Results of last week's experiment.... (Patreon)

A quick update on last week’s experiment. 

You may remember that I wanted to see if a shorter video (about an MP3 badge) combined with a formulaic thumbnail picture would generate more views than my previous video (about VHD) which took considerably more time and effort to assemble.

Well, you'll probably be glad to hear that the longer more elaborate VHD video won out. After the first 24hrs when views died off on the shorter badge video, the VHD video regained the number one position in hourly views and has continued to do so ever since.

So there you go, for me that was an experiment worth doing. A few people seemed worried about that I was planning on dumbing things down, but I’ve always liked to try things out for myself before making any kind of judgement.

A commonly held belief is that shorter videos combined with click-bait thumbnails are a sure-fire way to increase views. I had suspicions that going down this route wouldn’t have any effect on views for my type of videos, and these turned out to be well founded. 

The topic of my videos appeal to a more mature audience, people around my age, who are old enough to have formulated their own strong opinions, likes, dislikes and preferences. People aren’t easily influenced.  

70% of views on the channel come from the age range of 25-44. It sounds normal, but you have to think that  that’s old for youtube. 30% is in the 35-44 age band. These people (like myself) are far more likely to view videos on a computer rather than a phone  and this is borne out in the stats. That’s great with me. There’s little point in me putting out 4K videos for a 5” screen. 

I was happy to see that the 9 minute video didn’t attract a greater percent of mobile users than the 30 minute one either so this means I don’t have to worry about the length of a video putting off audiences either. 

So to sum up, I’m just going to keep doing what I do, although I do intend to try to keep videos below 20 minutes. If the subject exceeds that, and looks like it's going to go past half an hour... I’ll split it across two or more videos. This is mainly because I’m having trouble editing and uploading videos in 4K when they exceed a certain size/length. Sometimes I have to really pack information in to 30 minutes when it would be better paced over a 40 minute spread across two videos. 

Anyway that’s what’s going on right now. It’s just business as usual over here.