I'm thinking my inability to think of catchy titles might be part of my lack of viewers... Anyway, I've always enjoyed messing with broken stuff, and recently(ish) started pointing the camcorder at it. Tend to go with things I personally find interesting, for nostalgia, fulfilment of childhood dreams, or pure quirky reasons. So that includes various bits of audio tech, like personal stereos, record players, etc. I've no clue what I'm doing, and swear a lot when things spring free or snap for fun, but hopefully I'm not making desirable things more rare!
Welcome! It's not easy, especially now that more people have free time to try the same thing. I think you need to build a base of videos first, find your skills and start polishing them, even guys like Adam Savage don't have huge followings but he has some great videos. My Mate Vince's #1 Video is on a TV boombox with millions of views, I think he kind of struck paydirt with that one video and then people checked out his other work.
I am actually one of Techmoan's Patreon Supporters. This video, and the ability of Patreons to download some historic jingles etc made me sign up. About once a month Techmoan produces a video for his Patreons talking about the videos he has made and which ones were popular. Just like the pop charts and radio airplay used to be, videos can either take off leading to them being recommended to more people or fizzle out quickly. My recommendation would be to look at Techmoan, LGR, and The8BitGuy, who all have over a million subscribers, to see where the current standard is. Of course rather than try to copy them directly you could try something different. there is a big difference between the dry humour of Techmoan and the in your face humour of Technology Connections but I enjoy them both.
I watched a few of your videos, not bad, I'd post some in this forum, in fact we should have a thread with videos. Some of yours are very specific but placing them on here would be helpful to the visitors and get you more views. Personally I love AvE on YouTube, he takes apart my favorite tools and discusses the parts, I'd love to see something like that with Walkmans and boomboxes and I'm hoping one of you guys gets with autoreverser and makes a documentary on the "clones."
If you are talking about my own videos, then all but two were done to sell items and didn't involve any editing. Rather appropriate that one of my most viewed videos was for a Boombox
I have just watched a couple of Exasperant's videos. Some hopefully useful observations. The LG TV one didn't get interesting until about 13 minutes in. Even Techmoan has made observations on how many people quit his videos after 5 minutes. The most recent phone battery replacement one was about the right length. Have you ever tried presenting to camera. Most of the successful Youtubers seem to. VWestlife is an exception but only has 1/10th of the number of subscribers despite coming across as an expert on turntables. In contrast Ageing Wheels is quite entertaining despite coming across as a non-expert talking about some completely rubbish cars, due to his use of puns, and camera tricks.
I haven't seen any of your videos, but here are some general thoughts: 1) Just because you think something is interesting doesn't mean your audience will. Make it interesting to the common man. It's much better to talk down to someone, than to use a bunch of techie mumbo-jumbo. Even if your audience is mostly techie people. Techies are swamped by technical data all day, they need a break from all that. They appreciate a speaker who tells stories and explains things using non-technical analogies, just like a common man would. 2) Capture their interest in the first 10 seconds, or they'll leave. 3) Add some tags to help people find your videos. Those tags, the video title, and whatever you write in the description field under the video, are used by both YT and Google for search algorithms. 4) If you record indoors, use a light box or tent. 5) If you're speaking, consider using attaching a quality aftermarket microphone on your camera (instead of the crappy one built into it). Or you could record the video and audio separately at different times, and use editing software to put them together. This would allow you to practice multiple times, resulting in a cleaner audio without any "ums, uhs" or awkward silences.
