Lessons From a Decade of Making Videos
Lessons From a Decade of Making Videos
I wrote a post not too long ago called The Past and Future of Press Button Win. That post focused on the history of the channel and my thoughts about where it's headed now. This post is kind of an extension of that, but rather than talking about Press Button Win specifically, I wanted to talk about video making and what I've learned about it along the way. I would broadly divide YouTube creators into two types:
High frequency producers: people who make content weekly or even multiple times per week. Think Sajam. They might make things like:
Reaction videos to recent FGC news
Tutorials teaching you the basics of how to use a character
Online matches with commentary (often streamed first)
Low frequency producers: people who can have multi-month gaps between videos. Think Core-A gaming. High frequency producers usually focus on things like:
Documentaries
Video essays
High frequency producers make lots of videos, so they make videos quickly. This means they're in position to succeed where a fast turnaround is key. A character basics tutorial video illustrates this well. When a new character comes out, people aren’t going to wait months for someone to put out a meticulously researched, expertly edited, and well-produced tutorial video. Players just want to know how the character’s moves work, a couple good buttons, and a few basic combos to get started. There’s also a huge first mover advantage here. Whoever is first will get all the traffic (there’s no competition when you’re the only one out there). By default, they become the most popular video on the topic. Popular videos tend to be recommended by The Algorithm™, so the first mover tends to stay at the top of that list—it’s self-reinforcing. If you take your time and make the best character tutorial ever, you’ll likely never see the success of the person who made the quickest character tutorial ever. The most viewed Janemba tutorial video is one that came out the day the character dropped. Low frequency producers make few videos (and spend a long time making each one of them). Documentaries or video essays take a long time to make, so you naturally see low frequency producers focus on those.
The Economics of Eyeballs
Whether making videos is your job or just a hobby, you want people to watch your videos (why else would you make them?). Let's say you make your living via YouTube and your goal is to get one million views per year. If you put out two videos per week, you’ll get there with ten thousand views per video. If you put out two videos per year, those videos need to average a half million views each. It sort of balances it out—if you’re spending more time making each individual video, each video should (hopefully) attract a larger audience. I don’t monetize my stuff, but I still think about this a lot—the time I spend making a video vs. the time people spend watching it and the value they get from it. If I spend a lot of time and effort making a video and lots of people watch it, it was time well spent. If not, it might be time to reevaluate.
All of this is to say—if you’re interested in making videos, you need to think about what kinds of videos you want to make and what this necessarily implies. High frequency = high consistent time commitment. High frequency producers already exist for most (all?) major games. Some of these creators make videos full time. If being first means everything, how are you going to compete with someone who has already made it their full-time job? This becomes even more difficult when established creators get early access to new characters, game betas, etc. Low frequency still takes lots of time, and while you avoid the constant time pressure of high frequency content creation, you need to offer something new and present it well enough to grab people’s attention. Neither path is easy!
Happenstance Matters a Lot
Working hard will load the dice more heavily in your favor or let you roll the dice more times, but at some level, success will always rely on chance. Examples:
Shoryuken.com used to exist and was an easy way to get videos in front of lots of people. Whether avenues like this exist for you is beyond your control.
Your video might be mentioned or linked by somebody with a large social media following. Whether this happens is largely beyond your control.
You might have started making videos at a time where there was more or less competition in the space. You can choose to enter a space where there’s less competition, but that probably means there’s less interest there in general. It could work out if the niche you pick ends up later exploding in popularity, but this is largely beyond your control.
Some amount of success in any creative endeavor depends on luck. You can take this as a positive or a negative. “I hate this, I should succeed purely based on my merits!” and “I failed, oh well, not my fault!” are both valid interpretations.
On Production Value
Cool visuals don't matter as much as you think. This might seem hypocritical coming from a guy who spends hours making these:
I make them because it’s fun, but I think this sort of stuff basically has no effect on how well your videos do. That being said, some amount of production value does matter. Things like the intro sequences for Think, Don’t Mash! aren’t necessarily super time-consuming to create, but they’re clean and do their job (I hope, anyway). Editing, conciseness, and planning are what really matter. For example, take this Janemba tutorial video. It has a ton of useful information (I watched it and got a lot out of it!). However, it’s a 42 minute unedited stream of consciousness monstrosity of a video with no time stamps. You could put all the same information into a video that’s a third the length. I watched this particular video because I knew the player knew what they were talking about, but 99% of the time, if I click on a video and it has zero editing, I nope the hell out of there without a second thought. Speaking of unedited streams of consciousness, that's kind of what this blog post is turning into, so I think I'll call it here.