The answer is false..
There is lots of evidence that youth can be a major factor in YouTuber stardom.
A pre-teen Justin Bieber conquered the world (and Twitter) through a “Beachhead” on YouTube. There is an entire “business model” that involves creating videos for YouTube during your pre-teen, tween and teenage years and then growing your channel throughout your college years so you can graduate and be a full-time YouTuber. MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) and Tyler Oakly are good examples of the teen –> college –> YouTube Star success model.
MKBHD has even spawned mnemonic imitators like Dave2D and MY2KSapphire
Spending your entire puberty on the public eye has paid-off for for some. It seems to reinforce the idea that human’s are just Juvenile Apes and that “Juvenile” humans performers have broad appeal.
There are other business models taunted to help you break-out on YouTube especially if your teenage years have passed you by.
Julian Juenemann in our last episode talked about how producing videos on a daily basis can drive growth.
The Last Harpy (a channel about Game Of Thrones) came out of left field last year. Their daily release schedule that continued into the “post season” (other channels had already stopped production) garnered 250k subscribers and 61 Million views.
* It is worth noting that the views / subscribers ratio is much better for The Last Harpy than for Country Foods
Production value is also something that can contribute to the rise of a youTube channel. Often quirky hand held videos scream authenticity and pull-in fans from all over. Even those who like higher production values often tell would be YouTubers to “just get started” with the equipment they have.
The Country Foods Channel has broken all of those myths (age, frequency, and low production value to get started). Started in 2016, today it has less than 500k Subscribers and ~70 Million views.
Country Food was created on YouTube by two creators (Srinath and Laxman) located in India, they were already traditionally employed in video post production, and bought their production values to YouTube. Srinath was even married with several kids; not the typical YouTuber profile.
It’s the star of the channel that has really broken all of the myths wide open.
Laxman’s 106 year old granny is the star of Country Food which showcases her unique recipes.. and her unique on screen persona.
It is hard to know how much income Srinath and Laxman have earned since their videos are seen in many markets which have radically different media costs. A US based YouTuber may make $1-2k to as much as $5k per million views (depending on monetization).
What is known is that Sirnath and Laxman have quit their day jobs and are now full-time YouTubers. They shoot their videos over a single short 2-3 day period each month. Their most popular video Watermelon Chicken has more than 8 Million views.
There are even competing videos now..
Jun 30, 2017
6 min
Case Study: Growing A Business With YouTube
Julian Juenemann is a marketing consultant who has turned his passion for Digital Marketing into a product (Measure School) using YouTube, Email and his infectious smile. His popular video tutorials and unique vocalizations have fueled his school’s growth (and grown his consultancy); his YouTube channel has more than 22k subscribers and over 1 million views.
Once you release 120 videos YouTube takes you more seriously — Julian
Length & Completion Matters
Every YouTuber has to decide what “average length” is right for their audience. For Julian, his digital marketing and measurement tutorials are usually less than 15 minutes in length. The YouTube promotional algorithm tends to favor videos that have a high completion rate.
The YouTube Optimizer community feels releasing videos more frequently helps channels gain promotion — Julian
Star Quality
Julian’s videos have a high level of production value, are easy to understand, and are narrowly constructed around specific tasks and “jobs that need to be done.” His tutorials often cover specific digital measurement tasks using Google Analytics and/or Google Tag Manager; this also helps him drive SEO. Julian creates tutorials on the latest techniques and tools like Facebook Analytics inoculating his brand against stagnation.
Julian’s unique and pleasant accent is immediately recognizable, along with his ever present tagline:
Learn the data-driven way of digital marketing – Measure School
Interview With Julian Juenemann
I encourage you to check out my conversation with Julian. He offers a lot of insight into how he built his brand on YouTube and how he combined his growth with multiple drip email campaigns. He also talks a bit about Measurement, which should be important to all communicators and marketers.
Julian discusses how his videos allow him to achieve different business objectives:
* Drive SEO from Google
* Drive Discovery within YouTube
* Grow his product offering (Measure School)
* Fuel his consultancy
My interview with Julian was recorded at 9 am EDT (May 31, 2017). It was originally going to be a live stream on YouTube, but technical issues prevented that from happening. Once edited, a video of our discussion will also be posted (link – tbd).
Bio: Julian Juenemann
Julian Juenemann is the founder and Chief Instructor of Measureschool.com, where he teaches marketers the data-driven way of digital Marketing. Through his YouTube channel he currently reaches over 22,000 subscribers and has generated [more than] 1 million views. His videos are a mixture of tutorials, reviews and live content which is released weekly on his channel.
Jun 3, 2017
28 min
YouTube is testing a new material design that will ultimately appear uniformly across as devices and platforms. It’s built as a progressive web app using Polymer 2.0 (a Javascript framework).
It’s A Material World – for YouTube
A public un-veiling of this new material design look was announced in the official YouTube blog by Brian Marquardt whose title is listed as Product Manager. You can find Brian on Twitter.
Clean & Universal: Material Design
Keeping to the basic tenets of material design the new is clean and simple. Some users features have moved from the left navigation to the right. The right side navigation borrows from the notification and user setting menus found in Google Plus. User settings include country selection and an easy way to toggle the “Dark Theme.”
@MKBHD HOLY SHIT THEATER MODE FINALLY MATCHES WIDTH OF BROWSER WINDOW
— Neal (@NealEffinEss) May 2, 2017
Embrace the Dark Theme
The new main page, allows users to toggle the left navigation on or off via the “hamburger” menu. When off the new main page look super simple and clean. Material design is clearly a good approach for YouTube. Besides introducing this new look they are also introducing a large ad element.
One Big Promotional Box
On top of all of the videos they are displaying for your enjoyment, you may find 1 or more stacked ads promoting a YouTube channel; perhaps some day just a regular advertiser. If you have hidden the left navigation the the ad units will be as wide as your full screen.
I’d love to know what you think of this design and when you start to see it. You can message me on Twitter @hhawk or leave a message on the FIR Group on Facebook.
Links:
The Official Announcement (link)
The Material Design philosophy (link)
Polymer 2.0 – the progressive web app framework (link)
Check out the new YouTube look (link)
May 7, 2017
9 min
Why Coachella’s Live 2017 event and their 7 year partnership with YouTube should be an inspiration to communicators who are thinking about creating a complex live streaming event.
SPECIAL NOTE:
This episode of Youtubular Conversations started out as a live stream on my YouTube channel and on my blog TalkingAboutEverything.com. Learn more at the bottom of this post.
Multipied – Coachella Live
Coachella is a premier music event that encompasses multiple acts, on multiple stages, on multiple days – far more complex than any typical live event, such as my recording of this podcast.
Professional Communicators could really learn a lot from Coachella Live on YouTube – @hhawk
It is an effective case-study in how to present a complex live event one’s publics on YouTube – @hhawk
To enhance the user experience YouTube/Coachella have crafted a really robust user experience that allows:
* Folks on YouTube to see the full schedule
* Set up notices for themselves
* Users can toggle a time display to see any difference between their local time and the time at the Coachella Live event
* The live stream (if left on) will switch to any of these preset events at “just” the right time
Big Event
YouTube’s Coachella Live is one of their biggest events. Anyone viewing Coachella’s “LIVE” YouTube Page can see that the user experience is worthy of this event and the 7 year length of the partnership between YouTube and Coachella.
For the first time ever you’ll even get a sneak peek inside the famous underground dance music Yuma tent
– Ali Rivera, Head of Artist Partnerships, YouTube
In the official YouTube Blog Ms. Rivera points out, “This year, with select acts also available in Live 360. Music fans from around the world can tune-in to Coachella’s YouTube channel from April 14-16, on any screen (desktop, mobile and living room).”
360 Live
While I don’t own any VR gear — the increasing prevalence of VR content on YouTube is certainly encouraging me to consider buying some; I generally don’t do well when watching immersive entertainment – which is why I have avoided it previously.
Scheduled Live
If you are wondering how the scheduling works, Ali notes, “The livestream channels will automatically change to your favorite artists based on your selection. And if you turn on notifications for artists you subscribe to, you’ll get a note when they go live.”
A Video Tour
Screen Images of Coachella’s 2017 YouTube Page
Feedback
I’d love your feedback on this or any other episode of Youtubular Conversations. You can reach me on Twitter @hhawk or through this web site. If you watched any of Coachella “Live” on YouTube i’d love to hear about your experience.
SPECIAL NOTE:
This episode of Youtubular Conversations started as a Live stream on YouTube.. visible from on my YouTube channel. My TalkingAboutEverything.com web site also has a “YouTube Live” page — all my live streams appear there as well.
SEVEN EASY STEPS
* I recorded using my professional microphone setup [MXL -> Berhinger Mixer –> Chromebook]
* On the Chromebook I <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiN8IOakaDTAhXJ6CYKHdy-AlEQFgg9MAM&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.androidauthority.com%2Fcrouton-turn-your-chromebook-into-far-more...
Apr 16, 2017
10 min
Special Note:
This episode of Youtubular Conversations started out as a live stream on my YouTube channel and on my blog TalkingAboutEverything.com. Learn more at the bottom of this post.
This Week
This week we talk about money and video… and how YouTube is offering and pricing their premium products, explore PewDiePie reduction in monetization on YouTube and PewDiePie’s own content (which is increasingly non-monetizable). To then move the conversation away from money, I discuss Jenny Doan who has profited from YouTube by giving her content away.
Jenny runs the Missouri Star Quilt Company and was featured in the official YouTube blog
Live “local” TV on YouTube
YouTube’s “Live” TV bundle at $35 a month seems perfect for someone who “cut the cord” and has gone OTT – Over the top (of the set-top box).
For myself — I love bundles of TV shows as much as I loved the music industry bundling songs I didn’t want into a long playing record (LP) – Harry Hawk
I want a $25 dollar a month bundle that includes the full Red package (no ads + Music) and some of the cable programming but no sports and no local TV – Harry Hawk
Cutting the cord..
Still YouTube has thrown in a bunch of “goodies” to sweeten the deal. Each subscription comes with 6 different users accounts, each with its own DVR with unlimited recording capacity.
* Ideal for spouses, lovers and others who want to watch certain shows “together”
* They can have a “together” account while they each maintain their own accounts for the shows they will watch on their own.
* With parental controls you might even be able to have a family channel which records and locks-up programs until homework is completed.
* Red programming
Seeing Red
In the era of Russian American rapprochement, retrenchment, and intrigue Red programming seems wildly political but it’s just a name for YouTube’s premium vers. of the free streaming product.
* Videos can be downloaded
* All ads are turned off
* You get premium access to Google Music
* YouTube Red Originals (learn more at IMDB)
New shows from YouTube’s biggest stars
Live Local TV + Red Originals
So last week I wanted to know how much of the “Red” Originals was included in the Live TV offering?
My assumption had been that only the programming was included. Michelle Slavich Head of Entertainment Communications at YouTube was able to confirm that with me earlier this week:
You are correct- the YouTube TV membership includes our original series and movies, but not the other features of red like ads-free and music service. – Michelle Slavich
PewDiePie
One of the major programs that was promised as part of the Red Originals was a new show from Felix aka PewDiePie. Given the recent conflicts between the penultimate streaming network and their most popular creator — that show was canceled several weeks ago.
Felix has announced a new show on Twitch -the live streaming network which seems to be YouTube’s largest competitor. It’s not clear how popular he will be there. As of the morning on April 12, his new Twitch channel had less than 7 million views.
It will be interesting to see if Felix’s presence on Twitch encouraged more folks to kick the tires and give it a try – Harry Hawk
Apr 13, 2017
9 min
[powereditor]
This week we are discussing A virtual band in VR, deep neural networks (DNN) looking for sound effects and actual humans translating language.
Fake Musicians, Smart Machines and Human Intelligence
Visual Sound Effects
Noah Wang a software engineer at Google in a March 23, 2o17 blog post entitled Visualizing Sound Effects announced a working system for using AI to identify sound effects like “applause, laughter and bells.”
Once identified these “effects” are visualized by adding them to the auto-generated captions available for videos on YouTube.
“So what does this actually look like when you are watching a YouTube video? The sound effect is merged with the automatic speech recognition track and shown as part of standard automatic captions…
Click the CC button to see the sound effect captioning system in action.”
On the same day, Sourish Chaudhuri, who is also a Software Engineer at Google released a related post, “Adding Sound Effect Information to YouTube Captions” on the Google Research Blog. Sourish describes the process, “The DNN looks at short segments of audio and predicts whether that segment contains any one of the sound events of interest – since multiple sound effects can co-occur, our model makes a prediction at each time step for each of the sound effects.”
Getting It Wrong: Legal, Ethical and Moral Considerations
Since those with disabilities are required by law to given the same material/information and the potential for ML (Machine Learning) systems to introduce errors, the team spent some effort with a study that investigated what would happen when the DNN ML system get’s it wrong.
“This presented a surprising result: when sound effect information was incorrect, it did not detract from the participant’s experience in roughly 50% of the cases. Based upon participant feedback, the reasons for this appear to be:
* Participants who could hear the audio were able to ignore the inaccuracies.
* Participants who could not hear the audio interpreted the error as the presence of a sound event, and that they had not missed out on critical speech information.”
Powering Translation with Human Intelligence
Google has long allowed for members of the YouTube community to provide translations for the captions that are found in their videos. In a March 30th, 2017 blog post Aviad Rozenhek a YouTube Product Manager announced that community members would now be able to also translate the title and the descriptions of videos.
While this does represent a possible risk for brands who enable community translations in their videos this is also an amazing way to engage with a broad multi linguistic community.
Gorillaz New Video
The British virtual band Gorillaz released a new music video from their upcoming album Humanz. The video released in both 2D and VR (360) formats gives creators a side-by-side look at the creative decisions and creative options that are possible in a video crafted for VR.
I highly recommend communicators watch both of these videos. Warning: while pixelated cartoon nudity is contained within, I do feel these are both safe for work. Together these two variants of the same video have recieved in one week over 25 million views.
VR/360 Video
Traditional 2D video
It is worth nothing that this virtual band has for a number of years been actually playing out in RL (real life).
Details on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.
Apr 2, 2017
7 min
Why Can’t YouTube Block Dangerous Content?
“YouTube receives 400 hours of new video every minute,” Ronan Harris (MANAGING DIRECTOR, GOOGLE U.K.).
The volume of video that YouTube needs to process and categorize is hard to imagine. In 1 hour, 24,000 hours of video are uploaded; that’s over 4 million hours a week.
Major Loss
YouTube’s loss of major advertisers; over 250 brands that either pulled or suspend their display and/or video ads made headlines in Europe, the Americas and beyond. The loss was reported by a number of major media outlets including CNN and The Times (of London).
Limiting Creators
The discussion about “bad content” on YouTube seems by way of accusation of putting YouTube in the same boat as 4Chan and Reddit. YouTube isn’t a wild west and there are specific policies which have to be adhered to – if YouTubers want to earn monetization for their episodes.
* Several of them are listed below..
Discussion
I talk about this in depth this week. Including a detailed review of how ads can be restricted within Google’s and YouTube’s ad buying system.
Here are some of the details about how YouTube/Google allows for targeting and exclusion in Display and Video ads.
Targeting and Exclusion
* Category Content Options and Exclusions
* Targeting For Video Ads
* Excluding (web) Pages About Specific Topics
Blog & Community Posts
* Improving Our Brand Safety Controls (Ronan Harris)
* Expanded Safeguards For Advertisers (Philipp Schindler)
* Video Monetization Criteria (YouTube)
* Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines (YouTube)
* Community Guidelines (YouTube)
* Partner Program Policies (YouTube)
Feedback
Your feedback on this or any episode of Youtubular Conversations is welcome. Please message me on Twitter @hhawk or post on the FIR Facebook Group, or message me through this blog.
— Harry Hawk
Mar 27, 2017
13 min
Better engagement improves relationships with stakeholders. Building gameplay around your video can improve the effectiveness of your message making it easier to communicate. Since games can provide a formative assessment you can also use the results to “prove” that your video had an impact.
Some of the largest businesses in the world are already using Kahoot! at the highest Level to improve training, professional development and internal communications – Jamie Brooker
One Game Leads To Another – Which Leads to Learning
A series of games + videos delivered over several months could be a KPI demonstrating your out-reach is having a tangible and lasting impact. Kahoot! is an educational engagement and learning brand. Its product is more than a tool for classrooms; listen to this episode and learn why.
Gaming Improves Your Video
Taking your internally or externally released videos and adding gameplay can enhance them, improving retention of both the material and the audience. Gameplay can also turn the underlying material into knowledge that fun or interesting. In group sessions gameplay can drive collaboration and team work.
Embedding your next video into a game can make it more engaging – Harry Hawk
Kahoot!’s pedagogy encourages learners to make their own games in groups to challenge their peers with, encouraging collaboration and creativity – Jamie Brooker
Making your own game can be a game in itself – Jamie Brooker
Gameplay “Beats” Video
Video is engaging and immersive yet gaming often leaves video “in the dust.” – Harry Hawk
Gameplay proffers deeper engagement and immersion and in a multi-tasking social setting Gameplay still delivers, often better than a uni-tasked non-social environment.
Working Together: Gaming + Video
Video and Gaming can not only co-exist, one can enhance the other. At their core gaming and video are both environments for storytelling. Most high profile games start with a bit of storytelling setting the stage and triggering the action.
We tested our gaming environment “Kahoot!” in schools, to prove the engagement model before launching – Jamie Brooker
Kahoot! encourages players to “look up”, creating an engaged, collaborative and loud learning space – Jamie Brooker
I speak with Jamie Brooker the Chief Creative Officer and Founder of Kahoot!. Started as an educational learning platform, today Kahoot! has over 15 Million publicly accessible games and 40 Million active users every month. He talks about the use of Kahoot! in classrooms and workplaces, and how their passion for learning can help your communications strategy.
Why Kahoot Can Improve Your Communications Strategy
Kahoot! can help even if you are not making videos. Kahoot! can help you in creating engaging presentations to drive home the key points for your next meeting. You can also create a Kahoot! game with your internal team if you are looking to help educate broader external stakeholders around topics critical to your corporate mission.
Businesses that use Kahoot! will enable us to keep the product free to our educational users – Jamie Brooker
Any tool that can help today’s students focus and engage in the classroom is going to be up to the task of getting disengaged employees focused on important meetings, training and key takeaways. It can also create content for external stakeholders.
A fun learning based game could be part of your onboarding process – Harry Hawk
Educational Engagement could be part of your Inbound Marketing Program – Harry Hawk
Some of the largest businesses in the world are already using Kahoot! at the highest Level to improve training, professional development and internal communications – Jamie Brooker
Real World Example
Mar 22, 2017
33 min
International Women’s Day (IWD) coverage on YouTube and VR video (e.g., 360 degrees) where both covered this month in the Official YouTube Blog. I found it interesting that IWD and content with lots of video game related programming appearing (editorially) so close to each other.
International Women’s Day
The IWD post was published on March 7th. YouTube promoted IWD with this hashtag #HerVoiceisMyVoice and a custom graphic
They created this 01:28 minute video (to date it has more than 4.4 Millon views). They hared a link to many others https://www.youtube.com/youtube and encouraged their publics to “Today, we invite you to share a video [Twitter link] of a woman whose voice speaks to you. Let’s use our favorite brave, bold, or downright beautiful stories to remind our communities and ourselves just what we’re capable of. Happy International Women’s Day!”
360 Video
The post is about 360 video but it is entitled Step into the games with new VR videos. The VR Video post was published on March 10th. As I noted above, I find given all of the contravesty and animus around Gamergate that YouTube would publish official blogs about both topics so close to each other. I can only assume the closeness of the publication dates was intentional to show support for both communities.
As YouTube have done in the past, the blog promotes a playlist of videos that are in the VR format. Some videos where in the 8k resolution which I wasn’t able to stream at 8k. I did view a few of the 4k videos on my laptop; the resolution was impressive. Using the 360 view field with a mouse cursor is a bit halting as I would often forget and mistakenly click causing the video to pause (and ads to load). I’m sure the experience with a VR headset is better.
I don’t play video games often or even recently although I love watching others play them. It was a great way to see some of the story lines in the games. The playlist is certainly worth checking out even if you don’t have a VR headset. If you do, it’s time to break it out.
Links
The Official YouTube Blog
2017 YouTube International Women’s Day blog post by Danielle Tiedt, Chief Marketing Officer at YouTube
Step into the games with new VR videos by Ryan Wyatt, Head of Gaming Content
Mar 15, 2017
6 min