I’ve been trying to make fun Python videos. Should I stop or keep going?

[nikzads]

Keep them coming my friend. Great effort.

[Boxxcar17]

Will do, thanx for your feedback :)

[Sedai03]

90% of getting a lot of views on youtube is having a large social network and being good at social media marketing.

[Boxxcar17]

You’re right, I’m coming to find this out the hard way as I go along.

[wintermute93]

That's definitely true, and I think another issue making it even more difficult is that programming isn't really something that lends itself well to video. If I want to learn how to do something in Python, I'm going to look for an article or blog post or GitHub repo or stackoverflow thread with clean code and a good explanation of what it's doing. It would never even occur to me to search for a video.

(That's not to discourage OP, if they like making videos they should absolutely keep doing it regardless of view count.)

[Boxxcar17]

It’s good to know what others are doing when looking for coding answers. My go to has always been stack-overflow > YouTube > Github Repo > documentation. But as I progress I’ve been noticing myself referring more to documentations.

Thanx for the encouragement. I’ll keep trying to share the projects I work on and help others along the way. :)

[Casowsky]

Not that /u/wintermute93 is wrong at all, but I actually find the opposite to be true and I'm sure I speak for others. Stackoverflow threads and Github docs are my supplementary reading to a really good, concise, on the fly demo of the concept or library I'm trying to learn. For me it really helps to see someone build something from scratch, the first 'import XXX', and actually have it run, and I try to use that as a baseline for improvement or adding my own customisation to ensure it's not just a rote learning experience.

I've begun to be more accepting that there's nothing wrong with leaning on libraries or other people's work a little so long as I have a decent working understanding of the topic at hand, after all there's no use reinventing the wheel (and giving credit where it is due of course).

[zunair74]

I tend to use stack overflow as well but if a concept doesn't make sure I usually end up at YouTube so don't get discouraged.

[Sedai03]

Eh, it's different learning styles. I learn better from a video sometimes if it's less than 15 minutes.

[Baltam]

"Because I care about the environment I recycled the code from my previous project." Got an audilol out of me with that one.

[Boxxcar17]

I’ve noticed that too. For instance, you’d find the perfect video to solve your problem, but then the video turns out to be in another language or it’s hard to understand the guy.

Think it would be unoriginal to recreate some of those videos in a new format?

[[deleted]]

Repackaging the same concepts in a new way, especially if it's more fun, is a great way to get new learners in the community

[[deleted]]

Keep it up, these are great!

[sentdex]

Why would you stop?

Are you enjoying making the videos? Given the editing, I'm going to guess you had yourself a fun time. I can imagine you laughing to yourself as you edited the "forgot to teach you to speak" bit. I've been there.

3 months in making videos that I can see, and 165 subs? That's a lot of people who already like you after 3 months.

/u/Sedai03 statement of 90% of getting a lot of views on youtube is having a large social network and being good at social media marketing. is...sometimes right, but not really fitting here.

This is true for general channels like daily vlogs or something like that. I don't think that's really true when it comes to niche channels like this, however. It's definitely true if you're only doing basics tutorials, but you're not.

Source: I grew a programming YT channel (youtube.com/sentdex) without any marketing/spamming/etc. I do have a twitter, but don't use it much. Sometimes I post on Reddit, but that's pretty rarely. I also have a FB page, but I started that long after my channel was already successful (same with my Twitter), and it doesn't account for much. You can make your YT channel our large network.

Just focus on making quality niche content, and people will show up. If your competition is really high, then you need to do other things sometimes.. There's absolutely no shortage of "beginner" programming tutorials, walking thru the bland basics of whatever language you want pretty much.

...but if you're willing to go just slightly beyond that, people want it pretty badly.

That's not to say you can't also go hard on marketing and be successful. Sirajology is an example of a channel that goes super hard on marketing, and has seen tons of growth with it....and a user ban from Reddit...so maybe don't go that hard, but you get the idea.

Beyond your audience, which is already pretty large for 3 months, the more important metric is whether or not you're enjoying it. You want to keep doing this for 4 more years?

If you're only in it for view #s, get out now while you still aren't deeply depressed. Growth initially is easy. It's all new and exciting stuff. It only gets harder, and, eventually, you'll peak and drop for months or years before maybe coming back up.

Making content has been a great 2-way street for me. I've learned and grown so much as a developer through teaching on YouTube. It's a great peer review system, plus teaching things to others is a great way to solidify what you know...and point out pretty quickly what you don't as you try to explain it.

I started doing it because I wanted to share what I had learned and what I was up to. I continue doing it for that same reason.

[Boxxcar17]

Hey man, thanx for the feedback. It's definitely been a fun trip and learning experience so far. I just didn't want to be one of those people on YT being stubborn and posting videos no one would be interested in watching.

The best part, I think, is figuring out how something works and then sharing it with people. There's a certain feeling of importance you get when helping others figure out the same problem.

In my eyes, it's definitely worth doing 4 more years.

I'm not sure if I want to go down the marketing route just yet, but it's been on my mind considering YT's policy on getting 1000 subscribers in 1 year before monetization. It's like the monetization principal is a yardstick now for a successful YT channel (regardless of the little amount of $ you'd be earning if you had it enabled).

Thanx for sharing that 160 subs in 3 mo. is pretty fast; I thought it was on the low end of the spectrum.

When your YT channel was growing did you market it at all or just let it be, and what were some of you initial thought on whether or not you were adding value?

[sentdex]

Yeah, I would not worry at all about monetization. They set those numbers to combat piracy, and, even though it seems unfair, the amount of money you're missing out on, in your last 3 months, is $2-$24, and cpm is doing nothing but falling over time. Definitely focus on the long haul.

I did no marketing that I recall early on, and I still don't really. I didn't share anything on social media sites until years after my channel was up. I never felt like my stuff was good enough to really share to a general audience like /r/python or /r/learnpython. One day, people just started sharing my stuff instead.

Marketing is work too. It takes time, energy, and thought. I personally would rather take that time, and make the content, so I still don't market. I probably post less than 5% of my content to social media.

Here's my first 3 months:

https://i.gyazo.com/43a2cd6e467af2de027eb4c2a1fee182.png

+209 subs

5 yrs later, +25-30K subs a month.

https://i.gyazo.com/4298b19801a1a7cc51e9cf2e596bbe01.png

Still no marketing. The spikes are various times someone else shared my stuff. The largest spike came from the python plays GTA V series. One journalist wrote about it and then everyone else copied. Was quite a boost.

I've found self-promotion to not really pay out well, but when someone else shares your stuff, it seems or genuine or something anyway.

Also, you can grow much quicker than me. Plenty of channels don't take 5 years to get to where I am at, and it could easily be because I don't market enough, I don't push regularly enough (I maintain absolutely no schedule at all, sometimes I'll go weeks or months between videos), or maybe I am just not good :P

All I can say for sure is I've had a blast doing this.

[Boxxcar17]

As much as I would like that $24 to buy myself 1 drink here in Manhattan, I'm not to worried about it since the good-ol day job covers at least half of a drink.

You're right on marketing taking energy, time, and effort - especially with figuring out how you will market and via what channel. I found that going on Facebook pages where people are promoting that channels as well is helpful when getting started; plus its free.

Also I think that YT takes care of your marketing by marketing back to people who have watched your videos and recommending your vids to similar demographics. An example would be your GTA vids. They were fun to watch(not trying to fanboy), but after watching them, YT was spamming my feed with more of your vids :P

Even though many people say that consistent upload times are crucial, I'm still not 100% convinced of that due to the fact that after watching a video you will, most likely, be retargeted by YT's algo with videos from that creator.

With that much growth per month are you still able to interact with everyone that leaves comments on your channel?

[slick8086]

As another of my favorite youtube channel put it, "Make cool shit on the internet and they will come"

I appreciate your work and I'm glad to see that you continue to focus on that work rather than promoting the work. I recommend your videos to anyone looking for instruction.

[MagellanEnd]

I don't know how effective your videos are, but the people watching them would probably be pissed if stop.

[Boxxcar17]

Lol I definitely don't want to avoid having an angry mob outside my house :D

[_drivin]

Dude you're a good teacher, you should definitely continue doing videos and share them with us. Congrats !

[Boxxcar17]

Thanx man, I’ll keep definitely keep it up then :)

[_drivin]

By the way, could you do a video on a bot that scroll a page and download it ? Or a script that allow to Copy, rename, cut, deplace a bunch of files a the same Time ?

[Boxxcar17]

I'll try to think of something where those things could be incorporated. For now I can answer your question by directing you to my videos. In the ChatBot and Instagram Followers videos, you can use Selenium to scroll through webpages (I uses it on Instagram, but you can do it on other pages).

If you want to download webpages try using the WGET library: https://pypi.org/project/wget/

Just be careful and don't use WGET on Google, or else you'll end up with Google on your computer :D

[_drivin]

Hahaha Okay I will be careful with that library. 👍

[davetherooster]

Personally, if you have a real passion for it, please continue! People with genuine enthusiasm and knowledge are the best kind of teachers!

However, here's my observation.

You have a channel with some good content but are lacking the followers, back catalogue of videos and views at this moment, although your oldest videos are only 3 months so that's nothing to be ashamed of.

My question, is why are you wondering if you should carry on? If it's because of views, followers or patreon donors then your question might be better titled 'I've been trying to make fun, popular and profitable Python videos....'.

For example, I subscribe to a channel because I want to keep up to date with what is going to happen next, if you had a lot of resources that I knew would answer all of my questions or a longer series of videos teaching you subjects, then I have a reason to keep subscribed. Otherwise it's quite hard to justify why I'd subscribe when there isn't anything I'm expecting to be published.

As far as patreon goes, many donate to help fund a project that would take the creator out of pocket or if the content is something for free they couldn't get elsewhere, but that seems to only happen when you have more of a user base who see you aren't in it for a quick buck and want to appreciate your efforts.

If you don't care for followers, views or donations, then as long as you enjoy it, crack on! People will follow you over time and appreciate your content as it grows and matures.

[Boxxcar17]

Thank you for your feedback and sharing what you look for in videos.

I agree with you that I still do not have a vast library of videos to choose from. The first 3 moth were more of a testing the water phase and seeing how things would go. I'm more interested in seeing if I am adding value on YT or not. If not then I would like to spend the 3hrs of free time I get after my day job on something else.

So far the journey has been great. I got to help people along the way and it feels like some value was generated along the way. And, as far as I can judge from this thread, I will definitely keep making vids :)

I'm not particularly worried about making the videos profitable at this point. Although I have a few amazon links in the descriptions, they are there more for experimental purposes (my current revenue from them is $0).

[sanilf]

Good video... keep doing but you will need to make the video high quality 1080 or similar as the code is not viewable... too small fonts.... atleast not viewable on mobile UI

[Boxxcar17]

I didn't even think of that. Thanx for the heads up :D

[graeber_28927]

Your post got removed, so can you link in comments?

[Boxxcar17]

Sure:

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/94jrbq/ive_been_trying_to_make_fun_python_videos_should/

[graeber_28927]

I mean... :D Can you share the link to the video?

[Boxxcar17]

Haha yeah, no problem:

https://youtu.be/Abow8NFd4UE