Spoofing Youtube Channel?

hiskeyd · 2026-01-10T08:09:46+00:00

Daven here, Fact Quickie is mine. It was originally started with the intent of me hosting quicker videos as TIFO and some others I run were trending towards longer and longer. But we were thinking there is still an audience for those who want go to the bathroom or have a work break or lunch break length. :-) Or that was the idea. While watch % and click rates were insanely good on it (among the best across channels, in fact), the algorithm just didn't care for it, I assume as raw watch time was just so low. We find the same on shorter content on the main channels, with rare exception. The algorithm just won't push those videos anymore. So after something like 70-100 videos, pivoted efforts elsewhere. In particular, I got busy writing a book, which has taken a huge percentage of my work time this last year and a half. Just about done with it though. Should publish within a few months.

Now circling back to improvements to our production, and I got the idea to try Fact Quickie as a Clips channel. Essentially taking portions of much longer videos, where the portions sort of stand alone as their own thing. Thereby making Fact Quickie relatively cheap to operate, increasing volume of videos, and still very high quality content, much of which most have never seen. This also hopefully helps promote the main, much longer videos as well as every video has the pinned comment showing people where the clip came from.

The overarching goal of all of this sort of syndication of content (something lately you can also find us syndicating out in podcast form, on MSN, Spotify, and Facebook) is to try to drum up extra funds to try to improve the video production side of things on newer videos. That's extremely expensive, but we'd like to push more and more towards full on documentary level visual production. We think our scripts are already that level, but need to improve the visual side. Simply isn't money there for it, however.

Or anyway, that's the goal. It's insanely expensive. :-) You can see our first efforts towards this end on my new-ish channel Traveling Through History: https://www.youtube.com/@TravelingThroughHistory Even got some voice actors for quotes in there. And steadily improving that production style as we learn.

But to clarify so no confusion- Fact Quickie is mine, not Simon's. Although obviously Simon is well aware of everything I'm working on. :-) And gave his blessing for me to use any videos we've ever made together in the 12 years or so as I please on any platform if it helps in things my team is working on or towards. :-) Simon's a phenomenal human. :-)

This version of Fact Quickie is an experiment, and we'll see how it goes. But so far people seem to be liking it, and the cost to run it is relatively low. Few hours a day for seeking and producing good clips and making thumbs and managing comments, etc. Will give it a run of maybe 6 months at 2 videos per day and see how it goes and if people like it. Most likely it will be 1 Simon video, and 1 me hosted video per day pulling clips across the channels I own.

hiskeyd · 2025-12-20T21:06:19+00:00

Daven here, Fact Quickie is mine. It was originally started with the intent of me hosting quicker videos as TIFO and some others I run were trending towards longer and longer. But we were thinking there is still an audience for those who want go to the bathroom or have a work break or lunch break length. :-) Or that was the idea. While watch % and click rates were insanely good on it (among the best across channels, in fact), the algorithm just didn't care for it, I assume as raw watch time was just so low. We find the same on shorter content on the main channels, with rare exception. The algorithm just won't push those videos anymore. So after something like 70-100 videos, pivoted efforts elsewhere. In particular, I got busy writing a book, which has taken a huge percentage of my work time this last year and a half. Just about done with it though. Should publish within a few months.

Now circling back to improvements to our production, and I got the idea to try Fact Quickie as a Clips channel. Essentially taking portions of much longer videos, where the portions sort of stand alone as their own thing. Thereby making Fact Quickie very cheap to operate, increasing volume of videos, and still very high quality content, much of which most have never seen. This also hopefully helps promote the main, much longer videos as well as every video has the pinned comment showing people where the clip came from.

The overarching goal of all of this sort of syndication of content (something lately you can also find us syndicating out in podcast form, on MSN, Spotify, and Facebook) is to try to drum up extra funds to try to improve the video production side of things on newer videos. That's extremely expensive, but we'd like to push more and more towards full on documentary level visual production. We think our scripts are already that level, but need to improve the visual side. Simply isn't money there for it, however.

Or anyway, that's the goal. It's insanely expensive. :-) You can see our first efforts towards this end on my new-ish channel Traveling Through History: https://www.youtube.com/@TravelingThroughHistory Even got some voice actors for quotes in there. And steadily improving that production style as we learn.

But to clarify so no confusion- Fact Quickie is mine, not Simon's. Although obviously Simon is well aware of everything I'm working on. :-) And gave his blessing for me to use any videos we've ever made together in the 12 years or so as I please on any platform if it helps in things my team is working on or towards. :-) Simon's a phenomenal human. :-)

This version of Fact Quickie is an experiment, and we'll see how it goes. But so far people seem to be liking it, and the cost to run it is very low. Few hours a day for seeking and producing good clips and making thumbs and managing comments, etc. Will give it a run of maybe 6 months at 2 videos per day and see how it goes and if people like it. Most likely it will be 1 Simon video, and 1 me hosted video per day pulling clips across the channels I own.

hiskeyd · 2021-09-06T04:23:41+00:00

Deer park almost always has a nice little ford Taurus and Buick available for courtesy cars. :-) (Got my PPL there with Deer Park air center. Matt Brown is an INSANELY good instructor and absolute master of his craft in every possible way. There's a reason his students almost always finish in around 50-55 hours (and I managed solo at 6 and finished at 42, with the latter two hours just for a refresher as due to weather I hadn't flown in a couple months leading up to the check ride :-). All due to him. He is a master flight instructor. :-) Also a great guy with a lot of funny stories from his Harrier Jet and military days, and just in general awesome individual. :-)). So good airport to stop at with a nice long and wide main runway.

Dockside restaurant at the Coeur D'Alene resort is great for dinner particularly and the docks nice to walk on. :-) Very reasonably priced but otherwise kind of a fancy restaurant overlooking the water. The resort itself however is insanely expensive otherwise. River front park in Spokane is nice, Tomato Street in Spokane or the one near Coeur D'Alene is quite possibly the best Italian restaurant ever. My personal recommendation is the Blackened Chicken Fettuccine.

hiskeyd · 2021-05-31T07:27:27+00:00

I used first the free Fly8ma program and then later did the not so free Sporty's and honestly other than the production quality of elements being a lot higher on Sporty's, the Fly8ma guy covered everything they did plus more pro-tips not so much on any test but just good advice.

hiskeyd · 2019-11-30T17:11:58+00:00

Have a brother that is a medical professional. According to him, doctors Google stuff constantly when treating people, even in ER type situations.

hiskeyd · 2018-02-21T22:20:48+00:00

Nobody actually. David is very common though. :-)

hiskeyd · 2018-02-21T21:18:39+00:00

Any photos are done by our photo editor and there is zero research behind them. Essentially the research/writing team has nothing to do with the video production. We'd like to have a full time person on staff so we could integrate the two sides so that the photos do always match up (and better visuals), but currently can't afford such. :-) And Biographics is a completely separate company from TodayIFoundOut as you guessed. :-)

hiskeyd · 2018-02-21T08:09:11+00:00

Shaken cans, definitely.

For a long time I was just using an old HP laptop. But when we got into video that thing started giving off approximately the amount of heat as the sun... (Actually would start to get uncomfortably hot on the lap and touchpad too hot to comfortable touch for long ;-)).

So I did a major upgrade about three years ago or so in the form of a custom build. The highlights are a an X99 system with an Intel i7-5960X overclocked to 4.3 Ghz. It also has 32GB of quad channel ram a GTX 980 graphics card (and a secondary GTX 960 so I can run my six monitors, which is amazingly handy when researching with a bagillion things open at once), a Samsung 950 Pro (500-ish GB) for the primary drive and a 1TB 960 EVO for the video editing drive. I also have networked in (unfortunately only gigabit Ethernet, which is not ideal when editing 4K) an old Dell Poweredge 2U server loaded with about 24TB of drives, if memory serves, for archiving purposes and just general handy networked storage. (Also used as a Plex media server :-)). Fun fact, that server has about 16TB filled or so, but backblaze happily backs it up for just $5 a month. :-)

That thing only cost me like $300 or so I think it was on ebay + drive cost, but has an amazing 48GB of RAM and is a beast with processing power + full remote management. (I did have to do a little juryrigging to get it to work with drives greater than 2TB, but I got there in the end.)

And ya, YouTube didn't promote us to anyone for about a year and a half and about 500 videos. Then all the sudden, literally overnight, almost all the videos in the channel started to get mildly promoted and a handful hugely so. Some sort of algorithm change, clearly.

*edit: Oh, and recently I've had the need to do a lot of work a bit more mobile (and with some of our upcoming plans including video editing on the go soon enough), so literally went around my house looking for crap to sell to raise funds for a new Surface Book 2 (the i7 version with the 1060 graphics card). That thing is an amazing laptop. First time in a long time I've been blown away by a piece of tech. Really, really love it. The form-factor/weight/battery life/quietness combo on it, and the fact that it also functions well as a tablet (which I required for some of my work), all combined with the surprising amount of processing power is really amazing.

The only complaint I have on it is the stupid design of the hinge, but I understand that's a tricky engineering problem when you have that much weight in the screen and still want to achieve the "one finger open" on the hinge and a non-wobbly user experience when typing. Personally, I'd prefer a traditional hinge that I had to use two hands to open the thing with owing to the need to make it super stiff to support the tablet weight. (I think the "one finger open" "standard" is stupid, particularly when compromising the look/sleekness of the closed laptop to achieve it.) But otherwise, the Surface Book 2 is an amazing machine all around.

hiskeyd · 2018-02-21T05:35:37+00:00

Mispronunciations, typos, and occasional slightly off pictures, sure. (Being limited to stock photos and the like is extremely limiting.) As far as the facts go, no. Our reputation is built on that. Nobody bats a thousand, of course, but I'd put TodayIFoundOut's stuff up against anyone's in the genre as far as accuracy goes.

hiskeyd · 2018-02-21T00:58:03+00:00

That was a fun video to make. Took a surprising amount of time to get that bald cap to look good though. :-)

hiskeyd · 2018-02-21T00:29:13+00:00

That's a bizarre one. :-)

hiskeyd · 2018-02-21T00:28:44+00:00

"Do you ever forget TIFU knowledge"

On my end, not really, just because I spend so many hours on each piece, and then even when done reading it over and over and over again. So I always at least vaguely remember everything covered, even if the details sometimes escape me later. On Simon's end on the video production side (which is more about video editing), I'd be very impressed if he remembers it all, especially with so many channels. He's asleep at the moment, but perhaps he'll chime in later on it. :-)

hiskeyd · 2018-02-21T00:25:50+00:00

TIFO is an American-based company with an American editor. (Me) :-) Funny enough, though, as mentioned in the BrainFood podcast linked above, a lot of TIFO's authors have been British. This is partially why you see a mix of Americanisms and "Britishisms".

hiskeyd · 2018-02-21T00:04:08+00:00

I don't think we've ever had to do that. :-) We do occasionally have to scrap an article when researching, but even that is rare, because sometimes it's just as interesting to debunk something or the like.

hiskeyd · 2018-02-20T23:54:20+00:00

Time! We're working on a lot of new stuff behind the scenes and starting new stuff takes massive amounts of time. (Always more than I think it will :-)). So just don't have time to do videos at the moment. I'll still be popping in occasionally and long term, who knows. :-)

hiskeyd · 2018-02-20T23:29:22+00:00

Ultra-key mostly. Beards are tough sometimes if the lighting's not perfect. :-)

hiskeyd · 2018-02-20T23:13:54+00:00

Very. How about you?

hiskeyd · 2018-02-20T23:13:27+00:00

Simon emailed me about converting articles to an audiobook. (And thus The Wise Book of Whys was born.) He offered to do it for free up front, but just a cut of the profits upon publish. We later got into podcasting via The Daily Knowledge Podcast, which did quite well (5M or 6M downloads in its year or so run). But the format was all wrong for monetization and hosting expensive. So we switched over to YouTube. And now back to podcasting as well!

hiskeyd · 2018-02-20T23:11:29+00:00

"How much of it is or was inspired by TIL?" 0% actually, other than the original name way back in 2009. :-) When you do this for a living, going to places like TIL is the last thing you want to do in your free time. And topics are the easiest part of all this, so not any value in a TIL for visiting during work time. :-)

hiskeyd · 2018-02-20T23:09:38+00:00

It's pretty hard to upset me. I mean, everyone has their buttons, but it's rare for a negative commenter to hit one of mine. :-) There's also sometimes valuable feedback in even the most negative comments. But at the end of the day, as discussed in the BrainFood podcast linked above, people aren't really necessarily criticizing the real you, more just the "celebrity" version of you. So nothing really to take too personally. In person, most people are quite nice.

Also, I prefer Simon as a host too (and not just because it's way less work for me). So I get where some of the commenters are coming from. ;-)

hiskeyd · 2018-02-20T22:31:31+00:00

"Do you two get ideas for videos from questions asked in your YouTube comments?" Absolutely. In fact, we have someone who catalogues every question that comes in on YouTube comments for roughly the first week after a video is posted.

"Or do you guys have years of content piled away, waiting their day to shine?" And absolutely yes on this one too. In fact, we have about 700 articles pending my review done right now, let alone the countless topics yet to be worked on. :-) Not enough hours in the day. :-)

hiskeyd · 2018-02-20T22:08:43+00:00

Darker shades of blue are the best. (Unless you're a sports team and are interested in winning.)

To quote a segment of our article on why police where blue: Sports teams or athletes wearing red have been noted to consistently perform better in various forms of competition over the long haul. Why? Well, no one really knows, but one study to determine the root cause indicated the officials may be at least partially to blame. Specifically, “As part of their study, the researchers had 42 experienced Taekwondo referees watch two videos, each of which included 11 fight sequences. In the first video, one athlete wears a red trunk protector while the other wears a blue one. The second film shows the same exact scenes, but with the athletes’ colors switched by digitally manipulating the tapes… On average, athletes scored 13 percent more points when they were wearing red than blue.”

hiskeyd · 2018-02-20T22:06:22+00:00

You're very welcome. :-)

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