEO) so that Google ranks your link at the top of the user's search page. Some pages get lot of views because Google decides to show that link to their search engine users, some pages get no views because Google didnt like it.

They like their special interest + they like sharing it + they like making videos.

> 99.9% of them make nothing.

most creative endeavors are like this. I think it's fine, as long as those 99.9% aren't relying on their creative endeavors to make their living.

At some point, people have other motivations besides the obvious. Maybe they just like making neat videos for themselves and YouTube's a nice place to store them. Maybe they have one or two people they're sharing with because they know each other in real life and just like to show off to those people. Maybe they hope to strike it rich one day but don't have the resources to pursue it.

I pretty regularly think about the Twitch streamers that spend hours streaming to literally zero viewers. They stream for months and even narrate what they're doing, but nobody's watching. You wonder if it's a learned behavior from watching Twitch for so long.

I make lyric music videos with images generated from Midjourney (https://www.youtube.com/syntopikon). I do it because its fun and, as I'm working through Rolling Stones Top 500 Albums list, jives well with it. Maybe one day it'll make money (~1,330 subs, but not monetized), but until then, its a relaxing, fun project.

Can you actually monetize this when you don't own the music?

I might be able to eventually monetize shorts and video essays, but probably not the lyric videos directly. I made a Patreon for the imagesets used in each video (which are also available for free) and got a $3 Patron, which was surprising but still nice.

For the fun of it, I think. I started a YouTube channel back in 2017 and had some degree of "success". The goal of the channel was to share what sorts of things I was working on and what I learned.

I kept putting more and more work into my content. Some videos did well, and some got practically no views. At some point into it, I realized that I was doing projects to create YouTube content and that I didn't enjoy the process of editing videos. I was spending 30-40 hours editing a 10 minute video because my production standards kept getting higher and higher. So I stopped.

Sometimes I get the urge to make a video and when I do I try to limit myself to a couple of hours to get it done. My last video (published in October) I spent around a day recording and editing because I was pretty proud of the project. It had pop-culture discoverability, and I thought people would find it interesting and valuable. I posted it around on social media a bit, but didn't get too much traffic from social media. I posted it at the end of October and so far it has only gotten 100 views.

By contrast, my most popular video got that amount in the past day. It is what YouTubers call an evergreen video. That single video makes up about 80% of my channel revenue which is down to about $25/month now. At the channel's peak, I was making up to $200/month from ad revenue on the channel.

I will continue to make occasional videos when I feel like it, but I am not trying to make anything from my content.

Some people love video the medium.

I tried doing a video of myself talking off the cuff on a topic. Watching myself, it was painful. I obviously needed to write myself a script, do editing, etc. I would rather just write the text, and skip the video bit. :)

You basically can't expect to film yourself talking and put it on YouTube and expect to get lots of views. OP spent 100 hours making each video that's several minutes long.

yes he did. the level of effort a good video makes is off the charts. and then you're rolling the dice of luck/marketing.

exactly. and for every one of him there's a hundred that put in the same effort and failed

Sad? How is it sad that I don't earn $600k when I put up a video on YouTube of a bird on my balcony?

The 99.9% don't earn as much because their content isn't as highly viewed. That appears completely fair to me.

Whats the competition? If you are otherwise looking at a service industry job, or other forms of low wage kind of shit employment then I guess this sort of thing becomes increasingly desirable.

Something doesn't add up. They said they worked 6500 hours (100 hour per video). Is that just the one person? There are only 8760 hours in a whole year!

It's 6500 hours since the start of the channel in 2017, not just in a single year.

Same reason people try and be soccer players and rock stars.