Topic: Cool channel - 1 minute economy films (Read 1305 times)

Well, here we are, a year or so later and I've just (as in yesterday) celebrated the 10,000 subscriber milestone!!!

Thought I'd update this thread and share some of the stuff I've learned over the past 12-13 months as a YouTuber.

1) First of all, YouTube can be very, very supportive

My animations are great but let's be honest, the production value of my filmed videos is not... not yet, at least; I've always been insecure about actually filming myself because while I use my written English a LOT more than I use my native language (emails, blog posts,articles, books, you name it), the same cannot be said about my spoken English. I was kind of afraid I'd disappoint people but YouTube has been awesome; so awesome in fact that at a certain point, I took a close look at the analytics for:

a) my 10 most recent animations

b) my 10 most recent vlogs/filmed videos

It turns out the animations had pretty much the same number of likes as the blogs but... brace yourself... the vlogs had pretty much no dislikes. Which is ridiculous in light of how incompetent I know I am at lighting stuff, video stuff, talking in front of a camera (my accent is getting better but I'm still not satisfied) and there can only be one explanation: the community wants to support what I'm doing and in their quest for authenticity (compared to the talking heads on financial news networks, for example), they're willing to be lenient when it comes to things like production value

2) My audience is ridiculously diverse, from high school and college kids to Bank of England seniors, I kid you not; I've actually just recently (a couple of days ago) exchanged emails with a BOE dude who was very humble/polite and wanted my opinion on one of their new projects

3) The money, unless you're genuinely huge, is not going to be amazing compared to domaining, cryptocurrency investing and so on; if you're not doing it out of passion and instead are chasing money, there are better ways to skin that cat

4) Having your own product helps a LOT; perhaps the biggest positive surprise was the sales of my book's (Wealth Management 2.0) audiobook version... it's a huge advantage that I'll be able to earn additional income by selling products (books) that my audience is actually interested in rather than merch such as shirts, mugs and so on

5) I've recently started having a few very loyal fans, I've even had my first "first" comment on a YouTube video and my first "second" comment... first/second comments are a YouTube thing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXzUcqQM8qw).

I don't take these people for granted and always do my best to engage with my audience. My rule of thumb is that replying to comments is not just the polite but also the smart thing to do. It remains to be seen how this will change once the comment volume keeps increasing but I'll do my best

6) There's a LOT of work behind the scenes and videos which seem simple to make involve far more blood/sweat/tears than meets the eye. For example, my easiest-to-make videos are the rants I publish on Monday but even with those, I usually spend over an hour just recording myself for a minute or so of footage. Then there's also editing, finding/introducing images, publishing the thing , etc.

7) At the beginning, just like with most projects I guess, it does tend to feel that you're talking to yourself; it takes just as much time writing let's say a script for an animation now when I'm at 10k+ subs as it did when I barely had 10 subscribers and the same way, the same principle will be value at 100k subs compared to 10k; the "am I talking to myself here?" phase is perhaps the hardest

... that's it for now and if you have any questions or are interested in trying something YouTube related yourself, lemme know

Oh and btw, there are already 58 videos on my channel, so please check first to make sure the topic you were about to suggest hasn't already been covered.

For example, there's already a video about cryptocurrencies, one about fractional reserve banking and one about derivatives, three topics I think some of you guys would have recommended.

I publish two videos per week (usually one on Tuesday and one on Saturday) and it all ads up quickly. At one point I think I had maybe 8 ready-to-publish videos, then I got busy with other stuff and haven't worked on new ones for a short while (or so I thought). I eventually checked my folder and realized I had zero videos left. Doing my best to make sure I always have at least 10 videos in my "ready to publish" folder, so I really would appreciate interesting topic suggestions

Getting close to the 4k milestone

If you guys would like to suggest some topics for future videos, please post your suggestions here and I'll do my best to help.

Great news, my YouTube.com/OneMinuteEconomics channel now has 3,000 subscribers!!!

It started as a hobby but it seems the project is turning into *so* much more. At the very beginning, I wanted to maybe publish a video per month or so and used to dream about how awesome it would be if the channel had 100 videos: well, I'm already halfway there (49 videos) and instead of publishing once a month, I'm now posting two videos each week (one on Tuesday and one on Saturday).

It isn't easy... but I'm loving every minute of it! The channel now has lots of videos (spread across multiple well-categorized playlists), an awesome community is starting to emerge (I mean come on, I've published two videos about the election and the comments have been more than civilized, which is very... and I mean *very* rare) and most importantly, I feel the channel is genuinely helping more and more people.

Well, enough with the rambling already, time to get back to work!

While I'm not a huge fan of the simplistic style of animation, I would say that the information that is being put across is pretty good overall and quite neatly done for a 1-minute video. I'll definitely consider watching more of these in the future, especially if they start to dive into more obscure financial events and so.

This is a good video I would say, relatively subjective and I didn't see any glaring issue with bias. I liked it overall, especially for 1 minute.

I also agree with you, my favourite part of the debate was the economic portion, once they started to delve into who-gives-a-shit topics I kind of lost interest. During the time they had it really showed what each candidate's priorities were.

Quick update: currently at 2,720 subs and I need your help with something.

I've just published a one minute video about the first Clinton-Trump debate from an economic perspective:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JS4SarjwWA

Would really appreciate it if you could help me spread the word via facebook, twitter, etc.

Did my best to be as objective as positive.

As an economist, I have to say I've hated the debate. They've spent about as much time discussing economics as they've spent talking about tabloid-type issues such as Obama's birth certificate. Interest rates are at record-low levels, central banks are pumping unprecedented amounts of liquidity into the system, the global economy is dealing with unbelievably complex problems… yet politicians still prefer tabloid-ish topics. Go figure.

I personally feel 2 minutes usually is enough time to explain everything. 1 minute is sort of squeezing it, and 2 minutes is sort of enough to retain attention for most people. Anyways watched a couple of them , and they seem to be really well in the time.

Thanks for the kind words guys

Currently at around 1,200 subscribers, really happy that the channel's growing and I'm no longer just talking to myself haha.

For most topics, a minute or so is enough. In extreme scenarios, I'd even be reasonably comfortable with something like 1:55 but as a general rule, I want to limit myself to a video length lower than or equal to 1:30.

Interesting concept of doing videos in a minute, but I doubt it will be much valuable. You can't really explain much of any concepts relating to any event under a minute. While they might be fun to watch, I doubt they would be educational.

Despite that some of the videos are really good. Some one-minute videos on explaining bitcoins and some of the concepts would definitely be fun to watch.

If it's for the sake of bitcoin community we are here to support your activities. You have made an informational and nice video. Hope this may increase the knowledge and understanding of newbies as well as to non bitcoin community. Your project may promote bitcoin to other people and will help increase the number of users in the bitcoin industry.

Well, I've managed to break my previous Reddit "record" (100 YouTube subscribers in ~24 hours) by attracting ~150 subs over a 24-hour period with my video about derivatives.

The main difference between this situation and the other one is this: for my previous record, I've done very well on just ONE huge subreddit (/r/videos, with 11 million members, genuinely huge) whereas the derivatives video did well on several smaller subreddits.

It definitely adds up, especially since you can get good placement on the smaller subreddits. I end up on position #1 of page #1 on smaller subreddits relatively frequently, whereas my best performance on /r/videos has been the last position (#25) of page one. Now, of course, I could receive insane amounts of traffic by hitting position #1 of page #1 on /r/videos (easily hundreds of subs, possibly 500+) but that's easier said than done and therefore, if I were to aim for consistency, targeting smaller subreddits kind of makes more sense.

The channel now has close to 800 subs, so "the big 1k" is close.

That's it for now, will post in this thread again when I have something new/meaningful to report.

Heh, woke up to great news today

The latest One Minute Economics video started doing well on Reddit, on the huge /r/videos subreddit (about 11 million members). It's still there, on page 2.

Before that happened, I was sitting at 370-371 subscribers and was optimistic that I might get close to 400 thanks to Reddit.

Well, I went to bed and woke up to a whopping 465 subs

I have done well on /r/videos before with my bitcoin video but it seems this video (which explained what pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes are) generated a LOT more subscribers for the same number of views.

The only two explanations I can think of:

1) they found the video more interesting than the bitcoin one

2) I'm now posting two times per week, so the channel looks more active

Definitely the best 24 hours the channel has had so far... by far.

Are you guys interested in my progress?

If so, post in this thread and let me know if I should continue publishing updates.

Wow!

My bitcoin video hit page 1 on all of the important bitcoin subreddits: r/bitcoin, r/btc, r/cryptocurrencies and r/bitcoinmining

If you come across it, please help the video stay on page 1 longer by upvoting.

Alright guys, the video about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies has been published a few seconds ago:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xSomPDhOAu4

Did my best to male this exactly the type of video you can show to non-tech-savvy people without them giving you "the look"

Are any of you active on the bitcoin subreddit over at Reddit?

If so, I'd appreciate it if you could post the video. This channel is still in its infancy, so every bit of exposure helps!

Thanks for the kind words and for the healthy dose of optimism

I'd be happy with 10k-ish subs and a nice community, our little corner of the Internet.

Welcome aboard

The animation is done by a talented designer (I write the scripts and provide artistic suggestions, she does the magic after that), she uses GoAnimate if I'm not mistaken.

The bitcoin video will most likely be published next week.

For the time being, here's a reddit link for my most recent video, the Brexit one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4nmnnu/this_months_brexit_referendum_explained_in_one/?

Please upvote if you can.

Hey great channel, tried to make something like this myself one time, its not easy.  When you have the bitcoin video post it up here and on reddit.  Good luck and can see you with a few hundred k subs in 6 months.

I`ve subscribed to your channel.By the way,what software are you using for those animated videos?

Animoto or other?Is the software free or paid?I was interested about making cuch animated videos...

Waiting for your bitcoin video.

Good luck OP.

Thanks guys

I'll try to publish a bitcoin video next Friday, for now I've decided to publish one about the Brexit referendum through which people will decide if the United Kingdom should leave the European Union or stay:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k4x-ofl3BxI

The referendum will take place this month (on the 23rd), so it's a time-sensitive topic.

Did my best to make the video balanced, I'm not telling people what to think and instead, tried to present the top 3 arguments of each side so that they can make their own decision.

Are any if you guys active on Reddit?

Would really appreciate it if you could share this video there, I think videos which are submitted by established Reddit users do better.

It's pretty good little channel, in the same vein as the One Minute Physics channel. Good luck growing Andrei.