The most successful professional youtubers are the ones who have extrmely high quality production values and a minimum of one upload per week

The competition for views is feirce and your videos should look as polished as anything coming from a major TV network..because that is who are are competing with to a certain extent as people tune into Streaming services like Disney every week there is this merging of online based content ,in the minds of many, so your content better be top notch as well as your knowledge of the subject and even your intro graphics and how your presentation is edited and your sound.

There are so...SO many people doing videos on every aspect of Blender and some of them have Patreon accounts and offer shaders/models etc to monthly supporters who commit to certain monthly ammounts.

The higher quality Channels IMHO seem to be the ones who assume thier target audience prefers to work entirely within the Blender eco-system. ( Use keyboard shortcuts)

I see very few channels for example,that focus on importing and exporting to other apps Like Poser,Daz or Iclone.

Just a few personal observations

wolf359 posted at 9:56PM Fri, 15 January 2021 - #4410416

The most successful professional youtubers are the ones who have extremely high quality production values and a minimum of one upload per week

The competition for views is feirce and your videos should look as polished as anything coming from a major TV network..because that is who are are competing with to a certain extent as people tune into Streaming services like Disney every week there is this merging of online based content ,in the minds of many, so your content better be top notch as well as your knowledge of the subject and even your intro graphics and how your presentation is edited and your sound.

There are so...SO many people doing videos on every aspect of Blender and some of them have Patreon accounts and offer shaders/models etc to monthly supporters who commit to certain monthly ammounts.

The higher quality Channels IMHO seem to be the ones who assume thier target audience prefers to work entirely within the Blender eco-system. ( Use keyboard shortcuts)

I see very few channels for example,that focus on importing and exporting to other apps Like Poser,Daz or Iclone.

Just a few personal observations

My experience has been that subscribers aren't really the hard part, as long as you're patient. "Build it and they will come", as long as you are giving out some good tips. Tutorials will almost always gain subscribers much faster and easier than other types of videos. The real challenge with making a successful tutorial channel isn't so much the fancy graphics and flashy intros. In fact, people seem to complain if you give them an intro longer than 5 to 10 seconds, no matter how "cool" or professional it is. The real challenge is coming up with new ideas every week. Also, people looking for tutorials really want high-quality audio narration, professional-sounding voice narration when it comes to video tutelage. I learned that early on with my channel. Give them quality narration with professional audio and decent content and you will get subscribers. I would definitely recommend investing in a really good mic if you're serious about doing tutorials for a living. Tutorials are subscriber magnets, but it won't come easy.

The problem is to keep the views coming, you need to keep uploading. And uploading. And uploading. You need a new video at least every week, so you'd better have a lot of things to say and a lot of ideas to show, or that's going to be extremely difficult to pull off. Not to mention, you need to edit your videos. More than graphics or intros, the quality of the editing and audio need to be on point, and that means you need to do a lot more than simply screencap your workflow and upload it as a raw video. So it becomes extremely time consuming.

Since video ads only make you less than 1 cent per view, you'll definitely need other means of income. Patreon site or a marketplace where you sell models or something to compliment your tutelage is a good idea. Youtube doesn't let people monetize now until they've got over 1000 subscribers and/or 4000 hours of watch time in the last 12 months. That's not really a big deal, but it could seem like forever to reach that first 1000 subs, especially if you're updating once a week! It's a full time job.

Indeed it is a full time job!!

Interesting. If you're doing the 3D work and can record as you go along, the YT videos - more broadly, making video content - could become a natural outgrowth of what you're already doing. Then, you're content becomes sort of a journal of what you're doing and that could be narrated into a tutorial or demo. It could be less of a slog that way because everything plays well together. I've been watching some paid tutorials where people show how they make things that they're actually selling. That's pretty cool and is informing my thinking here.

Well, I finally bought a new 2TB external hard drive to replace my older 5TB drive that died right after I finished my animated film in April 2020.

Bought Decal machine yesterday and downloaded a couple of tutorials to get me started and Ordered a new pair of eyeglasses to replace my badly scratched lenses.

so its time to get serious about starting my animated web series "HALO reclaimer"

@wolf359 Now that looks really interesting. An animated web series based on something popular could be a real winner. I'll keep an eye out for that.

@Torquinox Yeah, that's kind of how I got started with my tutorial channel. I would show how to model the objects I had been creating anyway for sale. Then I would see those same models for sale, competing against my own, in the markets I sell in. haha. Again, the problem is more than just recording your work. Unless you're doing live streams on Twitch or Youtube, pre-recorded footage will often need lots of editing and some artistic input to help it catch on. You'll also need to keep talking while you're working and have a good mic to explain your process as you go (if you do it live). If you narrate over your work, then that once again requires post editing.

Workflow walkthroughs are cool, but people prefer to watch those live. The most successful tutorials rarely last longer than 10 minutes, because it's mostly showing how to do one or two things. A walkthrough, like you are watching, is a little different, and not quite as many people will sit through hours of a workflow.

Just for a little perspective, my longest video is about a half-hour long. Still, the average watch times on my videos, according to analytics, are just a few minutes. People usually skip the parts they already know and look for the parts they're interested in. That's why it's a popular trend now to add timecodes to your videos so people can jump right to the parts they have the most interest in. There's also a trend now where people blast through an entire scene creation in just a minute or so, and that's the actual hook of the whole thing. "Create this scene in five minutes or less" is a popular trend now. Obviously, not intended for absolute beginners but surprisingly popular.

LuxXeon posted at 5:01PM Sat, 16 January 2021 - #4410477

@wolf359 Now that looks really interesting. An animated web series based on something popular could be a real winner. I'll keep an eye out for that.

@Torquinox Yeah, that's kind of how I got started with my tutorial channel. I would show how to model the objects I had been creating anyway for sale. Then I would see those same models for sale, competing against my own, in the markets I sell in. haha. Again, the problem is more than just recording your work. Unless you're doing live streams on Twitch or Youtube, pre-recorded footage will often need lots of editing and some artistic input to help it catch on. You'll also need to keep talking while you're working and have a good mic to explain your process as you go (if you do it live). If you narrate over your work, then that once again requires post editing.

Workflow walkthroughs are cool, but people prefer to watch those live. The most successful tutorials rarely last longer than 10 minutes, because it's mostly showing how to do one or two things. A walkthrough, like you are watching, is a little different, and not quite as many people will sit through hours of a workflow.

Just for a little perspective, my longest video is about a half-hour long. Still, the average watch times on my videos, according to analytics, are just a few minutes. People usually skip the parts they already know and look for the parts they're interested in. That's why it's a popular trend now to add timecodes to your videos so people can jump right to the parts they have the most interest in. There's also a trend now where people blast through an entire scene creation in just a minute or so, and that's the actual hook of the whole thing. "Create this scene in five minutes or less" is a popular trend now. Obviously, not intended for absolute beginners but surprisingly popular.

I agree, a web series could be very good! Best wishes with all that, Wolf!

Thanks Luxxeon! You answered a lot of questions I didn't ask yet :D That's very unethical, people selling copies of your demo model. I would hope they at least changed it up a bit! >_> Post-editing and narrating the finished video could be a drag, but that still might work out better for me than posting my lightly-edited live work - at least in the beginning. Your thoughts on recording length timecodes, etc are very helpful! Thanks again!

Thanks LuxXeon,

There are alot of HALO based channels that discuss HALO lore and post screen recorded game play etc but AFAIK only one guy is making his own animated series and is using the "Source filmaker" game engine.

My plan is to produce short (max 3 minute) high quality episodes In the style of "The Mandlorian".

Ive created ALOT of content and sets already and will likely create more using Decal machine going forward.

The Characters will all be animated In Iclone of course.

When video tutorials first became a thing that "everyone" was doing, I couldn't stand them, I much preferred written tutorials. I was at a point, I didn't need hand holding and walking thru the basic stuff, I just needed the one or two key points that I was missing/not familiar enough with. Information I could have skimmed out of a written tutorial in about 30 seconds was buried in 43 minutes of someone stumbling, muttering, and backtracking thru stuff I was already familiar with for the 2 minutes I was actually interested in, ugh. I still haven't entirely warmed to video tutorials, as @LuxXeon says, time codes help immensely, as does the trend toward shorter/focused tutorials, but I'm still lukewarm on the idea.

Its absolutely a full time job. Production is tantamount, and anyone making a real go of youtube, usually has VERY high production values. The market is too competitive now, gone are the days you could get by with having audio so low people had to max their speakers to hear half of what you've said, followed by your next video with audio so loud you're clipping your mic half the time. Narration after the fact, seems to almost always be the better option than trying to talk and demonstrate at the same time. Beyond just recording and editing the content, if you're going to be successful you need to have/be "promoting" on multiple platforms, and you have to have a level engagement/interaction with your subscriber base.

I can't really wrap my head around the whole concept of live streams. If I have the time to sit watching someone do something [or watching them play a game?!] I'd rather be doing that something myself [playing the game myself!]. Its clearly incredibly popular right now, and growing. I've tried to watch some of the twitch "creative" streams while I'm working, but it always ends up becoming background noise as I inevitably shift my focus almost entirely to what I'm doing, or enough so, that I'm not really learning anything from the stream.

LuxXeon posted at 7:05PM Sat, 16 January 2021 - #4410477

There's also a trend now where people blast through an entire scene creation in just a minute or so, and that's the actual hook of the whole thing. "Create this scene in five minutes or less" is a popular trend now. Obviously, not intended for absolute beginners but surprisingly popular.

I think, I'm more inclined toward watching that kind of thing [or even time lapsed stuff], than step by steps. Very few step by step videos seem to be paced right for me. A quick over view of the entire process however can often highlight areas that would have been potential pitfalls. As you said tho, definitely not the most "beginner friendly" of content.

LuxXeon posted at 7:23PM Sat, 16 January 2021 - #4410421

In fact, people seem to complain if you give them an intro longer than 5 to 10 seconds, no matter how "cool" or professional it is.

That's nothing new. That goes for short animations too. The amount of times I've seen a a 20+ second flashy title sequence tagged onto a 10 second animation, [nevermind the 30 second credit roll at the end when ONLY ONE person worked on the short!] boggles the mind! Not saying I haven't ever been over zealous with a title sequence or two myself, but most of the time, less is more for sure. It can be especially grating if you go thru half a dozen of someone's videos in a row, and they're all set up the same way . . .

10-15 second clip[s] of what's in the video --> 20 second title sequence --> 2 minutes of actual content --> 30 seconds of end credits

. . . you've just wasted as much time as there was actual content.

Yeah, a lot of people will do everything they can to extend the length of a video because midroll ads can't be displayed until a video is 8 minutes long. Used to be 10 minutes until recently. So if a person only has 5 minutes of actual content and they want to squeeze some money out of it, they'll use a bunch of filler to extend the run time. I personally never saw a need to do that, because I tend to talk too much and overexplain everything anyway.

My channel was growing pretty fast back in 2017. I was seeing a daily average of 100 new subscribers for a period of a few months, and that's when I started taking things more seriously. I added a short intro to all my uploads, I developed a "brand" style appearance to every intro, and actually invested in some better audio equipment to help improve the narrations. Things were moving so fast, I just couldn't keep up with it. I found that updating more than once a month was not something I could do, and that just wasn't going to be good enough to keep the algorithm happy. Not to mention, I had gained most of my subscriber base prior to Youtube adding things like the notifications bell, which means only a fraction of my subscriber base would see my new videos through notification. This meant that new uploads would not gain traction quickly unless I promoted them through social media, but that just isn't enough. You need it to show up in recommendations, and the algorithm favors trending videos.

I haven't added a new tutorial in about a year now, and I don't know when or if I'll add new tutorials. I have a secondary channel where I upload animations but I doubt it will ever grow as much as the tutorial channel did.

@Warlock279 What you described seems almost standard practice in the Poser/Daz communities

a 30 second opening title sequence with music

10 seconds of a Daz/poser girl performing some sexy strut cat walk or typical "booty shaking" dance and at teast one minute of credits naming all of the merchant products they used from the eye lash morphs down to the toe nail textures.?

As for tutorials, I have a Massive video archive of tutorials on Blender/Iclone covering subjects that I expect to have to learn to use in the future.

Perhaps I am a bit of an outlier but I am an OBJECTIVE based learner.

Meaning I dont really partake in "general education" but wait until I need to know how to perfrom some specific function in an actual project I am producing then I watch a specific tutorial on how to do that one thing and move on.

This is why I like The guys who do the short focused videos on specific functions.

Of course I also like the longer videos that cover all of the aspects of Complex plugins Like Hardops/boxcutter and Decal machine.

wolf359 posted at 9:34AM Mon, 18 January 2021 - #4410534

@Warlock279 What you described seems almost standard practice in the Poser/Daz communities

a 30 second opening title sequence with music

10 seconds of a Daz/poser girl performing some sexy strut cat walk or typical "booty shaking" dance and at teast one minute of credits naming all of the merchant products they used from the eye lash morphs down to the toe nail textures.?

As for tutorials, I have a Massive video archive of tutorials on Blender/Iclone covering subjects that I expect to have to learn to use in the future.

Perhaps I am a bit of an outlier but I am an OBJECTIVE based learner.

Meaning I dont really partake in "general education" but wait until I need to know how to perfrom some specific function in an actual project I am producing then I watch a specific tutorial on how to do that one thing and move on.

This is why I like The guys who do the short focused videos on specific functions.

Of course I also like the longer videos that cover all of the aspects of Complex plugins Like Hardops/boxcutter and Decal machine.

While such Daz/Poser videos may exist, there's no point to dumping on on them.

What you're talking about is discipline vs project-based learning. Discipline-based is the more formal education. Project-based is using the skills and resources you have to do the project. Each has benefits. In the end, we're all project-based. It's the way of things. There is a value to having some knowledge of the discipline before launching off on projects; but often, learning the discipline really can wait. And you find, even while learning the discipline, you're doing projects to reinforce the concepts. So, it's all a big continuum of learning.