Hey everyone, it's Jacqueline for Pixie Dust PhD. Today we're going to do
something a little bit different. Instead of talking about a Walt Disney World or
Disney Vacation Club topic, we're actually gonna be talking about YouTube
and my journey here as a new YouTuber. I saw Jen Lefforge do these monthly creator
updates on her channel, I'll link her channel in the description below, and I
really appreciated the honesty with which she talked about her success and her
struggles. So I'm gonna go ahead and also do this series as a way to pay it
forward. So this is completely candid, it's not scripted all all so it will be much
longer than my normal videos, but if you want to hear about why I started YouTube,
how I'm actually doing filming and editing, struggles I'm having, questions I
have, etc., go ahead and take a listen.
Alright, so why did I start this channel? Well the "PhD" part in my name handle
isn't a lie--I do have a PhD. So from the second part of my undergrad education
all the way through the end of my PhD thesis I was really fully immersed in
that: in my work, and in my education. And I really sort of lost any sight of having
hobbies, especially anything peripheral to my studies. So certainly most things in
the creative world I felt were pretty peripheral to what I was doing. So in
high school and in the beginning of college I had some creative hobbies, and
those sort of just completely fell off the map for me. Now I've been done with
my PhD for a little over a year and a half, and in that time I've sort of
learned how to become a normal human again.
I.e., my sleeping is better, my eating is more regulated and healthier, I exercise
sometimes. I just feel far more normal than I did when I was working on my
thesis. For those of you who don't know it's pretty normal for PhD folks to be
working 55 plus hours a week. I typically worked 55 to 60 hours a week, and in my
lab that was very much on the low side. I had a ton of bay mates who worked far
more than that. So when you're working that much you really just don't have
time for yourself, or for hobbies, and now that I'm done with that I just work 40
hours a week like a normal human being I'm trying to find hobbies again. So I
knew I wanted to do something creative in my life, and something that I had
never done before. I wanted to gain some new skills. I really have zero experience
with filming or editing and I thought that that would be pretty fun. So I
settled on YouTube, and I thought about what the channel might
be. I didn't really want to do just like a daily vlog of my life because I don't
really think my life is that interesting, but I did think that a Disney vlog would
be fun. Now I can't really vlog because I don't live in Florida, so I can't be
taking you guys with me to the parks all the time. But I do have a ton of Disney
knowledge in my brain that I thought I could disseminate on the Internet, and
maybe other people would find it useful. In particular, when I was planning my
first big trip to Walt Disney World by myself in 2017, well I went with my
partner but I did the planning by myself basically, I used YouTube as a massive
resource and it was amazing. That being said, most of the videos were 15 to 25
minutes long, even about small topics, and I thought that to carve out a small
niche for me in my channel. I could try to cover these topics in a shorter
amount of time. So my goal has always been 6 to 7 minute long videos. Some
of my videos are much closer to 8 minutes, so I am a little bit longer than
I wanted. That being said eight minutes is still,
you know, two times as fast as many of the other videos going over the same
topics. So my channel is really aimed at impatient folks who just want to get the
information as fast as possible. Basically, my channels aimed at me. Okay
so for filming right now I'm filming on a Nikon Coolpix, I also have a Canon SX
720 HS. I really like that camera more, but something's up with the lens. Like
there's always a blemish on all of the footage now, so I don't really use that.
But basically I'm just using point-and-shoot cameras. And for the
audio I did actually order about a $30 mic off Amazon, it's like a clip-on mic,
but it really sounded horrible everytime I tested it unless I was holding it like
right next to my mouth, like clipped onto my collar was not good enough. So I don't
use that at all and I'm just using the built-in audio in the cameras. Now I live
in a condo building so I have shared walls, and you know folks are turning
water and air on and off, so even if I have quiet time in my place and I've
turned my air off there is this just ambient noise all the time. To deal with
that I run all the footage through Audacity and just use their noise
reduction tool, and that seems to be working well enough. Now I'm aware that
it's not the sharpest quality image or audio, but for this purpose I don't think
it matters too much. Certainly no one has complained, that being said I don't have
a huge audience, so we'll see that goes in the future. So for editing
I'm using the free version of HitFilm Express. It's pretty user friendly, I find
it to be relatively intuitive. I don't really have many complaints. My only real
complaint is that it crashes a decent amount, and my laptop is actually a
gaming laptop so I think that, you know, my laptop is more than capable of
handling the footage and stuff. It seems like it's the program. So I just save a
lot in case it crashes, but that's really not a big deal to me. So yeah, I like
HitFilm Express. If you have different editing software that you like a lot
more let me know in the comments down below. Again this hobby is a learning
situation for me, so I'd be happy to learn a new program. Okay, so YouTube itself.
The volume on YouTube I feel like is pretty out of control. On HitFilm Express
I keep everything at the same levels, there's like a master volume level that
I lock on all my files, and when I export them out of HitFIlm onto my computer and
listen to them they all sound fine. But then when I go and upload them on
YouTube sometimes they're very quiet, sometimes they're very loud, and from
what I can tell you can't actually modulate the volume in YouTube Creator
Studio at all. You can go ahead and replace sound with
some of their preset sounds, their music that you're allowed to use, and change
the volume on that. But the volume of the actual video is just stuck on what it is.
I did some Googling about this, the volume being kind of weird
on YouTube, and it seems like that's a common problem. But if you have any
advice for dealing with that let me know. Right now my upload schedule is every 4
days. I sort of just picked this. I knew I wanted to upload close to twice a week,
but I wasn't sure if I could fully commit to two times a week just given my
schedule. And so I felt like every four days would give me a small cushion. I
know a lot of channels that do two times a week will do every Tuesday and every
Saturday, like these are the days we upload. I don't know if that is, like,
"better"? I don't know if people would rather it always be the same day rather
than just regularly every four days for me, or every three days, or whatever it
may be? Let me know what you think down below in the comments, and if you have a
certain upload schedule that you find works really well or doesn't work well.
And then when I upload I'm normally doing middle of the day eastern time so,
around lunchtime Eastern Standard Time so Walt Disney World time. Because my
channel so small I don't really think the upload time matters? I
a little bit of googling about this and there was a real mixed bag about when
people said it was best to upload. So if you have any thoughts about that let me
know. So thumbnails I make all my thumbnails
in Canva; I'm just using their free designs. I'm having a pretty fun time
playing around with that. I know a lot of people will stick with the same design
scheme for all of their videos. I have clearly been using different thumbnails
for all my videos. They are all in the same color scheme; I use like purples and
pinks and blues, and then I put my channel logo, which is my profile picture,
on all of them. But yeah they're not the same. I don't really know if that's a
problem? Let me know what you think in the comments down below. For now I think
it's fine. At the very least I think that the logo
at least has some continuity throughout even though the scheme of the thumbnails
changes. For the process of editing I was really nervous about starting this hobby,
about having to hear myself talk, and look at my face all the time.
I actually don't hate it as much as I thought I would. I don't mind my voice
nearly as much as I thought I would. I talk out of the left side of my mouth
which is super weird, not really sure what to do about that, and my eyes sort of
dart around a lot. So I am still working at getting comfortable talking to the
camera, and being able to speak fluidly. I'm sure you've noticed in my previous
videos that there are a lot of edits, there are a lot of jump cuts, because
those are so scripted, but I don't memorize them. So I can really only get
out about a sentence at a time fluidly in the way that I want to deliver it,
which is a very precise manner of communication, unlike what I'm doing
right now which is totally rambly. So I don't talk like this in my normal videos
and that's why there's so many edits, and so it does take me probably an hour and
a half or two hours to really fully edit a video to my liking. And a lot of that
is just because I have to make so many cuts. So I'm hopeful that with time I'll
be much better at speaking to the camera, and will be able to deliver those
precise communications in a more fluid motion so I won't have to cut as much
footage. Okay so let's talk about my channel itself. So I'm gonna read some
notes from analytics so I don't get them wrong. So I started my channel on
February 10th, that was the day of my first upload, which was just a very short
introduction video. And since then I've uploaded pretty much every four days. So
I have a 55 total view since the start of my channel, and 34 unique viewers. That
totals to 1.8 watch hours and 14 subscribers.
So I'm not mad about that; it's not amazing, don't get me wrong, no
one starts their YouTube journey and is like not hoping to get views or
subscribers, but 1.8 watch hours considering how short my videos are and
I think it was 34 unique viewers, that's really not bad considering I doubt that
I'm winning the YouTube algorithm at all, like I really don't think that it's
promoting me very well. So yeah, it could definitely be better, but I'm pretty
happy with where it's at. Especially 14 subscribers I think is
pretty good for one month. If we keep on that pace I could get to a hundred by
the end of the year, which would be amazing and it's kind of impossible to
think about that right now, but the fact that, you know, I'm over five subscribers
is great. The views on my individual videos range from 1 view to 22 views.
So the 22 is my video about the FastPass+ system, like overview and
basics. Makes sense to me that that one is the most viewed. My ADR video I think
only has two views, which I was pretty surprised about because I had to do a
lot of research about that when I was planning my first big Walt Disney World
trip, and I thought that that would generate more traffic. But hey that's
okay. The average watch time on my individual videos ranges from 14% to 85%.
So that's not bad. Of course since my videos are pretty short I would rather
that you know the average really hover around 60 plus percent, and we're really
not there right now. But maybe as I build up more of a community that will trend
upward. So my channel has 712 impressions and 1.7 percent of those were from
YouTube recommending my content. So like I said earlier I'm really not winning
the YouTube SEO algorithm. Given that my channel is so small I'm not surprised.
I think most of my traffic is coming from Twitter and Instagram. And even
though I started this hobby specifically for YouTube and I made Twitter and
Instagram to support that, I am succeeding it that's so much better. So
on Twitter I'm following 228 accounts and 69 accounts are following me, and on
Instagram I'm following [93 accounts and 28 people are following me]. Instagrams a
little spammy. I get a lot of like sub4sub comments, which is not what I'm
interested in. I don't want shallow subscriptions. I really do want to be part
of a YouTube community of Disney folks. I want to talk about Disney with other
Disney people, basically things that, you know, aren't happening with my in real
life friends. They're not that interested in these topics. But I think I have made
some good connections with a few folks on Twitter and then they're also on
YouTube. Primarily just like three or four I want to say, but I think that's a
pretty good start for one month. So that's my month one creator update. I'm
definitely still learning a lot, but I'm having a fun time figuring all of this
out. I am starting to find like a small tiny corner of the Disney community that
I'm comfortable with, and that they seem like good people, and I like reading
their posts, and I like watching their videos, so that's great--that was
definitely a goal and starting this. I'm probably gonna continue doing this
monthly creator update every month whether or not people like this or not,
even just as self-reflection for me and to see how things go month to month. So I
do hope you enjoy this. I want to be transparent about this process for
anyone going through it and struggling themselves, or thinking about starting a
YouTube channel. I really didn't find a ton of content like this in general for
frankly like new very small channels. So I hope you have a great day and my next
Disney topic video will be uploaded in four days. And until then if you want to
talk about YouTube stuff definitely chat with me in the comments below, or if you
prefer Twitter or Instagram you can find me there @PixieDustPhD. See you real soon!