03.07.26
Thoughts on YouTube
Post-production continues slowly, slower than I’d like.
I’m getting a bit concerned about the number of animation sequences that I’m sketching in, potentially storing up a lot of work. I’ve been trying to be conscious about over-reliance on animation sequences, but the film’s calling for them; we’ll see how it shakes out.
I discovered the documentary and filmmaking community on Substack this week, and I’ve enjoyed reading through the posts. This one was a particular standout:
It’s instructive on the mechanics of YouTube, which is something that I’ve been thinking about. I have a bit of an ambivalent relationship with YouTube, I started on it early on - we built a channel in 2011 and spent about six weeks uploading a fair bit of content. But the returns were so paltry that we judged it to be a waste of time and dropped it almost immediately.
It was my initiative to give it a go, I’d heard from others that the brand new YouTube monetisation might be the future; I felt that was possible and I wanted to get into it. This was right at the start of YouTube monetisation and the strategies for how to build a successful channel remained unclear. I think we probably didn’t have exactly the right content, nor the right format, but it was a tremendous amount of work that seemed not to pay off and, fearing that it was a grand waste of time, we abandoned it.
In hindsight that was a mistake. I was up for persevering a bit longer, but I didn’t put up too much resistance when the suggestion came that we should drop it. I think part of the problem was that we went all-in to see whether, if we got a lot of content up quickly, we could find equally quick success. Once there wasn’t an instant payoff, and it wasn’t clear what the path would be to a stable return, it just seemed like a misallocation of resources.
It’s easy to say now, but we should have just kept it bubbling under on a much lighter schedule. As time wore on, and it became clear that YouTube was going to become increasingly important to filmmakers, we should have given it a second look. A frustration for me at this point is that that monetised channel still exists, doing nothing, but I don’t have access to it. Anything I build from here is going to have to be a clean channel and go through the threshold of watch hours and follower counts that’s required for monetisation. But them’s the breaks.
YouTube did eventually become one of the best performing platforms for our work, but our films go out on the big channels, not on our own channel. The advantage of that is that a large audience is already there and the channels get more favourable royalty rates from YouTube that we would be able to achieve ourselves – at least that’s what they claim. The type of films that we make could not be produced simply for YouTube, they take months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; it just wouldn’t be economical if relying purely on YouTube revenues, it only works as an embellishment to all of the sales generated elsewhere - linear television, territory licences and streaming platforms.
So what might work on YouTube? The article returned me to that question, I still haven’t settled it in my own mind, but I think it’s going to be part of the story over the next year. What’s clear is that the films that I made in the past and the film that I’m making currently will not work for that format. It’s going to have to be something more modest in scale which can be done more regularly. That’s the balance that I’m going to have to find.