Thursday, May 05, 2016

My presence on YouTube and what is being watched

I am going to Social Media Camp this year so I thought I would look at some of my social media impact starting with YouTube.   I have played around on YouTube to try and figure out what drives views.

I have several YouTube channels:
BC History - 418,814 views and 1564 subscribers - I started this channel December 14th 2013 because I was finding all manner of interesting old film clips from BC.   Some of the films I have simply uploaded unchanged but many of them I have edited them to focus on a single thing and cleaned up the images as best as I can.   I try to post something new a couple times a month, but life intervenes and I have long gaps of nothing.   The channel seems to consistently get at least 400 views per day

Bernard von Schulmann - 280,030 views and 373 subscribers - I have had videos on this channel since January 20th 2009.   The number of views is misleading because 238,000 of them have been in the last 10 weeks from a single film I posted online.  This film has brought me 330 new subscribers in 10 weeks.    Most of my videos on this channel have at most a couple hundred views and often languish at less than 100.

BC Iconoclast - 34,022 views and 34 subscribers - I created this channel to post things about politics but have not done much with it.   I have posted some old political clips and interviews I have found online but none of my own content yet.   21,175 views come from a single, a 1978 interview with Pierre Trudeau.   It spiked around election day in 2015

My top 5 most viewed videos
244,117 - In The Name of the King June 22nd 2015
21,175 - 1978 Interview of Pierre Trudeau by Jack Webster posted Feb 5th 2015
17,275 - The Coquihalla posted Dec 13 2013
17,140 - To Build a Better City - a 1964 City of Vancouver/CMHC film posted Feb 24th 2014
11,087 - 1976 Vancouver Tourism Promotion Film posted April 20th 2014

I have 11 more videos on the BC History channel that have had between 5,000 and 9,999 views,   On my Bernard von Schulmann channel I have one video in the same range.   With BC Iconoclast there are none.

BC History is one my one channel where I am consistently offering new content and trying to get views,   On the channel there is an ongoing and consistent growth in views with some videos clearly doing better than others.   I am not sure why some and not others do well when the two are basically the same in style and content.

On a regular basis someone discovers something interesting and highlights it online somewhere.   The Tyee has shown a few as has the CBC.  While both sources drove a bunch of views, it was in the thousands and not more than that.   Over the longer term I get a lot more views from YouTube suggested videos.

In the Name of the King is a really badly made Uwe Boll film that had my oldest son as an extra which is why I posted it online.   From June 2015 to Feb 2015 it got almost no views but then suddenly took off when it regularly has been a suggested video by YouTube.  Why did this happen?  No idea,

My fastest video out of the gate video is one I made yesterday.   The film is a photo slideshow of images from the webcam at the Fort McMurray airport.   I posted it at 4:30 pm on May 4th and 18 hours later it has 4,300 views and the views are staying consistently high.  What is odd is that it does not come up in searches I do on YouTube for it.


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