Micael Widell Newsletter #36
Captain's log
In the beginning of March, I felt very bored and uninspired to do Youtube videos. I think it is partly because my Youtube channel hasn't been growing in daily views for the last 1.5 years or so, and sometimes motivation dwindles when I don't see any progress for long periods of time. I decided to take two steps back and just not do any youtube videos until my inspiration would return.
I spent the downtime listening to lots of podcasts with successful youtubers like Mr Beast, to get insight and inspiration. I also studied my own analytics to try to understand why my channel hasn't grown. The main takeaway is that during 2017-2020, I constantly had 3-4 "hit videos" that the youtube algorithm would push to new people every day. This constituted my growth. But during 2021-2022 I haven't really had any new hit videos, and the old ones have slowly faded out.
Making hit videos is hard of course. But in the beginning of my youtube career I was a lot "hungrier", and therefore made more of an effort to produce hit videos. In the last year I think I have become a bit too comfortable and lazy, not really spending enough time and effort on coming up with great video ideas.
What I have learned about success on youtube, is that the number one thing that will make people click on your video, is the right video idea. And the number one thing that will make youtube recommend your video to more people, is lots of people clicking on it in combination with a high percentage of people watching the video to the end – this is called retention.
So I decided that from now on, I must spend more time and effort on finding video ideas with a high likelyhood of success, and more time and effort on increasing retention. Retention can mostly be improved by cutting between scenes more often, and by having an interesting and well paced story.
After 10 days of not working on videos, my inspiration had returned. So I made a new video, focusing on an idea that has been very successful recently on youtube: A longer macro photography introduction course, and I spent a lot more effort than usual on making it very well made to improve retention. And guess what – it seems to have worked :) The video is doing better than most other videos so far. I also tried another "classic" video idea that have seen a lot of success on youtube earlier: Beginner Mistakes in Photography. It is doing pretty well as well so far.
Going forward I will put more time into ideation and making the videos even higher quality, in hope of getting a few more "hits" to make my channel grow faster. I am going to try this for a couple of months to see how ut works out.
/Micael
Inspiring photos from Instagram
Here are some photographs I have found on Instagram recently that I really love and find inspiring. Click the username to visit the photographer's instagram profile and follow them.
@astrofotografen
@steyle_com
@martinneuhof
@eduardflorinnigaphotography
My Published Videos since the last newsletter
- Macro Photography for Beginners – Complete Tutorial
- 8 Most Common Beginner Photography Mistakes
- How I store and backup 6TB of data in a Cheap and Simple way (NOT a NAS :) – Patreon supporters only
Goodbye for now
Thank you for reading this far, and see you in a month! Feel free to follow me on YouTube, Instagram and Twitter in the meantime. If you like my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon. And lastly, please also feel free to tell your friends about this newsletter, and to reply to it if you have feedback or comments :)
/Micael