- I will still say that I think this marks
probably the worst decision I've made
when it comes to releasing a Strange Parts video.
(bright music)
Hi there, guys.
This is not a normal Strange Parts video.
If you're here for taking apart phones
and crazy adventures in factories,
you might wanna skip this one.
But if you wanna know a little bit more
about what happened in the past couple days
with using the YouTube Premiere
to release the new RFID video
and how that went horribly, horribly wrong,
then stick around.
We have been working for the past two months
on this big RFID video
about making my own RFID
based on the challenge from Stuart
and I put a lot of work into it,
Kevin, my editor, has put in a lot of work into it,
and Impinj and a whole bunch of other folks
really went out of their way to make this happen
and so I was really looking forward
to sharing it with you all
and I thought a cool way to do that
would be this new YouTube Premiere feature.
The basic idea, if you're not familiar with it,
is that I upload the video,
I schedule it for a particular time to go live,
and then we all,
whoever tunes in gets to watch it live with me
and we can all chat
and then after that
the idea is that it just becomes a normal YouTube video.
And so I did that.
I scheduled it about six or seven hours out
and the chat was awesome.
I hung out from the time that I uploaded it
until it started,
so it ended up being six or seven hours.
I ended up staying up really late
until about 4:00 a.m. here in Shenzhen
to hang out with you guys.
For everybody that tuned in,
they'll know it was a pretty fun chat
and we had a lot of good conversations
and I thoroughly enjoyed that.
But I will still say that I think this marks
probably the worst decision I've made
when it comes to releasing a Strange Parts video.
So there were two main problems
and I think they're probably related
but also separate.
So the first problem
was that a lot of people were really upset,
are really upset,
about the YouTube Premiere feature.
It makes it look there is a video you can watch right away.
It pops up a bunch of notifications
and it shows up in your subscription feed
but then when you click on it,
it says, come back later to watch the video.
And so by the time the video started,
there were like hundreds of thumbs down,
there were a bunch of negative comments
all about the feature.
Nobody had seen the video yet,
so there was nothing to thumbs-down about the video.
That was a real bummer.
It really kinda kicked things off,
well, I don't know,
it didn't kick them off particularly well
for the success of a video.
And then I guess the other big thing
is that the views were way down,
lower than I've ever seen for a video on Strange Parts.
And, you know, I try not to get
too wrapped around the axle on that
but this looked like
no-notification-had-gone-out kind of level views
and so that's super worrying.
Obviously I work really hard on this stuff.
I would like as many people as possible to see it.
And then there's just a money aspect.
The reality is it costs me money to make videos
and, you know, this isn't all about the money for me
but I'm trying not to lose money doing this
and I spent considerable money between paying Kevin,
who's been on this full-time
for the past four or five weeks,
as well as paid for stock footage
and flights and equipment and stuff,
so a lot goes into these videos.
And right now, the main source of income
that pays for this is YouTube ads
and so it's really, really dependent
on how many views a video gets
and the success of that video
really is in the first couple hours.
And for some reason,
this video did not pop the way most videos do.
It didn't pop as high
and it trailed off much, much sooner.
And it seems like I'm not the only creator
that's reporting problems with views
on videos they premiered.
Jon Prosser tweeted about it here with a nice graph
and a channel called Counter Argument, I believe,
I'll leave a link in the description,
he made an entire video
about the changes in analytics he's seeing.
Same thing, like way, way lower views than normal.
And so I actually think
that there is some sort of bug or interaction
between YouTube Premieres and the recommendation algorithm
and I suspect it's probably not intentional
and it might not just be a simple bug in the code,
it might be sort of the way those two systems interact.
My guess, and most of you guys don't know this
but I actually used to be a software engineer at Google
working on web search,
so I don't know a lot directly
about how the YouTube system works
but I can kind of guess culturally,
I would guess that the YouTube Premiere's team
sits in a very different part of the building,
if not a different part of the world,
from the team that works on
the YouTube recommendations, suggestions,
what shows up on your homepage, algorithm team,
and I suspect that there is a bunch
of unexpected interaction between those
that is really hurting creators
and hurting videos right now.
Based on my experience, (chuckles)
the advice that I've been giving
to my creator friends has been,
don't use YouTube Premiere,
the YouTube Premiere feature.
It seems like a great way to kill a video.
That was my experience.
I don't think this video will ever recover
in terms of views for me.
At this point, based on the numbers,
I think I'd be really happy
if it does a fraction of what the other videos did.
So based on all that,
I reached out,
I now finally have a YouTube Partner Manager who's in Tokyo,
which is good,
and now, finally, I have someone to talk to
when something horrible like this goes wrong,
and we talked a little bit.
He wasn't aware of these problems
and he's been talking with his team
and he's reached out to the YouTube Premieres team
to see what can be done.
But his best recommendation was to reupload the video,
which is what I did last night.
I stayed up again until 4:00 a.m. to do that.
It did sort of pop again,
people got a notification again,
but the numbers weren't very good.
Reuploads on YouTube don't always go very well.
So I ended up taking that down.
I had just made the old video unlisted.
So I ended up switching back to the original video,
which is, it's just a mess.
It's got me so stressed out.
There's not much more I can do at this point
other than focus on making the next video,
which is what I'm doing.
So the big obvious question is, what now?
And part of that is, will I ever do this again?
And (chuckles) right now,
I would have to say I'd be pretty hard-pressed
to be convinced to try YouTube Premieres again
for one of my videos,
particularly one that I've spent a lot of time on,
like this one.
It's just too risky.
If I'm gonna spend this much time
making really polished videos,
I kinda gotta know that they're gonna get shown to everybody
and that I'll get the normal number of views
that I expect at least.
But the chat we did was super fun.
It's one of the best interactions I've had with you guys yet
and I think we should do more of that.
I would really like to do more of that.
So I gotta figure out a way to do that.
I think one way to do it is livestreaming.
I'm not totally set up to do that,
at least when I'm here in China
for various reasons
I probably can't go into in too much depth
but you can probably guess at.
So I don't know.
I might also do something like the premiere again
but maybe not on YouTube.
I don't know, maybe on another platform where,
I don't know.
I think, at the very least,
I won't be experimenting with stuff like this again
on the main channel.
There's just too much to lose if something goes wrong.
So I think main Strange Parts channel will continue
to be what you know and love from Strange Parts,
these sort of more polished videos,
and we'll just release them as normal videos in the future
and I will announce them
on all the various social media channels.
I guess there are other couple quick questions
I might wanna answer, just anticipating.
Why does the apartment look different?
And why does it keep changing?
I was gonna make a video about this.
I may still. (chuckles)
But I sort of got forced into renovating this apartment,
which started as just a simple re-paint.
There was some mold growing around the corner
from the air conditioner
and the apartment manager
wanted to renovate some other apartments of theirs
in the building at the same time.
And so, anyway, I kind of got pushed into it
at a time that I didn't really want to
but I thought it was just gonna last like a week or two
and it turned into this three-month saga.
I ended up having to pay
to fix a leak in the roof personally
and then I ended up having to do most of the work myself.
It's this whole long thing.
I don't know whether it'll ever turn into a story
good enough for Strange Parts.
It's mostly really boring,
about building maintenance in China.
But it's been this huge thing.
So anyway, I am finally,
so I've been living out of this apartment.
I've been living in another apartment for three months
and I am finally, as of last week, back in this apartment.
So that's been a huge mental energy sink.
But I'm back in here and I'm fixing it up
and I wanna make it look cooler.
So I've got some LED strips over here
and some lighting in the back
and there's some new acoustic foam on the ceiling
and, yeah, been working on making this
into a proper Strange Parts workshop/studio.
So more to come there.
And then just my next focus is on making much more videos.
So I've been kinda stuck on this one,
but we've got one coming up.
YouTube flew me out to Tokyo
for a YouTube Creator Spotlight,
which was super cool.
I got to meet some other Asian creators
from all over the region
and meet some of the YouTube folks
that are working in the Tokyo office.
So while I was there,
I might have gone to see
the Tokyo electronics markets in Akihabara.
So stay tuned for that.
It's a collab with another Japanese creator, ONLY in JAPAN,
who was super awesome
and spent the afternoon showing me around.
So that's coming up.
We're editing that next.
I'm gonna get Kevin going editing that probably today.
So stay tuned.
It'll probably take, I don't know,
a week or so for us to edit that.
And then I've got a bunch more projects in the works.
This is usually the point at which
I say thanks for joining me.
If you like videos like this,
please subscribe below.
But instead, I'm gonna ask you guys specifically this time
to go follow me on Twitter or Instagram instead.
That's where I post about sort of what I'm up to
on a day-to-day basis,
where I am in the world,
what projects I'm working on.
It's also where I reach out to you guys for advice and help.
It also helps with these situations
where something's going wrong
with YouTube notifications or whatever
and it's another way for me to get in touch with you guys
and let you know, "Hey, there's a new video out.
Go check it out."
Also, it is one of the better ways to get in touch with me,
particularly Twitter.
If you tweet at me,
that's what I prefer as opposed to DMing me.
But DMs are open,
so if you have something
you really need to talk to me privately about.
But if you do it open, on an open tweet,
then I can reply and everybody else can see it
and we can have a conversation.
That's all I got for this time.
Stay tuned. We got more stuff coming up.
I'm still really excited for stuff to come.
This is just a little speed bump
on the Strange Parts journey here.
So I'll see you guys again soon.
We should have another video out
in the next week or two here.
And until then, I'll see you on Instagram or Twitter.
Take care, guys.