This week I’ve been having a long look at my YouTube page. I have quite a lot of videos over there and a few relate to this actual WordPress site which you are currently looking at. Some are promotional videos like the one you will find right at the bottom of this post which try to persuade the viewer of the merits of either Floating in Space or my poetry book, A Warrior of Words.
Back in the 1990s I felt it was about time that I did something about becoming a film director so I went on a video production course at a now defunct place in Manchester called the WFA. The Workers’ Film Association was situated in Hulme near the city centre and had what was at the time quite a hi-tech video editing set up. Sadly, a few years later, the digital revolution came and all the training I had done with video tapes and super VHS cameras was rendered not worthless but seriously behind the times.
The video I made back then was about the taxi drivers of Manchester and it was one of the first videos I was able to digitise and upload to YouTube. Manchester Taxi 1992 is my 5th most popular video with over 4,200 views. The four more popular videos are all, with one exception, old VHS videos that have also been digitised. The one exception is a promo video for Floating. It has six thousand views which I have to put down to using it in a Google advertising campaign some time ago.
My big issue with YouTube is that despite having a small handful of videos with pretty substantial views -my top video has over 180,000 views- I don’t make a penny in royalties because in order to make money on YouTube, you must have over a thousand followers. I have at the moment about 402 YouTube followers and it’s been difficult to even break that 400 figure. For a long time I had 398 followers but every time I found a new follower, I would lose one. I would get to 399 and be on the verge of cracking the 400 barrier, only to drop back again to 398 or even 397. Just lately I seem to be remaining steady at 402.
Why am I losing followers? Well even though I manage to produce a new blog post every Saturday, I don’t produce a new video every week. In fact I don’t even produce a new video every month. Why not you might ask? Well, for a kick off, videos are pretty hard to make. They have to be filmed and then edited. They need a lot of time and effort and I seem to spend all my time and effort writing my weekly blog post. Sometimes in the past when I’ve struggled to make a video I’ve tried to take an old blog post and make it into a video. I’ve done quite a few versions of my book bag posts as videos but some work out well and others don’t. I remember making one and feeling quite pleased with myself but then reviewed the video and found myself talking about my Book Blag and also about Bleak House by David Copperfield!
A lot of my regular videos are video versions of my poems and I began to wonder whether those people who come to my site to watch my old VHS videos of motor racing at Oulton Park or Manchester Airport in the 1980s are perhaps a little put off to encounter my poetry videos.
Not that my poetry is in any way offensive, in fact I personally think it is rather good or at least I like to think it has a certain charm. Then of course as they are my videos and I made them, I’m bound to say that. The thing is, those people who come to my page to listen to poetry might not necessarily like my other videos and those that like the other things might be thinking ‘what’s all this poetry stuff doing here?’
That is basically why I thought it might be a good idea to create a separate YouTube page dedicated to my poetry videos. After a quick bit of research, I found that I could create another page quite easily so with a few taps on my keyboard there it was! The next thing was to migrate my poetry videos over to the new page and this is where the problems began. I thought I might be able to do it with just a few more keyboard clicks but migrating videos sadly isn’t possible which is rather annoying. The only answer is to delete the videos from my main YouTube page and then upload them again to the new page.
The big problem with this is that firstly, doing all that takes a lot of time and secondly, it means that I’ll lose all the viewing figures from those original videos. Now a lot of my video poems don’t have great viewing figures or ‘likes’ but surprisingly quite a few of them have really good stats and it’s a bit of a shame to see them all go back to zero on the new page.
The other thing is finding the original videos. I don’t delete them and I still have them on my hard drive but in many cases I tend to edit them again and add perhaps different music, some subtle sound effects and sometimes even a new voiceover. I haven’t named the video files particularly well so it isn’t always easy to find which is the newest or even the best version. Not only that but as my trusty old laptop gets clogged up with loads of videos and has started running really slowly I’ve shifted them over to portable hard drives to free up space so they are not as accessible as before.
Message to YouTube if they happen to see this post. Give users the options to easily move videos to different channels. Things could be so much easier!
Anyway, I’ve started things off, added an introductory video and over the next few months I should eventually have all my poetry videos moved over to the new page. Of course perhaps I should announce the new set up to my small band of followers. How could I do that? Well, I’ve noticed that YouTube has made it possible for channels to create a post, much like Facebook and Twitter. So, I could make a post announcing the new channel and the changes I’ve made. I did a quick search on Google asking ‘how do I create a post on YouTube?’ The answer came straight away and looked pretty straight forward. Could I manage to create a post though? Of course not.
Perhaps that’s something that can’t be done on an iPad so I switched over to my laptop and guess what? I actually managed to finally create my first YouTube post. Happy days!
My usual YouTube page can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/@SteveHigginsWriterBloggerPoet
My new poetry page can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/@PoetrybySteveHiggins
Letters from an Unknown Author! 