I produce Music Tech-based educational content on YT. It started as a hobby and sideline to my main work (which at the time was classroom teaching of the same content). While I'm no longer working in classrooms (pandemic plus other reasons led to this), I'm still producing content, which I think is of good quality and worthwhile.
The issue I have with it is that I refuse to produce attention-grabbing clickbaity titles or thumbnails. I don't like the whole algorithmically-driven race to the bottom of the brain stem, and have zero interest in producing the same. I've had plenty of comments from viewers who say the videos are great and informative, but if I'd just jazz things up a bit then I'd get more views.
I'm just wondering how this will change (if at all) with this new program. It takes a LOT of time to produce decent content, and even more if you're going to provide a course and backup materials etc.. Writing curricula is HARD work, and writing tests, etc., that are actually valid is reasonably challenging and time consuming.
I currently get about £100 a month from YT, which definitely doesn't reflect the time I put into it (but I know it has other benefits as I sell a fair number of books partly as a result of the viewership). I know that the beasts of the platform (3b1b spring to mind) would do really well from this (and deservedly so), but I do wonder if things really need to change to make YT work well for genuinely-produced non-clickbait educational content.
This reminds me of a saying I've heard from Dean Graziosi (sales type guy).
"Sell them what they want, give them what they need".
I also dislike this whole game where you have to essentially mould yourself into this "mainstream click-baity character", but part of me recognises that if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing.
One way to think of it is - you owe it to your audience to save them from worse educational experiences, and the only way to save them is to try to rank higher than these other more click-baity low-value videos.
> but part of me recognises that if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing.
The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want? Is there a way for YouTube to compensate for clickbaity titles and thumbnails? Are they incentivized to do so?
Thinking back at teachers and teaching that I really liked, they aren't always the best salesmen, but they're always very good communicators, and good at speaking. I don't think that the content promoted by today's engagement machines are optimizing for that.
The justification some youtubers (LTT comes to mind) use for clickbait video titles/thumbnails is that they feel that so long as the content itself is good then it doesn’t matter what techniques they use to get people to watch it. Their logic is that there’s nothing wrong with lying to get someone to watch your video so long as they enjoy it once they do.
To me it the race to the bottom of clickbait video titles/thumbnails feels dishonest and harmful but it’s hard to see what to do about it other than manual curation and/or alternative platforms which don’t use recommendations to exponentially amplify click rates.
> One way to think of it is - you owe it to your audience to save them from worse educational experiences, and the only way to save them is to try to rank higher than these other more click-baity low-value videos.
This is clear self-deception and a way for a person to start the slide down the slippery slope to abandoning their standards. You don't owe it to your audience to 'save them' (a weird, evangelical way of putting it). You might like to put better content out there and hope that people find it and value it (and take reasonable steps to promote it, in a non-scammy way) but no, you don't need to rank higher than lower quality content. Because 9 times out of 10 the highest ranking content is junk and trying to rank higher will cause your own content to descend into being junk as well.
> if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing
Or you bet against fads and hope that your consistent brand will develop an increasingly loyal and appreciative following over the long term.
You could lose that bet, but sometimes cashing in on today’s hot trends means washing out and being forgotten when they change. You’re making bets every where you look.
From what I have seen this idea of is the problem with a lot of online courses.
The courses that sell seem to be made by great sales men and women. But then the actual course itself is bad.
A lot of courses/content is created by a single person. The chances of them being great sales people and educators at the same time is pretty rare I would imagine.
This goes back to what the original commenter is feeling, the algo is going to work to the benefit of the great sales people. Which in turn leaves the good educators and the learner at a disadvantage.
We need a better way to find great courses/learning content. Social media(including Youtube in this) is not a great way to discover good content.
I'm a creator too. I'm small on YouTube (3,880 subs; 6.4k views and about 293 hours watched in the last 28 days), but have a (relatively speaking) large Discord with 3,800 members. I have a mailing list of about 1,600. My goal and focus is to sell, but it's to sell a big package around the idea of IT education. I want to sell to people who want the interaction and community, not just the knowledge dump.
And I'm the same. I won't do the over-the-top, hyped up character who uses the latest trends to grab your attention, like some sort of hollowed out clown that has no real joy in the middle.
Instead, I just focus on writing my online courses, mentoring people, and building a community. If you're interested in the same thing, and I can help, reach out :-)
Reach out? How?
Looking up movedx i found a channel with 40 and a channel with 441 subs.
Having integrity in 2022 seems pretty cool, but am i missing something...like a link?
Hey 3880 subs is pretty good. I'm still on 241. haha. It actually takes a lot of effort to get past 1000 subs/5000 watch hours, which is the minimum for monetization.
There is certainly slimy YouTube tactics for attention and clicks, but not all successful YouTubers are doing slimy things.
If your videos are genuinely interesting and / or useful, you need to be able to convey that fact to users, before they watch it. It isn't too much to ask.
Just imagine a viewer asking you the question, "ok so why should I watch your videos over someone else's?". It is a fair question. And replying back, "you don't get to know that until you watch it" isn't a reasonable response.
Matthias Wandel comes to mind as exceptional here - almost 2M subscribers as I recall, a popular 'second channel' too, and way against 'youtube scream face' and similar nonsense. He's done a few 'shorts' since initially saying he didn't (as I don't) see the point, but other than that, standout top of class etc.
I just hope that the use of metadata is enforced using AI the same way copyright is being enforced. I think a better approach would be to corral/wall-off this learning content sub-platform, similar to how kidsyoutube is walled-off. I wouldn't mind typing youtube.ed or edutube.. or something else. The value of youtube would be in the big iron behind it, so the front-end can be anything, as long as it's policed to comply. Example of it not being police. I make a video and I call it "Trump's documents classification". I then use the metadata to insert words used in FBI classification and voila..
I think there exists a middle ground that doesn't devalue your content, sell your soul, sacrifice your authenticity, keep up with the joneses, etc. That being said, hard pass on the clickbaity thumbnails and titles. When folks suggest "jazzing things up", they might be looking for some vlogging and conversational segments. You, as a personality, are just as marketable and appealing as the content you produce. You are the brand.
An example of an overcorrection would be posting short one-off videos that address specific problems and solutions with titles such as "When Should I Apply Reverb?" or "My Top 5 VST Plugins". If producing lectures is your strong suit, well, we need more of that...
It depends on what you want. Google is optimizing for eye balls so content that warrants more engagement is going to win. 2 questions on the end of the spectrum to ask yourself...
Do you want to build a community that is a reflection of your ideas?
Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?
> content that warrants more engagement is going to win
What does that even mean?
I'd be careful about using the language of silicon value ad companies. It changes how you think. One minute you're talking about content and community and the next thing you know you have metrics and are trying to measure engagement and are now making decisions based off something you could actually measure and not relying on your instincts, experience, and good taste.
Instead, create videos (not content) for your fans / audience based on what you know works. Make it so good, your audience will want to support you.
I think Justin Sandercoe does a good job of this. There is a community on his web site and a community on his YouTube channel, but more importantly he has fans on every guitar forum on the internet. He sells books for people who want them and he has courses you can pay for, but they are mostly guides through his lessons which are all available for free on YouTube or reproductions of copyrighted work which he can't give away for free.
The most important thing for his success (IMHO) is that he has created a lot of very high quality videos. He doesn't do clickbait titles or images. Just video after video of great stuff.
While obviously in a minority, GP should take heart in the fact there are viewers out there, myself included, that will actively avoid videos with click bait title cards.
Silly facial expressions and “you won’t believe…” type text are an instant turn-off for me. However, they are obviously effective in engaging a younger audience.
> Do you want to build a community that is a reflection of your ideas?
I do, and I think I've done that - I have regular viewers who I interact with, and some of them also get private tuition from me. Many more, though, have bought my book on Cubase and Music Technology, and have found it useful, which is wonderful for me. It's precisely why I don't engage in OTT titles or "shock face" thumbnails - although they are a lot better produced than when I first started the channel (which look more like 1940s UK Government infomercial titles!)
>Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?
No, I don't. I'm fortunate that I don't need to earn a lot of money to get by, and I'm not very materially driven. I have a decent house with no mortgage, and no expensive hobbies (any more!) or vices, and I'm generally pretty happy where I am. I'd love to make 10x what I'm making at the moment, and be able to devote a day or two a week to making videos, but I think it'd be difficult to get 10x the subscribers to allow me to do that.
Take a look at Veritasium's perspective on this issue [1]. Veritasium reflects on clickbait thumbnails from the content producer perspective, and balances that against the motivation behind YouTube's algorithms. His final conclusion is that cilckbait isn't all bad, and that it serves an important purpose for both viewers and content creators. His classification of clickbait into different types is also fascinating.
Very minor anecdata I would like to share: I have discovered Veritasium like most others, at the time when they weren't "clickbaiting", when their videos actually had the thing that they discussed right there in the title. I learned tons of things. Each new video, and each title, made me eager to discover that thing.
But around the time they implemented their "clickbait" titles and thumbnails, it had the opposite effect on me. They all just *seemed* like so many other videos: bland and tasteless. The content itself hasn't much changed, but the allure certain has diminished for me. I've stopped watching their videos.
Compare that to Curious Droid, or Practical Engineering, which still use descriptive titles, sometimes questions, but always exactly about the subject.
Honestly, if your content is good, all the more you should put some effort on your thumbnails. Don't feel bad about it.
To me it's like spending your lifetime writing an amazing book, only to spend a few minutes on designing the cover. It could be an amazing video/book. But how would I as the customer know?
I (and probably many other people) are constantly searching for good videos to watch. And unlike books, it's so easy to take a peek on a video and decide to close it within seconds if it's not something that is interesting to me.
The middle ground I've seen is to concede a bit to the clickbaters and make a few clickbait videos that talk about what you do and what's available in the other videos.
People will never just spontaneously realize you exist and on their own seek out the media you produce.
They have to discover you somehow. The YouTube Algorithm is at least partially concerned with enabling people who would like your channel to discover it.
Regardless of how well you think YouTube does that, you have to admit it's not exactly a simple thing to do. YouTube is trying to maximize ad revenue by maximizing watch time. They are not trying to evenly distribute viewer attention among "worthy" channels.
There are some examples in fitness-educational content, say Jeff Nippard and Athlean-X, that use some clickbait tactics in terms of thumbnail choosing, titles, and editing, but then nonetheless delivery high-quality educational content that doesn't seem like it should have been behind clickbait.
But even if you feel like that's a betrayal of your integrity and you just want to produce something like MIT OCW, well, there are other examples from fitness content, say Stronger by Science, Sigma Nutrition, Iron Culture, where they either make enough to get by but not a ton, or even in Iron Culture's case lose money from the social media ventures but do it anyway. If you want to use MIT itself as an example of something that can be legitimate, high-quality education, but still make money, you can consider that universities operate as non-profits and rely on charitable donations to amass the wealth they have.
I don't think the phenomenon you're getting at here is limited to YouTube or even to educational content on any platform. Sellers of junk food make more money than sellers of high-nutritional, better quality food, and the most profitable sellers of high-nutrition content, high-quality food are even still using clickbait-like tactics of misleading marketing and overselling what their products can really do. The most boring fruit and vegetable stands in the world selling basic nutrient-dense, really good products but not lying about what it can do for you, are just getting by and not getting rich.
Sometimes, that has to be enough. If you believe in what you're doing, do it, even if you're not going to get rich.
While I agree with your hesitation in marketing deceptive content, I think you may be overloading marketing on YouTube with the term click-bait.
From Wikipedia:
> Clickbait is ... designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link ..., being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.
Think about it the other way, for all the time you spend producing content in an effort to help others, wouldn't it be more rewarding to you to help as many people as possible? As a user of YouTube, when I search for help with something, I typically start with result that visually looks like it's going to provide me the best answer, as that's the only thing to go on. If the title and thumbnail looked low-effort, I assume the content would look low-effort as well. Maybe that's an intentional aesthetic choice, it can definitely work for some content.
HOWEVER, if the video were to actually deceive me, I would just stop going to that creator entirely. This should be true for most viewers and YouTube is encouraged not to provide misleading results. Otherwise, trust in the results would diminish searching directly through YouTube.
Totally see where you are coming from, and as a consumer I try to avoid any video that smells like clickbait.
There are many channels that do have great content and accurate captions/thumbnails. From what I’ve seen, having high quality, consistent content over a prolonged period of time is a pretty sure way to grow.
> Totally see where you are coming from, and as a consumer I try to avoid any video that smells like clickbait.
same.
i watch a lot of youtube. i pay monthly for it, so i don't have to see ads. i've seen linus tech tips videos come up in my recommendations a time or two, and i am never going to watch them, just on principle. boy do i ever hate the mugging and pimping people like him indulge in, in an effort to bait me into watching.
> I don't like the whole algorithmically-driven race to the bottom...
Yup.
The consumer's challenge is finding what they want (or need).
Is it ironic that a search company mostly uses recommenders?
Why not better search? Why not better foraging and browsing?
--
Sole reliance on algorithmic recommenders, automated hate machines, has resulted in multiple negative outcomes. Existential threat to democracy, spike in teen suicides, accelerant for self radicalization, death of independent journalism, dominance of conspiratorial thinking, loss of public discourse, and probably a few more.
I'm sure search, foraging, and browsing strategies also have downsides. But I can't imagine how the outcomes could be worse.
A click bait, is a bait, a lure in all instances to get something different what is expected.
A fish wanting the worm gets the hook, a fox wanting the meat, gets the snap trap. The clicker wanting the content promised in the title, gets something different, not what is expected.
> ... wearing a funny hat ...
An instructor still delivers all the details and content as expected with or without the funny hat. Not so for click bait videos.
You're correct. Now imagine that the vast majority of teachers focused more on wearing funny hats to engage students than teaching them the material - because schools paid them more for that.
Parents would probably be interested in alternatives.
> Click bait isn't different than wearing a funny hat to engage students in class.
what are you talking about?
a student gets stuck going to class regardless of how goofy the teacher dresses, whereas I feel an extreme sense of revulsion when I click on a YT link with a meme-thumbnail or a clickbait title.
your analogy fails since in this instance the 'student' gets to decide whether or not they participate in the course.
If I had had the chance to walk out on goofy teachers through high school then -- just as one anecdote -- I wouldn't have graduated.
so, in other words, clickbait 'engagement' style marketing will get your volume numbers up, but the hidden aspect is that there will be a market that pulls entirely away from you -- 'teachers' on YT will need to understand these market dynamics if they're really interested in teaching the masses rather than making money on viewership.
If teachers K-12 were paid according to their student throughput that'd turn into a major humanitarian crisis, imo.
Good to see producers also don't like attention-grabbing titles or thumbnails. I fight clickbate with the only tool I have found.
If a recommended canal have clickbait titles, shocked faces on the thumbnails or if the titles are auto-translated to my language I select never recommend this canal and move on to the next
Having good thumbnails and tiles is just marketing. If you want to sell or get the word out about what you are offering it helps to have a good marketing effort. Yes, creating the material is a lot of work, but that doesn't mean that marketing is something that doesn't need hard work.
The problem is it isn't "good" thumbnails. It's that stupid fucking, "who farted?" face. Or more often for young women, it's "Uh-oh, I did a bad thing" face.
I agree, race to the bottom of the brain stem. I sympathize with GP
I used to think like this about marketing in general. "Build it and they will come" was the usual motto in my formative years. But isn't it a shame to build a great product and then not have people engage with it, just because I frown upon marketing?
I find this thread interesting because the 10-or-so comments I've read are all discussing the merits and necessities of 'salesmanship' for this kind of work and throwing their hands in the air for 'What could be done' (maybe not literally but by omission of engagement with that part of the topic).
From my perspective, there are viable 'solutions' to this problem; Patreon, Curiosity stream, Coursera, etc.
I suppose those solutions, Direct Pay or Subscription, require more from individuals compared to youtube, 'free but with ads'. So the problem here is , "Is there a solution to the ad-revenue-based-on-views approach that keeps the content free for viewers"? When you identify it like that, I don't think there can be. I think the model demanding as many views as possible is a feature not a bug even if the outcomes are less than desirable. And now, in my view, we're talking about failures of Capitalism and this is just one example, Teachers being another.
> Every day, people come to YouTube to learn something new.
True.
> shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations
External links seem important on educational files, and I kind of like recommendations when I'm browsing educational stuff, but whoo, no ads on educational stuff? That's great!
> Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid
The alternative isn’t these creators giving their content away; the alternative is these creators using one of the dozens of paid-video-course hosting platforms that have sprung up. This isn’t going to put a paywall in front of any content that didn’t already have a paywall in front of it.
Yes, but you as a consumer choose youtube, because you pretty much know that all the content there (from your home feed to search result, to related videos) is free. You start with a soldering tutorial, then click on the related video on how to solder SMD components, then a related video about how transistors work, then you find a nice documentary about the history of computing, about enigma, etc... so you click through videos, watch (or adblock) the ads, and learn a bunch of stuff.
Now, most (or even all) of those related videos will be replaced by "pay to watch" videos, and i'm 99.9% sure, that the algorithms will prioritize paid video over free content, so all the free stuff will get buried, and you're left with shitty paid content of worse quality than those old, free videos.
On your very last point, you seem to be wrong. These commercial platforms are neither accessible for everyone, nor do they offer the sort of reach as youtube. The choice then is paid content somewhere, or ads on youtube.
By contrast, you now can chose between ads and no ads, both on youtube (and the former likely with algorithmic support).
That's a different calculus that - as it seems to me - should imply more paid content than before, contradicting your statement.
Laughable. If you have some following on youtube you are not giving away your content you get ads and sponsorship money from it. They are already getting paid for it and the proof is that there are a growing amount of full time streamers or content producers.
Just to play Devil's Advocate (and I can't believe that I'm arguing for YouTube here): Why shouldn't they charge for a useful service? And it does sound like they're removing other major problems with using their platform for this purpose.
Problem: Creators want to be paid more for their content (great content, good content, bad content, etc)
Solution proposed by Google: Lets charge customers who view this content so that we can pay creators more without losing revenue.
Solution proposed by Consumers: Lets give creators a larger share of youtube's profits. We're already paying for the service by offering our data, our youtube premium subscriptions, and other forms of MTX monetization.
TLDR; Youtube is double dipping in the guacamole bowl, despite having billions of pounds of guacamole.
I'm confused, how is this different than adding a 5$ membership program? Why is allowing the creator to sell video content users want a bad thing? Yes Youtube gets a cut, but that's literally how every single platform works.
As long as they offer both and not one or the other this should be ok. I’m hoping this allows creators to build more in depth courses consisting of a large number of videos. Right now I mostly have to go to Udemy et al for that sort of thing. Being able to preview some of a course on YouTube with ads and then buy the whole thing if I like it sounds like a win. I’ll reserve judgment until it launches though, it is an Alphabet product after all.
Many creators of educational content on Youtube already have paid content alongside their free. Except, the paid is currently hosted on other platforms like Udemy and Patreon. As long it's not an exclusive deal which forces them to only use YouTube, I don't really see that many problems with it. In the end, it will likely draw in more creators, which translates to more educational content, both free and paid, and hopefully better, as competition grows.
You can expect YouTube to take a fat percentage (30%?) far beyond what alternative monetization methods like Patreon.
Good revenue stream, especially if they can get partnership deals with schools or other educational institutions. Imagine YouTube getting this sort of "guaranteed" revenue, like publishers do from textbooks, but getting schools to foot the bill instead of students; great business model.
By no external links or recommendations, I think they're talking about the links to other videos they show after the video being currently watched has finished because they are talking about the embedded YouTube player
More subscribers for increasing their revenue from other videos, maybe yt-premium or even some protection against infamous random ban because of needness to support learning materials.
Probably what they meant by that is a beta by invitation only. That may lead to an open beta based on metrics and not hand picked creators, and eventually open to anyone who wants to participate. But I am just speculating.
Because if they just dumped it on everyone we would have pirated content and scam courses being sold on day one. So instead of the team getting to refine the service, they spend their time playing whack a mole with scammers.
Maybe just me, but I'm not really excited for established YouTubers to sell more stuff and expand their empires. It's already a winner-take-all game of attention.
The beauty of YouTube is finding like a retired professor who puts up their lectures on an account with a couple thousand subscribers.
It is not having a click-bait worthy thumbnail, over-produced video, and barely learning anything while being mindlessly entertained.
YouTube will kill many services in the process like skillshare, udemy, etc. They will continue to get bigger and bigger or this will fail miraculously.
I found channels with 10k-100k subscribers to be extremely high in quality and... bespoke. Just these days, I am learning a lot about OpenWRT while I wait for my router to arrive, and there was one channel with near 30k subscribers run by an amazing person, as he shares quite detailed information about routers, even the ones that are less exciting.
This was such a fresh breath from Linus Tech Tips style "we upgraded to 100 Gbps network" kind of content, because most of us are just tinkering around with consumer hardware, and geek out on minor details.
That, and they don't shove merchandise and minute long sponsored contents to you.
Agreed, some of these smaller channels still carry the spirit of public access TV by attempting to be informative first rather than going straight to growth hacking.
> YouTube will kill many services in the process like skillshare, udemy, etc.
Honestly I can't get over a cynical impression that the announcement is basically: "brilliant and skillshare are getting a bit too popular, we need to do something about it".
They might (do that kind of killing), but I'd also like to think that good educators are a segment that will be wary and savvy enough to steer clear of something that doesn't support the learning that they want to foster, so other learning platforms will endure. Basically I don't think that selling education works like selling ads. But I'm not objective (being an educator).
Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid Courses to provide in-depth, structured learning experiences for viewers. Viewers who choose to buy a Course can watch the video ad-free and play it in the background.
So you're cloning Udemy? Meh. Not much to be excited about so far.
Finally, to help learners apply what they’ve learned, we’re introducing Quizzes — a new way for creators to help viewers test their knowledge.
That could be somewhat useful, but..
For example, a math creator who recently posted a series on algebra can create a Quiz on the Community tab to ask their viewers a question related to a concept taught in their latest video.
Does anybody ever actually visit the "Community" tab of a channel? Why add this extra friction? Hasn't the technology progressed to the point that quizzes could be integrated right into the video player? For that matter, why not have "adaptive" videos where your quiz results can affect the video that you see (like triggering an extra in-depth explanation for notoriously tricky topic if the quiz taker scores below a certain level, etc.).
I hope this works out and provides some value, but I have my doubts as it stands.
Can we go back to the chapter on YouTube where we had downvotes so we can tell whether or not a video is going to be high quality and informative or not?
I don't understand YouTube's move to remove the downvote button - cyber bullying? What I will say though is it actually hasn't stopped me from being able to identify a bad video. If a "bad" video had 1,000 upvotes and (previously) had 10,000 downvotes, combined with a high view count and engage via the comments, just removing the downvotes still tells me everything I need to know: 1,000 upvotes on a high view count video with high engagement? Probably a bad video.
But again, I don't know why they removed it? /shrug
I think it was more useful for evaluating videos with low view counts. Maybe the video was good/useful, just not by an established high subscriber YouTuber. Or it's garbage spam but I can't see the 200 downs next to the 20 ups.
Does it bother anyone else that YouTube has its own TLD (.youtube)?
TLDs used to carry a lot of weight, and used to signify something besides individual entities/companies... but it feels to me like that designation is becoming rather diluted.
It bothers me that we still have those useless suffixes attached to domains. What does „org“, „com“, „net“ even mean to the average user? Nothing. It’s nothing but a pointless ritual at this point, and after ICANN chose to add thousands of generic domains, they don’t have any significance left at all, except that nice names are very expensive now. It would be easier for everybody if we simply removed that extra step that is TLD names.
I still don't know why ICANN gets to tell people what they can or cannot have as their TLD name. It's just a string, it doesn't cost anything more to compare on the DNS server if it's custom or standard.
One can arrange their own TLD for under $200,000 initial fee, plus around $25,000 a year (IIRC).
I imagine there will be a whole TLD auction game, but among those with deep pockets and governed by an organization that doesn't seem to take their job seriously. ICANN looks like a cash grab nowadays to me. I don't mean any offense to the engineers behind it, just that the administration seems quite greedy.
Interestingly, a number of corporations that registered their own TLDs seem to have since let them go. You can see them by searching for "Not assigned" on that page.
Personally, I'm quite happy with the proliferation of top level domains. It seems like the alternative was a completely unnecessary layer of indirection; it's not like every .com was a company or every company used a .com, so they weren't even strongly meaningful before.
YouTube killed learning on their platform, when they killed the downvote.
They removed the one metric that people had to signal that content is crap. So now people have to trust that "the algorithm" is filtering out all the junk. Which of course we know doesn't happen. The algorithm only cares about engagement, it doesn't care if the content is of good quality or even truthful.
But that would be just someone’s personal opinion (or worse). Why should I care? Besides, people discuss things on forums, and a more detailed review is more useful than a simple vote. Finally, it is often not that hard to see whether the presentation or the content is worth your while from the first few minutes of watching it. (There are, of course, some cases when watching is made difficult because of the presenter’s excessive showing their face or gesticulation, or having a distracting accent, but even those do not necessarily deserve being called “crap.”)
I can scan hundreds of vote counts in the time it takes to watch a few minutes of a single video. Google chose to make this process orders of magnitude worse for no good reason.
Also, why should I care about the algorithm's opinion? IME it's much much worse on average than the up+down vote ratio from thousands of individuals.
I am creator of online programming courses (notably the ones on Khan Academy), and I would not feel comfortable delivering a programming course where the sole form of assessment was a quiz. A quiz format can be used to check on some kinds of knowledge, but a programming course requires coding exercises (like the challenges and projects used on Khan).
That being said, for other domains, quiz-style assessment can get you quite far, depending on the sophistication of the quiz software. I like quizzes with multiple answer types, per-answer feedback, spiral assessments, etc.
Readit News
The issue I have with it is that I refuse to produce attention-grabbing clickbaity titles or thumbnails. I don't like the whole algorithmically-driven race to the bottom of the brain stem, and have zero interest in producing the same. I've had plenty of comments from viewers who say the videos are great and informative, but if I'd just jazz things up a bit then I'd get more views.
I'm just wondering how this will change (if at all) with this new program. It takes a LOT of time to produce decent content, and even more if you're going to provide a course and backup materials etc.. Writing curricula is HARD work, and writing tests, etc., that are actually valid is reasonably challenging and time consuming.
I currently get about £100 a month from YT, which definitely doesn't reflect the time I put into it (but I know it has other benefits as I sell a fair number of books partly as a result of the viewership). I know that the beasts of the platform (3b1b spring to mind) would do really well from this (and deservedly so), but I do wonder if things really need to change to make YT work well for genuinely-produced non-clickbait educational content.
"Sell them what they want, give them what they need".
I also dislike this whole game where you have to essentially mould yourself into this "mainstream click-baity character", but part of me recognises that if your goal is to sell, then you'd be wise to spend time on presenting your content in a way that is at least initially attention grabbing.
One way to think of it is - you owe it to your audience to save them from worse educational experiences, and the only way to save them is to try to rank higher than these other more click-baity low-value videos.
The issue is, I think, exactly that everyone must be at least partially a salesman to get ahead. Is this what we want? Is there a way for YouTube to compensate for clickbaity titles and thumbnails? Are they incentivized to do so?
Thinking back at teachers and teaching that I really liked, they aren't always the best salesmen, but they're always very good communicators, and good at speaking. I don't think that the content promoted by today's engagement machines are optimizing for that.
To me it the race to the bottom of clickbait video titles/thumbnails feels dishonest and harmful but it’s hard to see what to do about it other than manual curation and/or alternative platforms which don’t use recommendations to exponentially amplify click rates.
This is clear self-deception and a way for a person to start the slide down the slippery slope to abandoning their standards. You don't owe it to your audience to 'save them' (a weird, evangelical way of putting it). You might like to put better content out there and hope that people find it and value it (and take reasonable steps to promote it, in a non-scammy way) but no, you don't need to rank higher than lower quality content. Because 9 times out of 10 the highest ranking content is junk and trying to rank higher will cause your own content to descend into being junk as well.
Or you bet against fads and hope that your consistent brand will develop an increasingly loyal and appreciative following over the long term.
You could lose that bet, but sometimes cashing in on today’s hot trends means washing out and being forgotten when they change. You’re making bets every where you look.
The courses that sell seem to be made by great sales men and women. But then the actual course itself is bad.
A lot of courses/content is created by a single person. The chances of them being great sales people and educators at the same time is pretty rare I would imagine.
This goes back to what the original commenter is feeling, the algo is going to work to the benefit of the great sales people. Which in turn leaves the good educators and the learner at a disadvantage.
We need a better way to find great courses/learning content. Social media(including Youtube in this) is not a great way to discover good content.
And I'm the same. I won't do the over-the-top, hyped up character who uses the latest trends to grab your attention, like some sort of hollowed out clown that has no real joy in the middle.
Instead, I just focus on writing my online courses, mentoring people, and building a community. If you're interested in the same thing, and I can help, reach out :-)
If your videos are genuinely interesting and / or useful, you need to be able to convey that fact to users, before they watch it. It isn't too much to ask.
Just imagine a viewer asking you the question, "ok so why should I watch your videos over someone else's?". It is a fair question. And replying back, "you don't get to know that until you watch it" isn't a reasonable response.
I would expand on it slightly by adding that "Good Thumbnails" are complicated and are not necessarily "Clickbait".
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An example of an overcorrection would be posting short one-off videos that address specific problems and solutions with titles such as "When Should I Apply Reverb?" or "My Top 5 VST Plugins". If producing lectures is your strong suit, well, we need more of that...
Do you want to build a community that is a reflection of your ideas?
Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?
What does that even mean?
I'd be careful about using the language of silicon value ad companies. It changes how you think. One minute you're talking about content and community and the next thing you know you have metrics and are trying to measure engagement and are now making decisions based off something you could actually measure and not relying on your instincts, experience, and good taste.
Instead, create videos (not content) for your fans / audience based on what you know works. Make it so good, your audience will want to support you.
I think Justin Sandercoe does a good job of this. There is a community on his web site and a community on his YouTube channel, but more importantly he has fans on every guitar forum on the internet. He sells books for people who want them and he has courses you can pay for, but they are mostly guides through his lessons which are all available for free on YouTube or reproductions of copyrighted work which he can't give away for free.
The most important thing for his success (IMHO) is that he has created a lot of very high quality videos. He doesn't do clickbait titles or images. Just video after video of great stuff.
While obviously in a minority, GP should take heart in the fact there are viewers out there, myself included, that will actively avoid videos with click bait title cards.
Silly facial expressions and “you won’t believe…” type text are an instant turn-off for me. However, they are obviously effective in engaging a younger audience.
I do, and I think I've done that - I have regular viewers who I interact with, and some of them also get private tuition from me. Many more, though, have bought my book on Cubase and Music Technology, and have found it useful, which is wonderful for me. It's precisely why I don't engage in OTT titles or "shock face" thumbnails - although they are a lot better produced than when I first started the channel (which look more like 1940s UK Government infomercial titles!)
>Do you want to build revenue by growing your channel regardless of the type of consumer you attract?
No, I don't. I'm fortunate that I don't need to earn a lot of money to get by, and I'm not very materially driven. I have a decent house with no mortgage, and no expensive hobbies (any more!) or vices, and I'm generally pretty happy where I am. I'd love to make 10x what I'm making at the moment, and be able to devote a day or two a week to making videos, but I think it'd be difficult to get 10x the subscribers to allow me to do that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
But around the time they implemented their "clickbait" titles and thumbnails, it had the opposite effect on me. They all just *seemed* like so many other videos: bland and tasteless. The content itself hasn't much changed, but the allure certain has diminished for me. I've stopped watching their videos.
Compare that to Curious Droid, or Practical Engineering, which still use descriptive titles, sometimes questions, but always exactly about the subject.
Been watching him from basically when his channel started many, many years ago. Was really disappointed to see him give in to this.
I am hopeful that somehow…somehow!!! we can have the quality content like yours more discoverable without having to game the system.
It reminds me how “SEO” has turned into an entire, absolutely ridiculous meta game industry that rarely has to do with how good a website actually is.
To me it's like spending your lifetime writing an amazing book, only to spend a few minutes on designing the cover. It could be an amazing video/book. But how would I as the customer know?
I (and probably many other people) are constantly searching for good videos to watch. And unlike books, it's so easy to take a peek on a video and decide to close it within seconds if it's not something that is interesting to me.
They have to discover you somehow. The YouTube Algorithm is at least partially concerned with enabling people who would like your channel to discover it.
Regardless of how well you think YouTube does that, you have to admit it's not exactly a simple thing to do. YouTube is trying to maximize ad revenue by maximizing watch time. They are not trying to evenly distribute viewer attention among "worthy" channels.
But even if you feel like that's a betrayal of your integrity and you just want to produce something like MIT OCW, well, there are other examples from fitness content, say Stronger by Science, Sigma Nutrition, Iron Culture, where they either make enough to get by but not a ton, or even in Iron Culture's case lose money from the social media ventures but do it anyway. If you want to use MIT itself as an example of something that can be legitimate, high-quality education, but still make money, you can consider that universities operate as non-profits and rely on charitable donations to amass the wealth they have.
I don't think the phenomenon you're getting at here is limited to YouTube or even to educational content on any platform. Sellers of junk food make more money than sellers of high-nutritional, better quality food, and the most profitable sellers of high-nutrition content, high-quality food are even still using clickbait-like tactics of misleading marketing and overselling what their products can really do. The most boring fruit and vegetable stands in the world selling basic nutrient-dense, really good products but not lying about what it can do for you, are just getting by and not getting rich.
Sometimes, that has to be enough. If you believe in what you're doing, do it, even if you're not going to get rich.
From Wikipedia:
> Clickbait is ... designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link ..., being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.
Think about it the other way, for all the time you spend producing content in an effort to help others, wouldn't it be more rewarding to you to help as many people as possible? As a user of YouTube, when I search for help with something, I typically start with result that visually looks like it's going to provide me the best answer, as that's the only thing to go on. If the title and thumbnail looked low-effort, I assume the content would look low-effort as well. Maybe that's an intentional aesthetic choice, it can definitely work for some content.
HOWEVER, if the video were to actually deceive me, I would just stop going to that creator entirely. This should be true for most viewers and YouTube is encouraged not to provide misleading results. Otherwise, trust in the results would diminish searching directly through YouTube.
There are many channels that do have great content and accurate captions/thumbnails. From what I’ve seen, having high quality, consistent content over a prolonged period of time is a pretty sure way to grow.
same.
i watch a lot of youtube. i pay monthly for it, so i don't have to see ads. i've seen linus tech tips videos come up in my recommendations a time or two, and i am never going to watch them, just on principle. boy do i ever hate the mugging and pimping people like him indulge in, in an effort to bait me into watching.
Yup.
The consumer's challenge is finding what they want (or need).
Is it ironic that a search company mostly uses recommenders?
Why not better search? Why not better foraging and browsing?
--
Sole reliance on algorithmic recommenders, automated hate machines, has resulted in multiple negative outcomes. Existential threat to democracy, spike in teen suicides, accelerant for self radicalization, death of independent journalism, dominance of conspiratorial thinking, loss of public discourse, and probably a few more.
I'm sure search, foraging, and browsing strategies also have downsides. But I can't imagine how the outcomes could be worse.
A click bait, is a bait, a lure in all instances to get something different what is expected.
A fish wanting the worm gets the hook, a fox wanting the meat, gets the snap trap. The clicker wanting the content promised in the title, gets something different, not what is expected.
> ... wearing a funny hat ...
An instructor still delivers all the details and content as expected with or without the funny hat. Not so for click bait videos.
Parents would probably be interested in alternatives.
what are you talking about?
a student gets stuck going to class regardless of how goofy the teacher dresses, whereas I feel an extreme sense of revulsion when I click on a YT link with a meme-thumbnail or a clickbait title.
your analogy fails since in this instance the 'student' gets to decide whether or not they participate in the course.
If I had had the chance to walk out on goofy teachers through high school then -- just as one anecdote -- I wouldn't have graduated.
so, in other words, clickbait 'engagement' style marketing will get your volume numbers up, but the hidden aspect is that there will be a market that pulls entirely away from you -- 'teachers' on YT will need to understand these market dynamics if they're really interested in teaching the masses rather than making money on viewership.
If teachers K-12 were paid according to their student throughput that'd turn into a major humanitarian crisis, imo.
I tried to find your channel, but I don't think I found it. Would you say it's name or link to it, if you don't mind me asking?
I agree, race to the bottom of the brain stem. I sympathize with GP
Andrew Huberman has tame thumbnail images that are professional and informative. Like others have said, there has to be a middle ground to explore.
[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nZQgszA0_80/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwE...
are you seriously going to pretend that optimizing for the most cringy thumbnails , because its a race to the bottom on Youtube, is marketing?
this is a ridiculous take.
not just that but the ones shown in this post are absolutely cringe. makes for zero credibility when it comes to education.
From my perspective, there are viable 'solutions' to this problem; Patreon, Curiosity stream, Coursera, etc.
I suppose those solutions, Direct Pay or Subscription, require more from individuals compared to youtube, 'free but with ads'. So the problem here is , "Is there a solution to the ad-revenue-based-on-views approach that keeps the content free for viewers"? When you identify it like that, I don't think there can be. I think the model demanding as many views as possible is a feature not a bug even if the outcomes are less than desirable. And now, in my view, we're talking about failures of Capitalism and this is just one example, Teachers being another.
So maybe the solution is community willpower.
True.
> shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations
External links seem important on educational files, and I kind of like recommendations when I'm browsing educational stuff, but whoo, no ads on educational stuff? That's great!
> Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid
There it is.
Now, most (or even all) of those related videos will be replaced by "pay to watch" videos, and i'm 99.9% sure, that the algorithms will prioritize paid video over free content, so all the free stuff will get buried, and you're left with shitty paid content of worse quality than those old, free videos.
Google just wants that Nebula money.
By contrast, you now can chose between ads and no ads, both on youtube (and the former likely with algorithmic support).
That's a different calculus that - as it seems to me - should imply more paid content than before, contradicting your statement.
Solution proposed by Google: Lets charge customers who view this content so that we can pay creators more without losing revenue.
Solution proposed by Consumers: Lets give creators a larger share of youtube's profits. We're already paying for the service by offering our data, our youtube premium subscriptions, and other forms of MTX monetization.
TLDR; Youtube is double dipping in the guacamole bowl, despite having billions of pounds of guacamole.
Some community measure of the content quality perhaps? Something opposite of a Like button?
So pretty much, with launching a model where viewers might pay, Youtube is launching a Udemy competitor, no?
Good revenue stream, especially if they can get partnership deals with schools or other educational institutions. Imagine YouTube getting this sort of "guaranteed" revenue, like publishers do from textbooks, but getting schools to foot the bill instead of students; great business model.
But otherwise isn't being able to charge directly a good thing assuming creators remove ads and any product placement?
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The beauty of YouTube is finding like a retired professor who puts up their lectures on an account with a couple thousand subscribers.
It is not having a click-bait worthy thumbnail, over-produced video, and barely learning anything while being mindlessly entertained.
YouTube will kill many services in the process like skillshare, udemy, etc. They will continue to get bigger and bigger or this will fail miraculously.
This was such a fresh breath from Linus Tech Tips style "we upgraded to 100 Gbps network" kind of content, because most of us are just tinkering around with consumer hardware, and geek out on minor details.
That, and they don't shove merchandise and minute long sponsored contents to you.
I find YouTube unbearable without ublock origin and sponsorblock.
Honestly I can't get over a cynical impression that the announcement is basically: "brilliant and skillshare are getting a bit too popular, we need to do something about it".
So you're cloning Udemy? Meh. Not much to be excited about so far.
Finally, to help learners apply what they’ve learned, we’re introducing Quizzes — a new way for creators to help viewers test their knowledge.
That could be somewhat useful, but..
For example, a math creator who recently posted a series on algebra can create a Quiz on the Community tab to ask their viewers a question related to a concept taught in their latest video.
Does anybody ever actually visit the "Community" tab of a channel? Why add this extra friction? Hasn't the technology progressed to the point that quizzes could be integrated right into the video player? For that matter, why not have "adaptive" videos where your quiz results can affect the video that you see (like triggering an extra in-depth explanation for notoriously tricky topic if the quiz taker scores below a certain level, etc.).
I hope this works out and provides some value, but I have my doubts as it stands.
They don't want creators funneling users to external sites like Patreon. They want 100% of their income going through Youtube.
Same reason they roll out the "most replayed" feature, to make it easier to skip in-video sponsor segments.
Channels have community tabs?
Yes.
Coursera does this right now. It's very useful.
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But again, I don't know why they removed it? /shrug
They had a setting to disable votes per video but that just means the company admits the video is unpopular.
[1] https://www.returnyoutubedislike.com
Most users dont care. So Google removes it because its good for business, not for the user.
Massively downvoted videos are bad press.
TLDs used to carry a lot of weight, and used to signify something besides individual entities/companies... but it feels to me like that designation is becoming rather diluted.
One can arrange their own TLD for under $200,000 initial fee, plus around $25,000 a year (IIRC).
I imagine there will be a whole TLD auction game, but among those with deep pockets and governed by an organization that doesn't seem to take their job seriously. ICANN looks like a cash grab nowadays to me. I don't mean any offense to the engineers behind it, just that the administration seems quite greedy.
Interestingly, a number of corporations that registered their own TLDs seem to have since let them go. You can see them by searching for "Not assigned" on that page.
https://icannwiki.org/.ninja
Nearly no one knows the meaning of .com
also the US centric monopoly of .gov is probably antithetical to many early internet ideals.
.edu is much worse IMO.
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They removed the one metric that people had to signal that content is crap. So now people have to trust that "the algorithm" is filtering out all the junk. Which of course we know doesn't happen. The algorithm only cares about engagement, it doesn't care if the content is of good quality or even truthful.
For instance a few weeks ago I was stuck on a quest in WoW Classic, so I did a quick YouTube search, 100k+ view video, dozens of likes.
Yeah the video sucked and didn't show anything worthwhile.
But that would be just someone’s personal opinion (or worse). Why should I care? Besides, people discuss things on forums, and a more detailed review is more useful than a simple vote. Finally, it is often not that hard to see whether the presentation or the content is worth your while from the first few minutes of watching it. (There are, of course, some cases when watching is made difficult because of the presenter’s excessive showing their face or gesticulation, or having a distracting accent, but even those do not necessarily deserve being called “crap.”)
Also, why should I care about the algorithm's opinion? IME it's much much worse on average than the up+down vote ratio from thousands of individuals.