Koytek Wattenberg Media - YouTube Tips

The Creator Co-op: Why the Future of VTubing Should Belong to the Talent

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 20:54:40 GMT

Moin. Leo here, I’ve broken my arm and are unable to write cool blogposts at the moment. So here is a rant, transcribed with DaVinci Resolve Studio and ran through MartinGPT (aka I bossed him around to structure this for me). Unfortunatly some of my witty style has been lost in the process.
– Leo

VShojo’s Collapse Isn’t an Exception – It’s a Symptom

The recent unraveling of VShojo may have shocked fans, but for many VTubers and creators behind the scenes, it felt frustratingly familiar. Power imbalances, non-transparent decision-making, contract disputes, and a disconnect between company goals and creator needs. We’ve seen all this before.

What this shows us is simple: the agency model that much of the VTuber industry relies on isn’t just flawed, it’s fundamentally misaligned with the values and autonomy that creators want (and deserve). And that’s a problem that extends far beyond one company.

Same Old Story: From MCNs to Hollywood

The tension between platforms, agencies, and talent is nothing new. Before VTubing, there were YouTube Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs) like Machinima and Maker Studios. Back then, creators were promised growth, exposure, and resources, but what they often got were restrictive contracts, late payments, and no real voice in how their content or careers were managed.

Even further back, we can look at Hollywood, an industry notorious for gatekeeping, coercion, and opaque power dynamics. Especially for women, breaking in often meant navigating systems that were less about talent and more about access to powerful people.

VTubing, despite being digital and new, has inherited a lot of these same issues.

The Real Problem: Misaligned Incentives

At the heart of the issue is a misalignment of interests. Traditional agencies or corporations exist to generate profit and grow themselves. Their purpose is not to help individual creators, but to make their owners and shareholders rich.

That means:

Creators are often expendable.
Contracts are written to benefit the company.
The “brand” is prioritized over the human talent that built it.
Support services (legal, PR, accounting) are gatekept or dictated.

This isn’t malicious in every case, it’s just the logic of a system that was never designed with creator autonomy in mind.

But Why Chose an Agency in the First Place?

Creating content is a full-time job. Managing finances, negotiating sponsorships, scheduling streams, editing, legal, branding, community, it’s overwhelming. Agencies promise to handle all of that, so creators can focus on doing what they love.

BUT alternatively: You can hire freelancers, agents, or teams, like kw.media, who help you just with the services you need: project management, strategic advice, sponsor negotiations, editing or production. And unlike an agency, you keep your IP, your freedom, and your ability to walk away. Also, hiring someone makes YOU the boss.

Hiring freelancers or agents yourself can be difficult as you don’t necessarily know who is trustworthy and who isn’t. Additionally you don’t get any economy of scale that you would have by hiring someone full-time like in an agency.

So What’s the Alternative? A Creator-Owned Co-op

There is a better way, and it’s not a hypothetical. It’s a model that’s been used in other industries for over a century: a cooperative, or co-op.

In a creator co-op:

The company is owned and governed by the talent.
There are no external shareholders, only member-creators.
Decisions are made democratically: one person, one vote.
Services (like management, accounting, legal, production) are selected and paid for collectively.
Profits are reinvested into the co-op or shared transparently, not siphoned off to execs.

How a Creator Co-op Could Work

A creator co-op doesn’t mean everyone needs or wants the same thing. Two basic models allow for flexibility:

1. Flat Fee, Shared Services

Members pay a fixed monthly fee. That money funds shared services that the group votes to adopt – e.g., hiring a group accountant, a shared community manager, legal support, etc. If the group votes “yes,” it’s included. If not, members handle it independently.

2. Tiered, Opt-In Services

There’s a low base fee for general membership (legal registration, governance, basic ops). Then members can opt in to additional services they want. Need a lawyer? Pay into that pool. Want PR help? Opt in. Don’t need a manager? Don’t pay for one.

Both models can be written into the co-op’s charter, and hybrid approaches are also possible.

Legal Foundations: The European SCE

There’s already a legal framework for this: the SCE – Societas Cooperativa Europaea.

Requires at least five members from two different EU countries
Valid across all EU nations (and some neighbors)
Enables shared ownership, voting rights, and pan-European legal status

If creators are spread across different regions (e.g., U.S. or Japan), local co-ops can be created and federated into a larger group.

Privacy & Identity Concerns

For many VTubers, anonymity is core to their identity. And yes, legally, founding a company (especially in Europe or the U.S.) requires real names. But this applies only to the founding members. From there, internal systems can be built with strict access control to ensure that sensitive personal information is not exposed to the group unless explicitly necessary.

This is especially important in an industry where doxxing and harassment are real risks.

One Person = One Vote

Here’s the non-negotiable part: nobody can buy more votes.

In traditional companies, owning 51% means total control. In a co-op, it doesn’t matter how popular, rich, or powerful you are, you get one vote. That’s it.

This creates a fundamentally different power dynamic. Nobody can be outvoted by capital. Leadership comes from consensus, not control.

Multiple Brands, One Co-op

A co-op doesn’t mean everyone has to be part of the same brand. In fact, it can be the opposite.

You could have (using a wild mix of real and fictional examples):

A science-focused VTuber unit under the label “VTheorem”
A voice acting-focused group with known names like AmaLee or Cottontail under the label “Muscle Mommies”
Former members of an agency like VShojo forming their own creative unit under one roof (they could even keep using the name VShojo as a seperate legal entity)

Different brands. Different styles. But shared infrastructure, legal identity, and ownership.

Aligned Incentives, Real Autonomy

If the co-op hires an accountant, a manager, or a community lead and that person doesn’t work out, they can be replaced. Not by an exec, but by vote. The services exist to serve the members, not the other way around.

That also means service providers don’t get to dictate terms. They’re hired, respected, and compensated, but ultimately accountable to the group. That’s a powerful shift in how creators get support.

Some Will Walk Away

Not everyone will agree. Some creators might want to stick with agencies. Some service providers may not like the loss of top-down control. That’s fine. That’s freedom. But it also means that those who stay in the co-op do so because they want to, not because they’re trapped.

That alone is worth building.

Final Thoughts: Build the System You Want to Be Part Of

Building another agency like VShojo doesn’t work. VShojo was meant to be the alternative to Hololive. But it ended up just the same, if not worse (at least Hololive still exists).

Going Indie forever can make sense for some creators, but there is a reason companies are the “big players” in every single industry. Staying Indie will keep you on a backfoot in many regards compared to corporate folks.

Also, Co-Ops are cool. Let’s make one!

YouTube Channel Banner Template (UPDATED 2024)

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 18:49:02 GMT

This template helps you create a channel banner in the right dimensions, so that it’ll look good on any device.

Download Template (full size)

Channel banner measurement basics

The Logo Safe Area (1548x238px) is always visible. If you put a logo or text in general in your banner, keep it inside this area.
The Standard Banner Area (1548x423px) is shown on most devices. On YouTube-on-TV apps (which includes Chromecasts, AppleTV and game consoles), viewers have to scroll up to see the the part of the banner that’s outside the logo safe area (vertically).
The Extended Banner (2560x423px) is shown on devices which have large enough screens. This is generally everything except mobile devices. Again, viewers on TVs will have to scroll up to see the full vertical content.
The area around this is completely dead space. It persists for legacy reasons: Many years ago, TVs used to show much more of the background image. However, due to most people doing banners and not bothering with a full view, even TV users now see a banner. Since YouTube is ignoring this area, you should too – use a simple color as your background for this area.
It’s generally helpful to have your banner exceed slightly the absolute minimum area. In case YouTube tweaks something in the future, this avoids you having to re-do your banner just for a few pixels. In the template above, the blue area is 450px tall in total, even though you actually just need to care about the inner 423px today.
The maximum file size you can upload to YouTube as your banner is 6MB.

Advanced Usage Tips

You can use your banner to inform viewers visiting your channel about current events and schedules. If you upload on Mondays and Fridays, you can say exactly that in your banner.
Keep the branding in your banner similar to your thumbnails and your profile picture. This doesn’t mean that you have to put your logo in all three, but rather that all elements should look like they belong together somehow.
Use high-quality materials, if at all possible. Taking a low-quality image and stretching it until it’s banner sized won’t look good.
Avoid overcrowding your banner and making your banner too “loud”. The banner exists above your channel, underneath it your videos and the subscribe button. You want to make the banner have some attention, but not have it grab all attention. It only needs to fit your branding, it doesn’t need to attract clicks!
Add a value proposition to your banner. If there’s something which makes your channel unique (like: “vlogs without talking”) which isn’t immediately obvious in your thumbnails, say it in your banner.

Questions or need a banner made for you? You can hire us!

Alternatively, you can also get help from other creators on discord.gg/youtubegaming.

Getting Started with YouTube Live Streaming

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 14:53:41 GMT

You want to get started with YouTube streaming – great!
YouTube works as most live streaming platforms in its core, but let’s go over the most important bits together.

Before starting a YouTube streaming you need to actually create a stream.

The creation process resembles closely a video upload because after the stream is done, the stream archive is treated just like a video.

Note: Before your first stream you have to wait a 24 hour safety period until you can actually start streaming

Create a YouTube Stream

As the first step you want to open your Live Dashboard and click the blue “Schedule Stream” Button in the top right corner.

All your current and upcoming Streams will be listed here as well

You can create 3 different kinds of Streams

Follow the Stream Creation process by providing a title, description and a thumbnail.
Don’t worry about making mistakes, you can still change those settings later.

Add a title, description and select your category

Add a custom Thumbnail, and decide whether to automatically add the VOD to a playlist

If you are in the YouTube Partner Programm, you can also chose what type of ads you want to run on the livestream.

Add different kinds of monetization options

In the customization tab, you can choose chat settings, e.g. who is allowed to chat or if you want to use a slower live chat mode. You can also choose a short trailer for your upcoming livestream that automatically plays on the stream watchpage before your stream starts.

If you already have 1000 subscribers you can choose on what livestream or premiere you want to redirect to after the stream has finished – same as before:
don’t worry you can choose this at a later moment as well.

Add chat settings and possible trailers and redirects

If you have already streamed before you will see a blue “Reuse Settings” button. This will allow you to skip most of the Stream Creation Process and already fill out most of the textboxes for you.

Use the previous stream settings for the next one

Connect OBS to YouTube

If you haven’t yet, read our OBS guide on setting up OBS.

Getting started with OBS: A beginner’s guide

Now let’s get to the exciting part:
If you want to livestream, you either need to connect your YouTube Account to OBS or you need to find your stream key. Since you want to go and do advanced streaming anyway in the future I recommend you invest a little bit of time and get familiar with stream keys, then you don’t have to switch in the future.

You can find your stream key in the Live Dashboard on the left side, and you need to paste it into OBS’ settings → Stream → stream key field.

We recommend to use the RTMP/RTMPS streaming protocol – this should be the setting for your randomly generated default streamkey. Make sure you select the YouTube RTMP Service in OBS, select “Use Stream Key (advanced)” and paste the correct streamkey so your stream can be received by YouTube.

Select the Youtube RTMP/RTMPS Service and click on “use Stream Key”

Copy your Streamkey from the LiveControlRoom

and paste the Streamkey into OBS

By default the stream key is displayed as a string of hidden characters because you are supposed to keep the stream key to yourself so noone can stream to your channel but yourself. If you have the feeling that a stream key is compromised, you can just generate a new one in the YouTube Live Dashboard with the “Reset” button.

Now if you press the “Start Streaming” button in OBS your stream will connect to YouTube and start the preview. You can go live via the big blue “Go Live” button in the top right corner or if you have selected the “enable auto-start” the stream will start once it receives data.

Same goes for stopping a stream:

Unless you have selected the “enable auto-stop” option you will have to manually end the stream with the big red “end stream” button in the top right corner.

Note:
I recommend enabling the auto-start and disabling the auto-stop. This will allow you to jump right into action as soon as you hit “start streaming” in OBS but prevent you from ending the stream prematurely if you accidentally end the stream or have technical difficulties, allowing you to reconnect to the already started stream.

Useful YouTube Streaming Features

YouTube streaming has some unique settings up the sleeve.

For example YouTube let’s you choose one of 3 different latency settings before the stream starts, all of which can be found on the bottom left side in the live dashboard:

Normal Latency, ~7 seconds delay depending on internet speed on the viewer side, but all resolutions are supported. This is the best setting for a good viewing experience but less suitable for a lot of chat interaction
Low Latency, ~3 seconds delay depending on internet speed on the viewer side, resolutions up to 1440p60 are supported. This is a good balance between chat interaction and viewing experience
Ultra Low Latency, <2 seconds delay with the highest demands for a stable & fast internet connection on the viewer side, resolutions up to 1080p60 are supported. This is the best option if you want to have real time interaction with your viewers. With this latency setting viewers might experience buffering due to data ingestion hiccups.

Additionally YouTube allows you to add an artificial delay up to 1 minute, which can be used in competitive environments (esports).

In contrast to other large livestreaming platforms, YouTube offers up to 2 hours DVR (Digital Video Recording) playback. That means your viewers can pause the stream, come back and don’t miss anything.
Keep in mind that while they have paused the live stream, the live chat will continue to show new messages. If they want to catch up they can resume the live stream and set the playback speed to 2x. The playback speed will reset to 1x once the playback has caught up.

You can also disable DVR if you don’t want your viewers to be able to use that feature.

The YouTube Live Chat will let you pin a message to the top of the chat. This pinned message will be highlighted in blue. To pin a message, send the message first into chat like you normally would. Click on the 3-dot menu next to the message and select the “pin message” option. To release a pinned message you can either click on the 3-dot menu and hit the “unpin message” button or repeat the same process as before. The name of the button will change to “replace pinned message”.

The YouTube Live Dashboard natively supports chat polls. You can create a poll by pressing the poll button in the chat area. A new pop-up will open where you can ask the question and give up to 4 possible answers. The poll feature defaults to “Yes” or “No” answer options but you can just rename them. Once the poll has been started, it will be pinned to the live chat and users will be able to cast their vote. Once you end the poll, the results will be posted into the chat.

Add Polls to your Livechat

Viewers can also Clip small highlights from your livestream via the watchpage. Unfortunately at the time of writing this guide there is no way to directly see what parts people clipped by the creator. As a best practice: Ask your viewers to share the clips on social media with a special Hashtag or in a dedicated area of your discord server. Dont worry, even if you didn’t create the clip yourself, both views and watchtime will be counted toward your stream archive. This wayFeature you can even create a short with material collected by your fans with YouTube’s Clip-2-Short feature. Keep in mind that YouTube Shorts are one of the most powerful growth tools right now.

Getting started with OBS: A beginner’s guide

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 16:34:05 GMT

OBS is an amazing tool for creators, if you want to live stream; record your videos or even do both at the same time. This guide will focus on beginner advice, and a later guide will tackle more advanced advice regarding the use of OBS and the YouTube Live Dashboard.

If you haven’t already, you can download OBS from the official website. Once you installed it, there should be an auto-configuration setup. You can follow it if you want to get a somewhat sensible baseline of settings, but sooner or later you will need to go into the settings we present here anyway to unlock the full potential of OBS.

On Bitrates, Framerates and Resolutions

For streaming, your biggest roadblock is probably going to be your upload speed. In many cases, upload speed is just a small fraction (10-20%) of your download speed. So before you stream, make sure you test your speed beforehand. You can try some for the following services to get an estimate:

Once you get your result, check the spreadsheet in YouTube’s bitrate and resolution guide and see which resolutions fit with your bandwidth. Then, in OBS, go to Settings → Video to set the resolution, and Settings → Output to set the bitrate you want.

Make sure you set the Output Mode to “Advanced”.

You can set the Video Resolution and Frame rate in the Video Settings.

You can set the Bitrate in the Output Settings for both streaming and recording.

Note: Make sure you leave some headroom so you have some bandwidth available for online gaming, discord and natural fluctuations in upload speed that might happen while you’re streaming.

Example

Let’s say my internet can do 25,000 kbit/s down and 5,000 kbit/s up. I subtract a bit of headroom and know that I probably can have somewhere between 4,000 and 4,500 kbit/s for just my stream. In the YouTube guide, I see 2 options which fit me well:

720p, 60 fps – 2,250 kbit/s to 6000 kbit/s:
This would give me smooth 60 fps streaming, with pretty much the best quality that 720p can offer. This setting would be ideal for fast-paced shooters like Apex Legends.
1080p, 30 fps – 3000 kbit/s to 6000 kbit/s:
This would give a higher resolution and still be smooth enough. For slower (“cinematic”) games, strategy games and especially point’n’click games and “just talking” streams, this is a good setting. For faster games, a lot of it will likely be very blurry.
The following option seems like it’d barely fit, but it probably isn’t a good idea to use:
1080p, 60 fps – 4500 kbit/s to 9000 kbit/s:
At this rate, I’m very close to the best my internet can do, and while a stream like this would be possible, the result will probably be worse than the above options. Compared to 1080p, 30fps, each bit you stream now needs to serve twice as many pixels, so the quality for all images will be fairly reduced. And compared to 720p60, you will probably have a very similar quality *anyway*.

Again: All of the above assumes my internet upload speed can do 5000 kbit/s at most.

If you don’t stream, you can in theory crank your bitrate as high as you want for your recordings. In practice, it’s useful to follow YouTube’s guide on bitrates for uploads (they’re somewhat higher than streaming rates) to keep file sizes in check:

1 hour of 8000 kbit/s (recommended for 720p60 and 1080p) takes up 3.6 GB
1 hour at 12,000 kbit/s (recommended for 1080p60) takes up 5.4 GB
1 hour at 60,000 kbit/s (recommended for 4K60) takes up 27 GB.

As for resolution, the same recommendations as above apply: If a resolution is too high for your bitrate (for example, 8000 kbit/s for 1080p60 video), the video will end up somewhat blurry. And if you use a bitrate that’s too high for your resolution, you just unnecessarily increase the file size.

Recording videos

If you record videos, you just need to specify where you want your recordings to be saved to in OBS’ Settings → Output (by default it picks your home directory). In there, you also set how good you want the quality to be (High quality, medium file size probably is good enough; if you go higher, make sure your drive can write data that quickly and has enough storage space available.

You can change the Recording directory in the Output settings.

As a recording format, you can either pick mkv, which has the advantage that it can survive a crash or bluescreen, but the disadvantage is that some video editors don’t play too nicely with it – or mp4 or mov. But those have it in reverse; they’re supported by basically everything, but will corrupt entirely on error. If you have the hard drive space to do it, you can record in mkv, then remux (either automatically by OBS, or with tools like handbrake) them to a format which your editor supports.

Regardless of what you do, there’s two settings which probably are useful for you:

in OBS → Settings → Output, you should try using a hardware encoder, unless you have a very high end CPU. Nvidia’s NVENC in particular is very good at its job. If you don’t have a GPU yet (or not even a PC), you may want to check out our getting started on a budget guide.
In OBS → Settings → Advanced, you can set the color space to 709 (601 was made for 480i content), and set the color range to “full” (“limited” is mostly for TV content)

Make sure you select the encoder that fits your needs and hardware….

— and select the correct color space.

Scenes and sources

So, now we’ve set up the various things needed to stream and record, except the one that you probably care about: What is actually visible on the video or stream?!
That’s what you need scenes and sources for.

A source is a description of an (image) input. A scene is a collection of sources, already ordered, so you can quickly switch between things.

In general, it’s useful to have the following scenes ready:

Your normal recording/streaming scene, which probably has your webcam and game visible
A webcam-only scene, so you can just talk to your chat, while setting things up, or record a vlog-style video
A break/technical difficulties scene, in case something goes wrong and you need to quickly switch away from what you’d normally show, or you just want to take a break.

Adding a scene is as simple as hitting the + Button in the bottom left corner.

Now that you have the scenes, let’s add sources to them!

Note: Your sources will be in a layer stack. This means that the source listed at the top will be shown above all the ones below it.
If you can’t seem to find your source, check if it’s high enough up in your stack, or if it’s being hidden by one of the elements above it!

To add your webcam/external HDMI recorder, add a video capture device
To record a game, add a game capture. You can set this up so that it always captures a fullscreen application, or, if you don’t run in fullscreen, specify which window title to capture. Game capture is your best bet at capturing most things.If game capture doesn’t work, you may want to try using a window capture or the display capture. Note that the display capture will capture everything shown on screen: Embarrassing notifications, photos, and passwords included. Window and game capture are your better options.
To add static elements, such as a stream overlay or some text, add an image source (for static images), a media source (for videos and sounds), or a text source (have a guess what that does).
You can add Filters to your sources which can enable you to for example set up a greenscreen capture in OBS itself.

Alternatively you can use PCIe Capture Cards like the AverMedia GC573 or Elgato 4K60 Pro MK.2 to capture an HDMI signal either as a duplicate of what is sent to your screen or as an external input from a DSLR or gaming console.

You can move your sources on screen by simply dragging them around with your cursor. Clicking the edges will scale them while preserving aspect ratio, alt-clicking the corners allows you to squish things.

Add Sources to your Scene by pressing the + Button in the Sources section and select what kind of Source you want to add.

The best 7 methods of secondary stream usage

Sun, 17 Jul 2022 22:31:38 GMT

Streams on their own are very fleeting: You’re live, you get some viewers, and once the stream ends it’s done. No more view – and even if a VOD is available, it typically gets nowhere near as many views as any other kind of video. It is hovever possible to rescue the content and give it a second life:

The formats

There are many different use cases for secondary content, all with different strengths and weaknesses. A categorization is given below, but note that it’s of course not always this cut and dry.

Stream Clips. Clips are generally somewhere between 10s and 2 min long and showcase a single funny moment that happened during your stream. It usually is worth it to dig deep into your effects box with them to further emphasize the funniness: Add sound effects, visual effects, zooms, in-video subtitles, add effects to the subtitles themselves, and maybe even do silly animations. Example for animations in a clip, Example, Example.
Tip: Make the clips as tight as you possibly can. Avoid intros, outros, long CTAs, and even additional context that isn’t strictly necessary for the clip to work.
Stream Clips as Shorts. All of the above applies, but instead of using the resolution the stream originally was at, you make it vertical (or at least square) and at most 60s long. Compared to normal clips it’s got the benefit of appearing in the shorts feed, potentially netting you new followers from it.
Tip: You can also use these shorts to market your streams across other social media, such as instagram, twitter, or tiktok.
Stream Highlights. Highlights are generally between 1-10 min long and and show an entire scene or sequence from a stream, for example the game-winning push or an entire game round in which you were effortlessly steamrolling the opponents. You still may want to do some well placed effects where beneficial, but it generally isn’t worth the work to go as overboard with editing as for clips. The most important edit to make here is to cut out dead air, low-energy bits where nothing of interest is happening as well as overly repetitive bits (eg you dying and having to go back to a checkpoint).
Tip: As a rule of thumb, if a video requires context to be understood, make a highlight. If it doesn’t, make a clip.
Edited VOD. An edited VOD is an entire stream to which the methods for the stream highlights are applied. Example, Example.
Full VODs. This is the full stream recording of your stream as it appears on YouTube when you press “Stop Stream”. Depending on which other formats you use, it may be good to keep it public, or be good to make it unlisted.
Tip: VODs, both edited and unedited, work amazingly well for any game with a story.
Second Tip: If you’re currently working towards monetization on YouTube, VODs are an amazing source for watch time. You will need to leave them online in that case.
Clip Compilations. A clip compilation is amazingly easy to make: You just take your clips, put them back-to-back maybe adding a simple transition and that’s it. This way you even can get a fourth and fifth view out of the initial material. Clip compilations generally only work with clips, but if you have a highlight that is interesting because of some repitition, splitting up the highlight into a group of smaller chunks and peppering it throughout the compilation may work well and give your compilation the feeling of a having some sort of story arc. Example in combination with a highlight, Example for a clip compilation made out of videos.
Hero videos. A hero video shifts away the focus from just the stream towards becoming its own media, so in addition to just supporting effects, some – or even most! – of the video is going to be recorded specifically for the video. The stream highlights and clips inside step back from being the main content towards a more supporting role, like just being B-roll or a visual support for the narrative. Example, Example of a video that lives on the border between clip compilation and hero video, Example.

How to split up your formats between channels, or: Should VODs be kept online?

This somewhat depends on your audience. However, for most gaming channels, it’s advisable to have Clips, Compilations, Highlights and Streams on one channel while keeping VODs unlisted. This way, people can subscribe to you just once and have easy access to all your edited content. Plus, every time you stream your stream will get highlighted on all your videos across YouTube.

The major exception to this is if you already have a channel with content for an audience that is distinct from your streams, or if you’re streaming on Twitch. In this case, it typically is good to have one channel for clips, compilations and highlights, a second for VODs and edited VODs, and a third that is your other content.

Note: You generally don’t want to publish two pieces of secondary content (eg a clip, a highlight and a compilation of the same moment) right after each other on the same channel as your audience may get fatigued by it. At the same time, you also have to consider that your audience interest shifts over time as games lose relevancy, so waiting for months and longer also isn’t necessarily the play.

Conclusion

Clips, highlights and the other formats mentioned above are an amazing way to get yourself more views and reach new audiences without having to produce drastically new content. As such they’re typically fairly easy to produce with a great “bang for your effort” value. If you don’t have time for making them yourself, you also can get an editor to make this content for you, or allow fans to make clips and highlights on their own channels!

The Wattenberg-Indicator

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 10:31:12 GMT

Moin.

The Hero–Hub–Help model which YouTube developed in 2014 has been a helpful tool for video marketeers to help them understand what they can do on YouTube. Namely:

Hero content is big events, which you can advertise in a big way. It gets huge attention on the day it’s happening, and then quickly becomes uninteresting again, such as the E3 presentations.
Hub content is regularly scheduled content, to keep subscribers (and viewers you’ve reached through the other content) interested in your channel. This content gets watched by your subscribers in the first couple days after upload, and then basically never again.
Help content (originally named: hygiene) is helpful content teaching users how to do stuff, ie tutorials. This content gets found at any time via search, but doesn’t add much value to subscribers to your channel.

Now, this model kinda makes sense if you have a product you’re making videos about. But it kinda breaks down once you put it into the context of a normal YouTuber: It doesn’t make sense to make a big event which only is relevant for a week, so Hero content is out. Hub content is more in line to what YouTubers do, but YouTubers do so much more than make videos which just are consistent and appeal to their current subscribers.

So, out of this model, only a few bits actually are usable for YouTubers, and even these only are so with caveats. So I thought about it a bit and came up with a new model instead:

The SEE–NTS Model / Wattenberg Indicator

SEE-NTS is short for the following aspects:

The SEE-NTS model can be thought of as 3-dimensional space.
Also, I like to pronounce it as “sea ants”.

Subscriber Content. Ie content made primarily for subscribers, featuring funny in-jokes, references to previous videos, stories that make the creator more relatable to their fans and such.
Evergreen Content. Ie content which will stay relevant to the world for the (forseeable) future.
Event Content. Ie content which is tied to certain events.

— with their counterparts —

New Viewer Content. Ie content which is accessible and fully understandable to someone who never has seen any of your content before.
Timely Content. Ie content which is relevant during a specific window of time only, and then basically never again, eg news.
Serial Content. Ie content which you can sure you’ll see more of next week anyway.

The individual aspects make predictions on whether the view distribution will be flat over time, or have a spike shortly after publication:

Subscriber content is watched by subscribers, so it’ll get most of it’s views within the first week of publication, while New Viewer content may get discovered by potential new subscribers at any time.
Timely content is only relevant shortly after publication, after which it’s old news. Evergreen content is ever relevant.
Event content is most watched during the event (→ Tentpoling), while Serial content is watched all year round.

As such, the model explains why Hero-Hub-Help makes the predictions that it does: Hero content is minmaxed for spikeyness (Event/Timely, with a lot of advertising thrown at it so that talking about the Subscriber/New Viewer axis kinda is pointless), Hub content is Subscribers/Serial content (and doesn’t nearly spike as high), and Help content is minmaxed for flatness.

SEE-NTS also allows for other content to be categorized sensibly:

Mr Beast’s content is no doubt Serial (it’s not really a surprise what he’ll do next), but features some Event-like qualities (he basically makes his own events in each video by giving away a lot of money). His videos are accessible for New Viewers, yet appeal for Subscribers as well. And the stunts he pulls generally age well, so: His content sits pretty much in the middle and manages to more or less cover all bases.
A band doing a concert live stream is an Event for everyone who already knows the band (ie Subscriber-ish), but since music doesn’t really get outdated, it also is strongly Evergreen.
Videos like “how to decorate your house for Halloween” and similar seasonal content is Evergreen while the (yearly repeating) Event is going on. This kind of content technically could still work for Subscribers primarily, but realistically it’s probably gonna be a optimized for New Viewers.

Using SEE–NTS for Content Programming

SEE-NTS can be used to assess a channel’s current standing to make decisions for future content programming.

Most obviously, if the vast majority of views a channel has come from subscribers and all formats on the channel are made for subscribers, that channel may want to develop a format which is meant to appeal to non-subscribers and draw them in.

If a creator feels like they’re grinding away in a hamster wheel, but can’t afford to take a day off because all their subscribers will lose interest, maybe Evergreen Subscriber content would be able to bridge these gaps in the future.

If a musician can only realistically make one big Event/Evergreen-type video a year and struggles to re-activate subscribers in-between uploads, them making Subscriber/Serial/Timely content in-between to fill the gaps and keep people engaged throughout the year may be useful.

Of course, as always: It’s hard to recommend any specifics without knowing the actual channel. I hope however it can help creators, at a glance, find out where they are with their current programming, and where they have potential left to explore.

Limitations

SEE-NTS as a model doesn’t predict how successful content is going to be, it only can predict the rough shape of the view curve. The real world (and “The Algorithm”) of course can always throw a spanner in the works by having your viewers receive the video differently than what you designed it for.

Unlike Hero-Hub-Help, SEE-NTS doesn’t do content recommendations. For example, it’s not entirely clear to me what Subscriber/Event/Evergreen content would even look like, while for Help content, the hint already is in the name, and thus are the strategies you should take (ie SEO on your customer’s troubles).

SEE-NTS is untested as a tool for content programming. The questions that need to be answered in the future are:

Is SEE-NTS useful to accurately describe different channel programming strategies?
Is SEE-NTS complete, or are there more factors which are essential for programming?
Do creators who use SEE-NTS understand their programming better than those who don’t?
Is SEE-NTS useful to find gaps in the content programming?

Overall thoughts

From what I can tell so far, the SEE-NTS model seems promising. Even if it fails as a “practical” tool that can tell creators “do this”, it may still be a worthwhile academical tool as it categorizes content way better than Hero–Hub–Help.

Of course, I’d love even more for it to be useful as a practical tool. I guess time will tell how good this thing is.

I got a strike. What now?

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 19:37:17 GMT

If you just received your fist strike on YouTube, your first course of action should be to calm down. Do not delete any videos. You are in an uncomfortable situation, yes. But you aren’t lost, and there is plenty of time to fix the situation. Now, let’s understand the situation:

Is it a community guideline or a copyright strike?

YouTube has two strike systems. The community guideline strike system counts your violations against YouTube’s community guidelines, as determined by YouTube themselves. The copyright strike system is an implementation of DMCA (US copyright law), so YouTube only is the messager in this situation.

What to do if you get a Community Guideline Strike

When you get a strike, you first should try to understand what the strike has been issued for. YouTube will send you an email with a reason, which will have a help center article attached to it. For example, Spam, deceptive practices and scams has this article. There also is a list of all strike reasons.

If you think YouTube is right in their assessment, you can acknowledge it and just move on. The first strike comes without any repercussinos (it’s just a warning), the ones after may put temporary restrictions on your account. Strikes expire after 90 days. If you think you understand where you went wrong, you may want to edit your video in a way that solves the issue and try again. Note that YouTube cares a lot about context, so superficial changes alone may not be enough. For example, if a video of a sexy, naked dance gets taken down, reuploading it with a few censor bars won’t make it okay. It may be slightly more acceptable, but if it’s overall purpose is still to be sexually gratifying, it’ll be taken down all the same.

If you think YouTube is wrong in their assessment, you can appeal. A link for that can be found in your YouTube Studio. Often times, giving more context on what’s happening in the video is useful, especially if your video falls into one of the EDSA categories (educational, documentary, scientific, artistic). Once you appeal, it can take a few weeks for YouTube to respond.

If YouTube denies your appeal, you can contact @teamyoutube on twitter as a last resort. This typically only works if YouTube is very obviously wrong (for example, taking down a single video of you just testing our your mic as spam or porn), and it can happen that you don’t get any reply here at all.

If all of this fails, you’re out of luck. Should you try to re-upload your video, note that it may be taken down for the exact same reason relatively quickly, so avoid doing that.

What to do if you get a Copyright Strike

Copyright strikes are effectively a copyright owner saying that you violated their copyrights. Note that in addition to copyright strikes, there also are copyright claims. A copyright claim may run ads on the claimed video, or block it in some countries, however, it won’t have any effect on your channel. You can have as many claims as you want. A copyright strike will remove your video and, once you get 3 strikes, terminate your channel.

When you get a copyright strike, the first question to ask yourself is: Is the video completly my work? A video only can be completely yours if you don’t use anything that anyone else has made. For example, if you play a game in your video, that game is copyrighted by whoever made the game. Should you use music, the music is copyrighted unless you made all of it yourself (melody, chords, lyrics and playing instruments).

If you didn’t make everything used in the video, the next question is: Do I have licenses for every third party work in my video?. That is to say, if you have documents from the copyright owner(s) of the work(s) you used in your video which state you’re allowed to use them, you’re fine.

If you can answer the above questions with yes, you can pretty safely send a DMCA counter notification. If you happen to have contact to the claimant, you may want to send them an email / call them directly instead to sort this out, as that can be much faster. Once you send a counter notification, the claimant has 10 business days to respond. And if they don’t, your video will get restored within 10-14 business days.

If you used third party content in your video without a license, you need to get licenses (or at least permissions) to use the content. You can even do this after your video has received the strike. Note that asking for a free permission (or, equivalently, asking the copyright holder to retract the claim) is unlikely to result in anything useful; if they were fine with you using it for free, they wouldn’t have striked you. Especially for more popular works (movies and music from the charts), it’s likely that these licenses will be rather expensive.

There are a few special cases for copyright strikes, such as:

“The name of the claimant is not the name of the publisher.” This is quite common; Musicians especially won’t go around sending strikes to reuploads of their music on their own time – they’ll hire a copyright management company such as AdRev or DistroKid instead. Just because you see a name you don’t recognize and some reddit post saying they’re fake doesn’t mean that they actually are.
“This is fair use.” Fair use is a defense you can use in a court of law. Sending a counter notification is forcing the copyright owner to agree with you or drag you to court, so make sure you have the resources to fight this in court before you proceed.
“I sent a counter notification, but YouTube rejected it.” This happens if YouTube is very, very sure that you don’t have any legal ground for your counter notification, and blocks your notification to prevent you from dragging yourself to court.

In all of these special cases, ask a copyright lawyer for advice. Also, note that I’m not one of ’em.

What to do if your YouTube channel got terminated

For channel terminations, the same rules as for strikes apply generally:

Don’t panic.
If it’s a termination because of community guidelines or terms of service, you can appeal using this form.
If the appeal fails, you can tweet @teamyoutube
If it’s a termination because of copyright strikes, you need to resolve this with the copyright holders, either by getting a license or by sending free-form counter notifications.

For any further questions feel free to drop us a line on discord or via email.

Be a YouTuber, not a NewTuber. Make great Content.

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 19:44:35 GMT

Moin. Running a YouTube channel is hard. There’s a lot of things to consider, ranging from thumbnails and SEO to get found better, to monetization and branding. And while each of these things are important in their own right, it’s easy to lose track of what really matters: Making great content.

Your content is the actual video. The things you say, the things you show, the narrative, the structure. And it’s this content that makes people laugh, that makes them think, that amazes them, or makes them learn. Your content is fundamentally the most important thing about your channel, without it, none of your other strategies will work. For example, a good thumbnail and title without great content is just clickbait. And as for SEO, well, the most important metric is user happiness, followed by watch time. All your keyword research won’t have much effect if it’s not backed up by great content.

So how do you make great content? Well, it all starts with the idea.

A Great Idea

Good ideas are hard to come by, great ones even harder. Getting a great idea consists of two parts: First getting any sort of idea for a video, and then selecting the good ones.

To get ideas, you can use pretty much any “getting creative” strategy. I won’t go into too much detail about that here (just googling “how to get creative” should get you plenty tutorials) but one which I like to do is: Being bored. Specifically, a certain kind of bored in which I am away from entertainment (social media, videos, …), but am just stuck with me and my surroundings. Because of this, I tend to be very creative when falling asleep, or in those blissful moments when I wake up before the alarm and just wait for it to go off.

When you do get ideas, make sure to write them down, especially if they happen around your sleep. You will forget them otherwise.

Once you have a list of ideas, simply pick the best one to make your next video about. I say “simply”, but you can consider a lot here:

Uniqueness. If you have an idea which hasn’t been done before, it’s probably better than something that’s been done to death. For example, a travel guide to fictional places (eg from games) would probably be better than yet another Minecraft let’s play.
Detail. Some ideas sound great at first, but may fall apart on closer inspection and end up sucking after all. The more detailed your idea is, the more likely it is that you’d already have stumbled upon any idea-breaker, so it might stay a good idea until the end.
Awesome-to-effort ratio. While sorting ideas, you’ll find that you could with a quick and easy thing, or with a way better, but more time-intensive idea. When choosing between them, make sure that an idea that takes 3x as much time to complete also is 3x as awesome as the quick idea.

There are more factors to consider (such as: does the idea fit your audience?), but these make more sense in a later section. Especially if you’re just starting out, you don’t need to worry about them yet, and focus on exploring instead.

The EDE model: Exploring, Developing and Established Creators

Being self-critical

Once you have a great idea, you need to execute it. How to execute it is your job – since it’s different for each genre and each creator, there’s very little to be said which would cover anything to a satisfactory degree. The important part is that you do execute the idea at all and make videos.

If you do a good job at executing the idea, you’ll have a very good video. But chances are – especially if you’re doing these things for the first time – that the execution will be sorta meh. And that’s alright, under three conditions:

You need to acknowledge that your content isn’t perfect. This is key to all improvement.
You need to know which part didn’t work.
You need to figure out a way to fix it for your next video.

The first point should be self-explanatory, but figuring out the other two points can be tricky.

How to figure out what part didn’t work

YouTube’s explanation for the retention graphs

One way to do this is the viewer retention graph in YouTube Analytics. It’s a brutal, no-sugarcoat-kind of feedback on how your content has been perceived. On the right, and in the studio itself, you’ll see a quick explanation of how to read it.

Overall, the graph tells you about a couple of things. Most importantly, if the graph drops off very quickly in the beginning, your content didn’t meet the viewer’s expectations.

In the best case, that just means your title was a bit too sensational, which can be fixed the easy way (just update the title) or the hard way (re-do the video to make the content delivers on all your promises).

In the worst case, it means that your entire video straight-up doesn’t work. Ie that either the starting idea or the execution or both were bad enough that the viewer went back to look for something else to watch. There isn’t really anything you can fix in this case, but you still can learn.

If you see the problems right away, fantastic! If not, try to think of the individual aspects that make up your video: Does the pacing work? Is anything noticeably unpleasant about the video? Can the idea even carry a video of this length? And so on.

Generally though, if you don’t see what you’re doing wrong, you might need more knowledge on what constitutes a good video. You can gain this knowledge by watching other videos and analyzing them properly, or you can hire me to do it for you and teach you everything I know so you can get back to making videos more quickly.

Fixing the things that don’t work

After you’ve figured out what went wrong, it now is time to make sure you don’t repeat your mistakes. Sometimes, this happens automatically as the same stroke of bad luck probably won’t happen twice, or you aren’t using a specific thing which caused you trouble before.

Other times, it’s up to you though to make sure you won’t repeat the same problem twice. For example:

If your problem is a lack of structure, preparing a script might help.
If your sound is very bad and you can be barely understood, you can fix this with The Audio Guide to Happiness, or: How to make your Streams & Videos sound good. Note that this is the only instance in which upgrading your mic might actually improve the content itself. Generally, a viewer watching your video in 360p on their phone with $5 earbuds won’t notice whether you’re using equipment costing $50 or $50000.
If it’s the way you come across, you might want to practice how you say things and your body language while doing it.
If your problem is that your video runs out of steam, making it shorter might help. Also, if it’s an idea only good for a handful of seconds, consider making a #shorts video out of it.

Conclusion

If you’ve come this far, you know how to find and filter ideas, and how to self-critically evaluate your content. You may find yourself drifting towards the “make every video your best one yet” mindset in the future. This will be helpful to get your content to new heights. That said, should this start hindering your video production due to perfectionism, you might op to go for the softer “raise the average quality of your past 5 videos” instead.

Also: This is not all yet. This post focussed on things you can improve for yourself. But there are near endless possibilities in the realm of market analysis and marketing which you can consider. We will discuss these in a later post, so make sure you stay tuned here and follow us on twitter to get an update on that.

How to get clicks on YouTube thumbnails: The AIDA model

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 12:41:20 GMT

Making thumbnails can be difficult and frustrating. Even if you have the technical skills to make them pretty, they still might not work out and get abysmal click-through rates. So why is that? Well, that’s what this YouTube thumbnail tutorial is about. It’s a bit theoretical, but you should get a fundamental understanding on the “why”.

To figure this out, we must first think about a potential viewer browsing the home page. Let’s call her Tama. When Tama looks at youtube.com, she is immediately flooded with a dozen or so recommended videos. She quickly scans the page, and her gaze immediately sticks to the most attention-grabbing thumbnail. Maybe she likes it, maybe she doesn’t, and if she doesn’t, she’ll look at another thumbnail – probably another one that’s very attention-grabbing.

Step 1: Generate Attention

If your thumbnail doesn’t get noticed immediately, you have a bit of a problem. Tama only has so much free time in her day, so there might be only a few videos she can actually watch. If Tama doesn’t notice your thumbnail on the first go, you might have another chance. But the more often it’s not noticed, the higher the chance she won’t get around to watching your video at all.

There are various ways to make your thumbnail generate more attention, some of which we already talked about in our more practical guide: How to not fuck up your thumbnail. But in short, they are:

Use a high contrast.
Use bright colors.
Have a clear focal point.
Use few elements. I’d generally try to limit it at 4.

But Tama isn’t a toddler who you can entertain by just showing high-contrast bright colors. Tama is an adult woman who has interests on her own. And no matter how often she’ll get an economics video recommended, she doesn’t care about economics and won’t watch it, even if it’s got the most attention-grabbing thumbnail ever. So we need to do something about that, too.

Step 2: Generate Interest

When your thumbnail has done the heavy lifting, your title can jump in to help out. Tama now is examining the thumbnail and title together closer. Your thumbnail and title now need to work together to formulate a promise that clicking on the video will lead to an interesting couple of minutes. Unlike the rather subconscious process of getting attention, getting interest on something depends on your audience and what their background and interests are like. Because of that, the following is rather vague. If you’d like some examples more tailored to your channel, you can ask us.

That said, to generate interest:

Example of a Thumbnail that both generates attention (bright color) and interest (title contradicts the obvious). Thumbnail source: Vsauce

Have a solution for a problem. Especially if people come from search, with a question like “how do I fix XYZ”, a video with the title “How to fix XYZ” would probably have them very interested.
Use Clickbait. You can withhold information from the title and thumbnail (censoring part of the image, have the title refer to a vague “this”, etc.). Doing so may come back to bite you later on though.
Use branding. This is entirely useless for people who don’t know your channel, but if you do have a following that is interested in your channel, regardless of what it does, it might help.
Use emotions. A laughing or a crying face in the thumbnail says a lot about the video itself.
Spark curiosity. For example, a completely yellow thumbnail with the title “this is not yellow” is such an obvious contradiction that it can’t possibly be a mistake. So what’s going on here?

We’re almost there now. But not quite.

Step 3: Generate Desire

We now want Tama to actually want to watch the video. For this, we can promise her that our video is worth watching. This promise usually is implied rather than explicit. In above “this is not yellow” example, the promise is “it will make sense by the end of this video” or maybe “you will learn something”. In a repair tutorial, it’s “you can make your thing work again”.

A rare example of an explicit promise. Thumbnail source: Tom Scott

Desire, even moreso than Interest, is not just dependent on your channel, but also to each individual viewer, so even coming up with examples is difficult here. Even if you have interest already, there are a lot of reasons why Tama might not want to watch your video:

Maybe she is generally interested in the topic, but not “40 minute lecture”-interested.
Perhaps she has learned that clickbaity videos (or videos from a particular channel) tend to fail to deliver.
Or maybe she knows about the subject already, so your video is redundant to her.

Step 4: Action.

Unlike products (for which this Attention–Interest–Desire–Action, or in short: AIDA model has been developed), watching videos is free. On YouTube anyway. So there’s very little in-between someone desiring to watch a video and them actually watching it, short of external constraints (“I need to get to work now”).

Conclusion: How to increase thumbnail CTR using AIDA

On top of good SEO to make sure that your thumbnails appear in search queries relevant to your content, you can optimize the effect your thumbnail has:

Optimize for attention. Ensure that your video will be the first that’s seen when someone looks at YouTube (and your video algorithmically is featured there).
Optimize for interest. Give people a reason to click on your thumbnail.
Optimize for desire. Make people want to click on your thumbnail.
Find a balance. Often, improving one area means sacrificing another. A thumbnail that has an awesome _IDA but is so invisible that everyone fails to notice it will perform just as poorly as a video that is very visible, but provides no reason for anyone to watch it.
And lastly: Deliver on your promises. Your viewers have limited time, and they will arrive in your video with an expectation that you’ll now keep your promise. If you don’t immediately deliver, they’ll generally exit the video within the first 15-30 seconds.

Alright. That was it with this YouTube thumbnail tutorial. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask.

AVerMedia NEXUS AX310 & Streamer MIC 330 – Review

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:40:10 GMT

When talking about taking streaming or content creation in general to the next level upgrading audio equipment is one of the first things to do. For reference on what might be a good fit for you, have a look at our audio guide to happiness.

In this review/ guide we will talk about one possible one-stop-shop solution that might be interesting to you. First of all, I have to disclose: AVerMedia sent me their NEXUS interface and their dynamic mic for review. They did so for free, but this is not a sponsored post. Going into the test, I’ve been using AVerMedia products at several business events as compact devices that delivered good quality images so my expectations for their audio equipment are high as well.

So let’s answer the question: Are the AX310 and MIC330 worth 450€?

Live Streamer MIC 330 AM330

Let’s start with the mic itself. It’s a pretty straightforward dynamic XLR mic with a directional cardioid polar pattern. It doesn’t need phantom power and has a ⅜ and ⅝ inch connector which fits with most microphone stands/arms out there. Unfortunately, there isn’t a table stand included, which to be fair I expected for the price of 99,90€. It does come with an integrated pop-filter which is very nice, given you have to sit roughly 10cm in front of it for it to actually pick up the sound. This is not a flaw with the product itself though but rather with dynamic mics in general. On the other side, this has the advantage of not picking up any surrounding sounds like birds outside or computer fans when they are at full throttle, therefore decreasing the need for soundproofing your recording setup.

The AM330 has an integrated pop-filter and you can turn off the mic with the switch on the right.

So, having an XLR mic also means you need a USB interface to connect it to your computer. That might be one you’ve picked up for cheap second hand or you stick with AVerMedia again. I’ve included a link to myself trying out the video in case you want to hear what it sounds like in combination with the next piece of equipment, the AVerMedia Live Streamer NEXUS.

Live Streamer NEXUS AX310

The AVerMedia Live Streamer NEXUS is a XLR-USB interface to connect any mic to your computer, able to mix up to six audio lines including virtual audio lines and have integrations to OBS and YouTube to show the chat on the touchscreen. Let’s go through the functions and see what’s good and what needs to be improved to determine if this is worth the 349,00€.

Let’s talk about some general points first. The NEXUS AX310 is quite heavy with its 1kg, but this is actually an advantage since it provides enough weight to not slight easily away whenever I try to operate it, something that happens a lot to me while using the Elgato Streamdeck. Also, I really like the magnetic stand that comes with it. It has the perfect height and angle for me.

Audio Interface

The NEXUS does what it is supposed to do. Once connected to the PC, installing the software, and a couple of attempts to actually connect and update the firmware all the virtual audio lines were set up and worked as intended. Note that it is important to take an hour or two to sit down and plan out your audio line setup. It will make things easier although I have to admit it was very easy to understand even without having read the manual (who does that anyway). For the example video I used the system sound to regulate some background music for streaming, remember to only use music you have the licenses to, in my case epidemic sound, had the MIC 330 connected to the interface and Discord on the Chat line.

The mastered output directly fed into one of my OBS mic lines and being able to regulate every line with a haptic radio knob was a very good feeling. There also is a spotify integration but I would keep my distance from that due to possible copyright problems that come with using it. Also being able to mute certain channels with a push of a button makes it really handy to mute music and microphone during cutscenes in game recordings for example.

The NEXUS AX310 does not only have an XLR port but also support monitoring headphones (3.5mm) and also optical audio from consoles.

OBS Integration

Setting up OBS integrations was a bit of a pain in the butt. Instead of using the direct API like competitor products such as the stream deck, the AVerMedia Nexus relies on the OBS WebSocket plugin which needs to be downloaded and installed first before you can actually connect your NEXUS to OBS. It wasn’t too bad but it is still something I would say is not suited for a total beginner but rather someone who has already a bit of experience in tinkering with OBS, plugins and widgets. The same functions are mirrored to work with StreamLabs OBS but in all honesty, just use OBS. You can do all the fancy shit SLOBS offers in OBS as well without impacting your performance too much. Of course, the NEXUS will connect to AVerMedia’s recording software as well. All integrations support the switching of scenes, start and stop a recording as well as start and stop an outgoing Livestream.

YouTube Integration

Connecting your YouTube channel to the NEXUS was easily completed via an oauth prompt. But I need to point out that NEXUS gets more permissions on your channel than it actually needs. So imho this needs to be reworked. Regarding the actual features, once you have established a connection, there is a live view counter telling you how many viewers are watching your stream, a subscribe alert, and a chat display widget. The chat widget could have a slightly larger font size to it for normal text while reducing the size of standard emotes while increasing the size of custom emotes. Unfortunately, that is not customizable for users as far as I have seen. For those of you who are keener on streaming on twitch, the exact features are mirrored for a stream integration over there as well. I am missing a ‘send chat’ feature with both integrations.

The NEXUS AX310 with its 6 knobs and 4 VIP (very important programs) buttons.

System Features

This part of the review is rather interesting for both using the NEXUS in your stream as well as outside your stream. The soundboard feature is a nice addition for adding a bit of creativity for new subscribers/members to your channel or just as additional entertainment. Outside your stream/recordings, I can see the system features as being a nice addition to a productive workflow.

Let me explain: The four buttons on the right I’ve assigned to OBS, Steam. Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro making it easy to start up my most important programs for creating. On the touchscreen itself, I’ve mapped some useful hotkeys for said programs. Unfortunately, it does not support ALT-key or WINDOWS-key multi hotkeys so opening the windows screenshot tool with WINDOWS + SHIFT + S or exporting in Photoshop ALT + SHIFT + CTRL + W are unfortunately out of the scope. I hope the functionality will be added later on with the continuation of the development.

System functions also include a text macro with up to 500 characters. This unfortunately is only useful outside of your stream for answering FAQs on your discord for example. I am really missing the option in the YouTube and Twitch Integration, this could be a very nice way to send reminders into chat, eg a follow/subscribe CTA or product placement texts, and yes, those are actually worth something, read more about it in our guide about sponsorships and brand collaborations.

Conclusion

This post was about the question: Is it worth getting the AVermedia Streamer MIC 330 and Nexus AX310 for 450€?
As someone who always struggles with free space on my desk, I think the combo is indeed worth it. If you are in need of an audio interface for your mic anyway and don’t want to clutter your desk further with a Streamdeck, this is the right choice.

Comparing it to the setup I’ve been using up until then (Rode NT-USB (~150€) & Elgato Streamdeck (115€)), the really big difference is having the haptic audio line mixer. Benefits will of course stack if you are using AVerMedia’s recording software & hardware as well, giving you a one-stop-shop solution for streaming. I have to admit after the test, I do like the clarity of dynamic mics over condenser mics.

The main drawback is the currently limited functionality as a Streamdeck alternative and the still missing SDK Framework for modding the NEXUS.

This is not a beginner product!
It is a very good product for creators expanding their channels from a hobby into a semi-professional or even professional environment tough and I would recommend it under that circumstances.

($) – Affiliate Link / Advertisement

How to use Social Media to grow your YouTube Channel

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 03:18:06 GMT

Moin.

If wielded well, social media can be a powerful tool. It can reach new audiences, boost your old videos, and might even make your video go viral. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s first start with what doesn’t work. We’ll get to what works later, down to the strategy for each section.

Table of Contents

3 Ways that DON’T work
Promoting your Videos in Reddit/Discord/Facebook Communities
- … but it’s not always so simple
Create Teasers for your Content
Using Social Media well
- Social Media Strategies
Grow your Brand, not just your Channel

3 Ways that DON’T work

Relying on just Automation. You can easily run a social media account for your YouTube channel by simply automatically letting a bot post all your updates. This is most commonly done with IFTTT. Doing this won’t grow your YouTube channel however. Because a twitter feed that is just posting your videos every couple days is just plain boring. It may have some value to existing subscribers who for some reason prefer to be notified via twitter, but for everyone else it’s just spam. You also aren’t reaching any new audience with this.
Replying to everything and everyone. Social media is great to get talking to strangers. But it also is easy to get carried away: If you start chatting with folks all day long, you might find some new followers and maybe even friends – but these people aren’t inherently interested in your videos. So going for this strategy is at best very inefficient, and at worst will make you procrastinate your day away instead of working on your videos.
Self-Promotion on Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups. This is especially true when using channels or communities that are aimed towards creators, and towards self-promotion. In essence, you’re just not reaching any audience in these places, you’ll only reach other creators who also want to share their content. It’s like you’re a plumber at the world plumber’s conference asking around if anyone needs a leak fixed. It’s just pointless.
Now, it is possible to promote your content in places where your audience is. However, it’s more difficult than just finding the right community and posting your video link – actually, let’s make an entire section on this

Promoting your Videos in Reddit/Discord/Facebook Communities

As we’ve established above, you shouldn’t promote your videos in self-promotion communities. But where else should you? The answer is probably as simple as it is obvious: In communities that are about your content. If you make beauty content, share your video in beauty tips communities. Outdoor content might fit well in outdoor, nature and maybe even fitness communities, or communities about the place you visited.

Outside of being a great place to share content, these communities also are a place for you to find inspiration and collaboration partners. Maybe another person will talk about an insider tip, only known to locals. Maybe you’ll find people who do great text analyses, which you can use as basis for a video. And maybe it’ll just be a pleasant community to be around.

When looking for communities, you’ll find some with millions of members, all the way down to some with just dozens of members. Sharing in all of them is fair game. More members means more potential viewers, but it might also mean less focus and more competition. This means for example that if you share a video about a specific brand of shoes in a general shoe community and a community for just that brand, it may get way more views from the brand-specific one, even if the brand community is orders of magnitude smaller.

… but it’s not always so simple

So, assuming you have a video about a game, you might go for the subreddit and discord that is about the game – and quickly find your video get ignored, downvoted to hell, or worse, removed by a moderator. What happened? The problem is twofold:

On one hand, your video might be something the community sees every day. Especially in the gaming genre, chances are, if you’re doing any sort of video series of you playing one game, there’s dozens of others doing it, too. This makes your video rather redundant, and also not very interesting. This even can still be true if you only collect the highlights: In the grand scheme of things, your highlights may not be super interesting.

On the other hand, the audience you serve with your videos may be different from the community. For example, if you have a maths video that first talks about the basics necessary to understand it and only then has the grand reveal, you may alienate a community mostly consisting of maths professionals. Simply because it’s too simple.

I can’t really offer a solution to the first problem. If your content isn’t interesting to a community, there probably isn’t much you can do. Some content just isn’t super shareable, like personal vlogs. As an aside, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should switch up the format. Hub content (or anything optimized primarily towards subscribers and seriality in the SEE-NTS model) is very useful to keep subscribers happy and turn subscribers into fans. You just won’t reach many new people with it.

For the second problem there is a solution though, which is applicable not only to communities, but social media in general.

Create Teasers for your Content

Social media sites have recognized that images are better than links, so they automatically try to embed one when you share a link. But what’s better than still images? Moving images! This means that if you share your video on social media, you may want to use a short video clip or GIF from the video along with it.

As for what clip to share, there is a range of options:

The part most relevant to the community. If your full video wouldn’t do well in a community because they expect something that only is a small part of your video, share it to them! You won’t lose out on views, since the full video wasn’t really appreciated by that community anyway. It’s not the most effective, but you’d still get your name (and maybe even some nice backlinks for SEO purposes) out there.
Trailers. Just like you can do a trailer for a movie, you can make a trailer for a YouTube video. A trailer should state the premise of your video, some clips of what makes it interesting, as well as some funny or memorable lines. In the context of a YouTube video, this may be you laughing hard at something. Or it may be something impressive which makes the viewer want to get the full context of.
A meme. This doesn’t need to be the standard internet meme, you can also make part of your content intentionally memeable and try to leverage the creativity of your followers to make the meme somewhat widespread.
A distilled, vague version. Something that would work on Tiktok (or even a different YouTube channel for #shorts). It would make sense standalone, but maybe leave some questions open which your full video then would answer. For example, if you did a phone review, using a conclusion as the teaser in the style: “this video is the best phone on the market for it’s price, as long as you don’t mind the big flaws with it’s screen. Why? Watch the full video” might work well.

(there’s another option, but before I get to that, let me first give you some context)

You probably know the rules to grow your YouTube channel: Post frequently, find your niche, optimize your content and so on. The very same rules apply to any social media. This is because these rules aren’t necessarily YouTube rules, they’re audience growth rules. You can even apply them to TV shows quite well! So of course, you can use them for your social media as well.

This also is where the point I left out earlier comes back into play:

The heart of the content. This is a scary option to choose. You just show the main thing a potential viewer wants to see from your video. Doing so means that your video is entirely redundant and doesn’t need to be watched, since this short clip satisfies all curiosity.

Doing this would be a bad idea in the context of promoting your YouTube channel. You basically are just giving up views and ad revenue for what? Facebook likes? Well, yes! The point of doing this is to grow your social media presence, not just by posting companion pieces to your YouTube channel, but by letting it be valuable even to people who don’t follow you on YouTube.

And perhaps surprisingly, this isn’t a total waste of money. Your new followers might watch your future content, sure, but where this actually gets interesting is brand deals. If you have a million YouTube followers, but no real twitter/Facebook/Instagram presence, it tells brands that you might make good videos, but aren’t a good influencer. That is, a person who gets others to do (and buy) stuff. If you do have lots of followers and also a few viral posts you can point to, you can make increase the pay for brand deals significantly. Speaking of which, don’t undersell yourself! Just maybe use the heart of older videos that don’t get too many views anymore instead of always the latest.

Social Media Strategies

I already touched on a few of them, but here’s some more for completeness sake. This section really is more “how to grow your twitter” or whatever than really YouTube-related, but if you’re unfamiliar with it, it might be useful:

Use relevant (preferably: trending) hashtags, appropriate for the platform. (few on twitter, more on Instagram)
Post regularly.
Use automation where applicable.
Re-share old content when it’s relevant (dates, events).
Engage with your audience and fellow creators in your niche
Have every social media account valuable enough on its own to warrant someone to follow

Grow your Brand, not just your Channel

If you employ all the strategies listed above, you’re probably doing that already. The point is, a strong brand across various social media is going to let you reach new audiences, it will get you better sponsorship deals, it will give you a backup net should any one of your social media accounts get terminated, and yes, it’ll help you grow your YouTube channel, too.

It also is a lot of work. So make sure you don’t spread yourself too thinly by trying to run all the social media at once. If necessary, you can hire some additional folks so you don’t have to do everything from pre-production to via production, analytics and marketing to social media management yourself. And while we’re not social media managers, we can help you in other ways. You can consult us for content strategy, help with sponsorship deals, analyzing your channel, and yes, for your social media strategy. Though I suppose if you’ve read this far, you kinda know in general what we’d tell you for your channel specifically. Welp. Maybe we can help you in other ways, too?

Let’s talk about money & sponsorships!

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 10:50:21 GMT

You are a creator and a company wants to work with you.
Great! Don’t undersell yourself.

Even if you think you don’t have any value yet because you’re just a small channel, you probably have more going for you than you realize, namely production cost and market value.

Production costs

‘Production costs’ can be divided into:

Material cost
Did you have expenses such as music licenses or did you buy a game? Did someone create assets for you like an overlay or a lowerThird?
Time spent on production
Did you work on your own or did someone help you? Also how long did each person involved work? Remember there is something called minimum wage if applicable in your country.
Equipment cost
Did you rent a camera/greenscreen for this shoot? Remember that you have already bought a recording computer, microphone, etc and you might want to amortize these hardware parts with the revenue you earn from ads AND also from brand cooperation. Also, remember to save a small buck for equipment replacement in the future.

Market value

‘Market Value’ is the other big part of how to price your content. Your market value basically depends on how many people you’re reaching and how engaged the people are who you do reach. For example, if you are a pro gamer and have people wanting to buy whatever gear it is you use, your audience is much more valuable to a company than, say, a casual laid-back let’s player. Further, different types of content tend to get quite different payouts. The following list contains CPM values, meaning money paid per 1000 views your video is getting. These are values collected by the experience of our company and backed by the sales PDF of Mediakraft MCN from 2017 (which are similar, see source).

Integrated PreRoll ~ 40-55€
Sponsored Video ~ 50-70€
Brand integration ~ 80€
Shoutout ~ 55€
Product placement ~ 40€
Stories (instagram/youtube/snapchat/tiktok) ~ 15-25€
Twitter post/thread ~ 10€

Keep in mind these aren’t fixed values so you might be able to get better deals with clever negotiations. You can always contact an agency to handle negotiations for you as well if you don’t feel comfortable or would rather spend your time creating awesome content.

Seasonal market behavior means rising CPMs around the end of a quarter with the most known and extreme example having Christmas in December with the highest and January having the lowest rates of the year.

Taxes

Once you summed up the production costs and market value, don’t forget to add taxes so divide the sum by (1-X) where X is the local sales tax. For me in Germany, it would be 19% VAT so dividing by 0.81 will give us the right value to write onto our bill.

On that note:
ALWAYS write an invoice with a payment deadline so you can enforce it if necessary. Remember to insist on an upfront deposit when handling large projects so you don’t put in 80 work hours just to get it canceled in the last second. A typical split would be half the payment upfront and half of it once the project is delivered.

If you have any follow up questions:
feel free to ask in the comments or via discord.

The Audio Guide to Happiness, or: How to make your Streams & Videos sound good

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 17:14:02 GMT

Audio is the most important part to get right of a video. This may be counterintuitive at first – it ought to be the actual visual part (ie, the video), right? – but: A lot of viewers watch your content on mobile, and on mobile phones, 480p often is clear enough, especially if you are on mobile data.

This guide is mostly a beginner’s guide, so it just goes over “what mic do I even need as a game streamer?”, “where do I place my mic?”, “what should my recording set-up look like” and just one of the many possible filter chains you can set up in OBS. Which doesn’t mean that it’s not somewhat in-depth at 2000+ words long.General

Before we get started with the deep techy part, let’s start with something fairly obvious: Garbage-in, garbage-out applies to audio. Buying an expensive mic may make the audio sound better, but it won’t make you any funnier, fix your pronunciation, make you talk more or make you less rambly. In order to get better at those things, you’ll need to practice. This practice automatically happens just by making videos, but I’d highly recommend actively looking to improve these areas, as that’ll make the learning (and thus, improvement) go much faster.

Alright, let’s actually talk about mics now.

Which mic to buy?

In this section:

XLR vs USB
Pickup patterns
Frequency response

To get the TL;DR first:
Any mic between 50 and 300 USD probably is gonna work fine for you. This even goes for professionals; the Shure SM58 has been the industry standard for vocal performances since the ’60s – and you can get that one for 100 bucks or so. This isn’t to say that you should all go for the SM58, as it is an XLR mic and thus requires quite a bit of extra hardware (though I won’t judge if you do go for it).

XLR mics as a whole are a bit of a minefield. While in theory, you can adapt an XLR mic to your average 3.5mm jack, in practice, you’ll probably need a preamp to use them, and in the case of a condenser XLR mic, you’ll need a preamp that can deliver phantom power.These things aren’t impossible to figure out and do offer a lot of flexibility once you add multiple devices to your chain, but if you are a sole gamer just looking for a good mic, they add a lot of unnecessary complexity when you can have all of that in one convenient package as a USB mic.

As for USB mics, every gaming company and their dog makes one these days, most of them somewhere in the 100-150 bucks price range, marketed “for gamers”, “for streamer” and/or “studio mic”. They all come with varying degrees of features, most of them being somewhat useless, such as switchable polar patterns.

A polar pattern is from what angles the mic picks up noise from, and while it can be nice to be able to pick up sound both from the front and the back of the mic if you’re interviewing someone across the desk, you’ll realistically probably have a wall or your screens behind your mic anyway, so you really only need a good cardioid pattern and won’t benefit too much from being able to switch around.

Various polar patterns; the mic is pointing towards the top of the page. Image credit: Galak76 & Nicoguaro at Wikipedia, CC-by-sa 3.0; CC-by 4.0

That said: If you are a fan of clicky keyboards, cardioids will pick up your keyboard quite well unless you have the keyboard placed directly behind the mic. If you can’t do that, you may want to try your hands on shotgun-type mics, i.e. ones with a super-cardioid or lobar (“uni-directional”) pickup pattern. Further, if your videos involve you being outside somewhat often, a shotgun or even a lav mic suddenly starts being way preferable over a studio mic as studio mics don’t fare too well outside.

Now, I still haven’t answered which mic I actually recommend, and that’s because there isn’t a definitive answer that’s more concrete than “a cardioid ‘studio’ mic is probably the right tool for the job”.

For example, Blue’s USB mics tend to be somewhat flat but respond super strongly to the proximity effect, while Røde’s USB mics tend to focus the mids more, so what sounds amazing for one person may not sound good for your voice (or in more formal terms, different mics have different frequency responses).

Frequency response of the Røde NT-USB. Being a cardioid/pressure gradient mic, the low end falls off a bit. The bump in the mid-highs is there to add clarity – whether this sounds good on you I can’t tell though. Image credit: Røde

So really, the ancient wisdom of “try before you buy” applies here. Or at least “read reviews and listen to comparisons before you buy”. If you already have a mic, do share in the comments what you use and what you like and dislike about it – I can imagine that hearing from other creators is gonna be quite helpful here.

What to look at when recording?

In this section:

Mounting (mic arms)
Pop filters
Critical distance
Sound treatment & insulation
Proximity effect

So, you now have bought some kind of mic, and if you bought one of the more common ones, it probably is standing somewhere on your desk in front of you. And while that probably already works somewhat well, it is somewhat problematic: Your mouth is now further away than your keyboard. So it’ll pick up a lot of keyboard noise – regardless of which type of mic you bought – and not that much of you yet.

Ideally, you want your mic to be placed

an elbow’s length away from your mouth at most, while being
almost but not directly in front of your mouth and
as far away from any other noise as possible.

Outside of an actual studio, this probably isn’t achievable, but you can buy a mic arm which raises your mic up so that it sits on your head level and not nearly as close to your keyboard.

The reason why you don’t want your mic right in front of your mouth is that sound is tiny wiggles in the air, while blowing is much, much, much more powerful – try raising the volume of your speaker until it can blow out a candle. And plosives (that is, “p”-noises) are pretty much just blowing. So in order to avoid blowing at the mic, you do want to keep it a bit to the side from your normal speaking direction. In addition to that, you also can buy pop filters (or socks and some wire) to add some extra diffusion in case you do speak directly into the mic.

The critical distance is the distance at which the direct sound (i.e., you speaking) becomes quieter than indirect sound (reverb, echo). The “elbow rule” from above is a good rule of thumb to stay comfortably within this critical distance almost anywhere, but it of course depends on the pickup pattern of the mic you’re using, as well as the room you’re in – a room with a lot of laundry in it has much less reverb going on than cold, hard tiles. Now that’s an excuse to not clean up your room!

If you want sound treatment but don’t want to live in a messy room, you can also buy various kinds of things which are meant for that purpose. In general, anything that’s soft and squishy will help reduce reverb and eat any sound that comes close to it: carpets, couches, cushions, curtains, the heavier, the better, the more, the merrier. Hanging clothes over bookshelves helps, as well, but of course actual acoustic panels, specifically built for the purpose is the best you can buy. You almost can’t have too much sound treatment outside of a few use cases (eg if you want music to sound more like a live recording rather than a studio recording). Sound proofing (preventing sound from outside getting in) is less important, but can be necessary if you live next to a noisy road or otherwise have a lot of noise outside.

The proximity effect is the effect that causes the bassy part of your voice to be amplified the closer you are to the mic (on pressure-gradient mics anyway, which includes most of the mics that you’ll probably be using). If you are within licking distance, you’ll sound like a radio host, if you go too far away, you’ll sound somewhat tinny. Again, the elbow distance is a good rule of thumb as to where it sounds mostly balanced.

Software

In this section:

Denoising
Compressing
Clipping & limiting
Mixing

For software, I like to have a chain of denoiser → compressor (→ equalizer) → limiter in OBS. OBS luckily comes with those things built-in just click the gear next to the audio source and select “filters”, so I’ll just use that as an example. It works both for live and recordings btw – if you use this chain in your recording, you generally won’t need to do too much cleanup after the fact.

The first thing is the denoiser. If you are in a fairly quiet space, you may not need this one at all, but if you need to have a fan running, the denoiser can be fairly helpful. Don’t turn it up all the way until you don’t hear any noise, as that will make you sound as if you’re sitting in a fish tank.

OBS’ noise suppression goes from “full fish tank” (-60dB) to “no noise reduction at all” (0dB)

If you have some heavy noise going on around you, you can instead also try using RTX Voice (which also works on GTX cards with some tinkering) or krisp (which is a paid service). Both of them have in common that they do AI “magic”, which may catch more noise than the standard OBS denoiser does. Alternatively, you can use the ReaPlugs VSTs, specifically ReaFIR – in “subtract” mode, it can create a noise profile and denoise based on that specific profile, which also generally introduces fewer artifacts than OBS’ denoiser. ReaPlugs works on pretty much any hardware, all the way to Windows 98 and Linux (via WINE) machines.

Though again: If you can avoid background noise altogether, go for that instead of trying to fix things afterwards.

Next up is the compressor. The compressor brings loud and quiet parts closer together, so that you won’t cause bleeding ears after suddenly screaming after whispering for minutes in a horror game. In general, you want the threshold to be somewhere around your normal talking voice, with the compression being somewhere between 2:1 (for an almost not noticeable difference in sound) and 10:1 (for a full-on radio announcer style). Note that the compressor makes things quieter (a 10:1 compression means that something with an input level of 10dB above the threshold will get compressed to just be 1dB above it in the output), so you’ll need to increase the gain afterwards. Try to aim for a level which is roughly -12dB to -15dB in your normal talking voice, after the compression.

Example of the OBS compressor

If you want equalize your audio afterwards, you can use an equalizer. This is somewhat optional as your choice of mic will already have some effect on how you sound, but if you dislike the sound of your mic or dislike the proximity effect, the equalizer can help. OBS doesn’t ship with one, but ReaPlugs does, ReaEQ and ReaFIR.

Last in your chain should always be a limiter. A limiter is your lifesaver if you screw up anything; it’ll prevent anything from clipping and sounding like an Apollo 11 broadcast. Just leave it somewhere high up, e.g. somewhere between -1dB and -0.1dB, and make sure that it’s the last thing in your chain (that is, the last entry on the filter list in OBS), and you’ll be fine.

Example of the OBS limiter

Mixing. Where the background music should be in relation to you is quite a tricky question, as volume (how much sound pressure reaches your ear) isn’t the problem here, but loudness (how your brain interprets this). Even worse, different devices will sound differently, with something sounding perfect on desktop causing mobile phone viewers to not hear your voice over the background music.

kliksphilip recommends making your background music 20 dB quieter than your normal talking voice. I’d overall agree with that, though I will add that if your background music has a lot of dynamics in it (that is, quiet parts and loud parts), you can mercilessly compress them as well, just you can do with your voice. That way, at least the background music will be more consistent in itself.

The same goes for game audio: Compressing it kinda helps, so loud sword clanks and quiet footsteps both are closer to one level, and you’ll probably also need to make it way more quiet than you think you do if you’ve got people watching on mobile.

Note that volume sliders in games often aren’t the same sliders that OBS uses – OBS is decibel based (which is a logarithmic unit), but many games (and other programs, for that matter) use a linear slider. This means to lower something in 6dB steps, you need to half the linear slider each time, ie from 100% → 50% → 25% → 12.5% → …, so you’ll need to pull down those linear sliders quite far if you do use them.And that’s it

Well, almost. There’s still a lot more that I could touch upon, but intentionally left out because I didn’t want to make it too overwhelming. I’ll leave some more links here though, in case you’re interested

YouTube had a workshop on good audio recently.
Sound comparison between the Elgato Wave 3, Blue Snowball, Audio Technica ATR2100USB, Røde USB Mini, Blue Yeti Nano, Samson C01u Pro, Blue Yeti, HyperX Quadcast, Razer Seiren X, Beyerdynamic Fox, Audio Technica AT2020, Blue Ember, Shure SM7b and Neumann U67 — aka most of the mics which currently are currently targeting gamers/streamers/podcasters, plus some very expensive pro stuff.
The Wikipedia page on Microphones has quite a lot more technical stuff; good starting point if you are interested in the tech behind it.
We have a discord server if you want to chat with us, whether it is audio, games or something else!

Mobile Producion for Everyone

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 10:20:19 GMT

Today we’ll be talking about mobile production for YouTube and YouTube Live. This will be a broader approach to mobile production but we’ll go into more gaming-specific details further down the article, so bear with me.

Most of us in 2020 have a smartphone ready to use at all times, so making content isn’t limited to sets and recording rooms anymore. For almost 4 years now, mobile production has been around on a larger scale with the introduction of Instagram stories in 2016 and the YouTube Player allowing vertical videos since the beta in 2017. For a large portion of that timespan, this branch of web video has been smiled at, including me not believing in this type of content. But here we are now with one of the fastest-growing web video platforms taking off (TikTok) and we need to rethink how we can adopt basic principles of mobile production so they fit within our YouTube workflow.

Before jumping straight into the production, think about the format and set. Vertical videos (9:16) are great for having a commentary or conversation since the frame is limited to roughly the rectangular shape of a face. If you want to show more action or drama, it is usually a better choice to use a horizontal video (16:9). If you want to scale your production value later on and maybe want to see your film in cinemas, you might even want to consider widescreen (21:9). When it comes to choosing a set, keep lighting and sound in mind, but we’ll go over some hardware choices together.

Hardware:

Usually, smartphones are your all-in-one device when it comes to rough mobile production. They have a main camera for shooting landscapes and scenes and a front camera for vlogging/commentating as well as an internal microphone. With this basic setup, you are able to create crude momentary shots without a big budget.

Audio:

But as we all now – smartphone mics aren’t the best when it comes to quality and we established earlier that
audio > video when it comes down to the importance of quality (refer to this guide). Your options to improve mobile audio on a small scale production are mostly limited to lavalier and shotgun mics. Of course, you can go fancy pants with a portable audio link (but they are a well above 500€ each, so let’s ditch those for the moment, as we all know creators are working on a budget 😉). Personally I found cheap solutions from well-known brands such as Røde or Sennheiser ranging from 50€-200€ for shotguns and lavaliers. Which isn’t too bad of an investment if you plan to stick to this hobby or are pushing your channel to a semi-professional or fulltime position. Also, keep in mind the shape of the environment/room while filming. Atmospheric sound is nice to set a scene, but you still want to differentiate a conversation from background noise. If you are keen on learning more about audio, let us know and we’ll put an audio guide onto our list.

Battery:

So you’re on the road with your friends having the adventure of your lifetime (with acceptable social distances) and are filming all the goodness up to the climax of the story you want the world to know about. And your phone dies. How do we prevent this problem? The answer is pretty simple – get yourself one or several large power banks to charge your devices AND make sure they are charged before you head out into the wild or onto your couch just out of the reach of your power plug. For your reference, streaming usually eats up 1% of battery each minute (measured on a Galaxy S9 with medium screen brightness); recording a bit less.

Lighting:

Given you want to film indoors or at night you want to think about lighting as well since most smartphone camera sensors aren’t known for their lowlight quality. Keep natural lighting in mind during set choice! When talking about handheld lights, we are talking about lights directed to your face, usually clipped onto your smartphone. Cheap LED panels for about 20€ have power for about 45min runtime (and can be charged by one of the power banks you took with you).

Stabilization:

Smartphones also don’t have much image stabilization so you might want to think about adding a gimbal to your shopping list. This might be useful for running on the beach, a bit of biking or even some smooth pans across the floors of your favorite games expo (either E3 or Gamescom when they are reopened after the pandemic). Here is an example of some DIY OIS and for the interested ones the Making Of.

Software:

Now let’s get to the gaming section. Screen recording your favorite mobile game CLASH: CANDY LEGENDS (totally not sponsored, but if you want to pay me for these guides hmu). No seriously capturing mobile gameplay has always been something I’ve tried to avoid since there is a lot of crappy capture software out there that does not only capture the video but rather other data as well and also doesn’t deliver a proper encoding and sometimes comes with a watermark. But hey, there is an easy solution to that as well. Next to mobile encoders like streamlabs (an encoder based on OBS), Android, as well as iOS, have decent integrated screen capture software.

On that note keep in mind:

Mobile live streaming from the YouTube App itself requires your channel to have at least 1000 subscribers as a prevention measure for streaming suicides or mass shootings. From the last paragraph, you might have guessed that with a little technical understanding it is pretty easy to circumvent this soft lock. Although I have to admit that the stream game feature within the YouTube App is fairly comfortable to begin with. Letting you set up a PiP camera, a thumbnail, and more important the game title (for better search results) within the streaming setup, without having to rely on making those adaptions beforehand on your YouTube Studio Desktop. If you want to search for some YouTube live mobile encoders, here you go: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=live%20streaming%20app%20for%20youtube&c=apps&hl=en_US

If you don’t want to Livestream, that’s totally fine as well since you can either keep the footage and transfer it to a PC to use your usual editing tools. But don’t worry if you are just starting out, there is a good variety of basic editing tools for phones as well. From experience, I can recommend Adobe Premiere Rush (which works surprisingly well for an Adobe product and comes with your Adobe CreativeCloud subscription) but you can go for a one-time semi-pro tool, too. Yes, you could use the ‘free’ versions but is it really worth the 5€ to have a big watermark across the screen? I don’t think so…

Last but not least we have to keep one important thing in mind. Videos and live streaming in a decent quality eat up data like nothing else. A 5-minute Video in 1080p60 can easily be 1GB or larger as an unedited file. When you are constantly in your home WiFi, this might not be an issue, but on the road, it definitely can be. Yes, you could be a filthy parasite and take advantage of your nearest Starbucks WiFi (which has a surprisingly high average upload speed), but let’s be honest:a decent data plan of the mobile provider of your choice makes you way more independent and you don’t have to pretend you like the coffee.

Summary:

Mobile gaming is the largest market on youtube gaming (surprisingly I found out about the literally HUGE FreeFire Spanish language market as a result of the research on this topic). So if you are looking for a way into getting started with YouTube, mobile production could be the first step as it requires even less prerequisites than the basic setup we introduced in the ‘Getting started on a budget‘ guide. I still recommend editing and uploading via a Laptop or Desktop as it provides far more options and optimization opportunities.

As always, you can follow up on the articles with questions either down below, or on discord.gg/youtubegaming.

Why Grinding is bad for you

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 10:13:42 GMT

We often see small YouTubers, especially of the gaming variety, talk about “The Grind”. With the idea being that there is a period in the beginning of having a channel where you just need to make videos consistently. And after an undetermined amount of time, YouTube will pick up your videos, recommend them to everyone, and then you’ll become famous.

At its core, this strategy has some merit: You gotta make videos to improve. And having a schedule to follow forces you to declare a project as finished and move on and prevents you from procrastinating too much. But it also comes with a huge drawback:

When you’re just starting out, your main issue isn’t whether you have enough content for people to watch. Or whether your schedule matches that of your viewers. Or whether your SEO is good. When you’re just starting out, your main issue is making videos that are entertaining and unique.

And yes, unless you’re completely learning resistant, regular uploads will improve your video quality and entertainment value over time. But there is a huge difference in how fast you can learn if you are focused on just improving your quality, vs if you’re mindlessly grinding out videos just to meet some self-imposed quota.

Further, grinding and consistency does nothing for uniqueness. For example, you can become quite good at doing Let’s Plays, but with viewer interest in let’s plays consistently waning since 2012, you’re now lucky to get to 2008 levels of success, ie with low-five-digit sub counts being “large channels”. You can only be as popular as your market is large, and if you’re just doing what others did years ago, the market may have developed since then.

This isn’t to say that you should avoid doing something that someone else is doing at all cost. You absolutely can use other people’s formats as a starting point to develop your own style and your own formats, but that requires you to think quite a lot about what you’re doing, and in what direction you want to develop. And that basically is the polar opposite of grinding.

So let me propose something else instead to those of you just starting out.
A 3-stage Exploration/Development/Established model.

The EDE-model: Exploration/Development/Established Creator

When you’re starting out, you should explore different genres, different formats, different styles. Just throwing different ideas at the wall, and see what sticks, see what’s fun to make, and how much effort it takes, all while actively reviewing yourself and thinking about what to do differently – AKA “The shotgun method”. In this stage, your audience is your friends and family. And as you gain more and more experience, you’ll probably naturally gravitate towards a genre or kind of content, you then can use as a starting point to switch focus from exploring to developing your channel.

In the development phase, you can still switch things up, but the overall idea and vertical of your channel should become clear. If you haven’t already, this is also where you want to start to build your audience, ie start with all those little optimizations like SEO, a regular upload schedule, catchy thumbnails, and so on. Once you’re done with that and things go well, you’ll find yourself in the established state.

In the established state, you’ll probably have worked out a formula that “just works”, and where you can get quite far while being on auto-pilot. But even here, if you don’t pay attention to the rest of the world, you’ll find yourself stagnating eventually – same example as above, let’s plays used to be super popular, and now sit at 5-ish % of their peak search volume.

The main thing that changes between the EDE model and The Grind is that you don’t start out trying to make it with the first thing that comes to your head when hearing “I’m gonna be a YouTuber”, but have tried different things and techniques before settling down on the kind of content that you’ll. This gives you an advantage over anyone just grinding the same thing over and over again, in that you a) can make more thoughtful videos, and b) already have a better handle on understanding what your content even is.

The Development stage itself is fairly similar to The Grind, with one major exception. The mindset. Grinding per definition is very repetitious, and all you’re doing is anxiously waiting for the game (or YouTube) to drop the rare loot (or subscriber/view/discoverability boost). Even if you enjoy grinding, you’re putting the responsibility of possible success into The Algorithm’s hands. This is fine if you only want to have fun on YouTube and don’t really care about your numbers, but if you do care about growth, thinking of yourself as being in a helpless position really hinders you.

There of course is no grand unified plan to becoming successful on YouTube. Every channel, every person is different, and what works for one may not work for the next person. But I hope that this EDE-model at least can serve as inspiration to try something new or different, rather than just grinding harder and uploading more and more videos per day. Even if it’s just 10% or 20% of the videos you’ll upload in the future, I strongly believe that changing things up once in a while is always worth it.

If you want to discuss this with the community, feel free to join our discord! https://discord.gg/youtubegaming

The “Fuck Copyright” guide: How to legally use things in your videos that other people made

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 10:05:53 GMT

This guide is about the thing that makes copy-pasting stuff from the internet difficult, known as copyright. I called this guide the “fuck copyright” guide because of the immense frustrations that build up trying to deal with it.

I'm not a lawyer, so I can't actually give you legal advice.
I’ve just had several painful experiences over the past 10 years or so.

So here’s some rules of thumb when dealing with copyright:

Rule 1: Assume everything is copyrighted.

The idea behind copyright is that someone did some creative work, and therefore gets to own it. This of course applies to movies and music, but also all other kinds of creativity. For example books, pictures, drawings, viral videos, Reddit posts, and yes, video games. All of these things are protected by copyright, and in order to legally use them, you must ask the copyright holder for permission.

There are a few exceptions to this. For one, not everything actually is copyrighted anymore. Copyright eventually expires, typically 70 years after the author (=the person who made the thing) died. So as of 2020, you can use works if the author of the work died in 1949 or earlier, usually. For comparison, the Lumiére brothers (who can be regarded as the inventors of cinema and by extension, the entire medium of motion pictures/movies) only died in 1948 and 1954, respectively. Some countries have longer protection terms than that, some have shorter ones, and the USA especially has an unholy mess of 60 different conditions. For example, works made by the US government are never copyrighted.

Though do note that anyone fumbling about with these old things automatically gets their own copyright on their adaptation. So you can’t just take a sound recording of a Bach song that was recorded recently for example. While Bach’s composition is in the public domain and not copyrighted anymore, the recording is still very much protected.

You probably won’t find too much useful material in the “copyright expired” category outside of maybe NASA documents if you’re a spaceflight nerd, and fairy tales. Or why do you think Disney made so many cartoon adaptations of fairy tales?

For copyrighted works, there also are exceptions to the “you must ask for permission” rule, most famously fair use. There’s a lot of myths regarding this one and they all seem to make it this magical solution to all your problems. Which it isn’t. Fair use is very strict and narrow in scope. You can’t just write “no copyright intended” or “this video is fair use” in your description. That doesn’t help you at all. Fair use is defined by four factors, which a judge will try to apply to your content if you use something someone else made.

And that’s precisely where the problem is: You need to go to court for that. And even one court says that your videos are fine, the court higher up can completely revert the decision, as happened to Ray William Johnson, once the most-subscribed YouTuber: He had a series where he was commenting on/reacting to viral videos, and even though the first court ruled 18/19 of his videos to be fair use, the jury in the second court deemed 40/40 videos to be not fair use, forcing Johnson to settle.

Long story short, fair use is a right probably best left not exercised unless you are willing to fight for it. If you even can fight for it, because, oh yeah: Fair use is US-only. Other countries may have similar laws, but those are even narrower (albeit often clearer) than fair use is. Leading us to the second rule of thumb:

Rule 2: Always get permission.

Getting permission from the copyright holder tends to be easier than trying to fit your use of content into the narrow copyright exceptions there are. Sometimes, authors give everyone a permission to use their work in form of a license.

Gamers have it almost the easiest here: Many companies just grant anyone the permission to make videos of their games and even monetize it. For music, there are a lot of “copyright-free” or “royalty-free” sources and labels out there which you can use without too much hassle. And many musicians will happily tell you that you can use their music in your video. Unfortunately, and you’ll be noticing a trend here, it’s more difficult than that:

The first problem is that it already ambiguous what “you can use this” means. For you, it may sound like permission to use it. But for a musician, it may mean “I won’t strike it down, I just will send a copyright claim and collect all ad money the video is making”. So make sure to clear that up with the copyright holder.
The second problem is that it’s basically impossible to not own the copyright on the things you make, which allows “copyright-free” material to come with strict requirements on how to use their content, as it is actually still copyrighted. For example, NoCopyrightSounds’ music is copyrighted and has a ruleset which requires attribution and has quite a few content constraints.
The third problem is that permissions can be revoked, unless they explicitly state otherwise. This is rare to happen unless you really piss the copyright holder off, but just that happened to Pewdiepie; Campo Santo just revoked the license specifically for Pewdiepie for his racist comments.

Aside: Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons is a set of licenses designed to give some security when using copyrighted content and partially solve the problems listed above. CC0 is the closest you can get to having something actually copyright-free, Creative Commons – Attribution (CC-by for short) is the safe-to-use version of “you can use it if you credit me”. There are other CC licenses available, but those come with varying degrees of headaches attached, especially on YouTube. For example, “non-commercial”: If you aren’t monetizing the video, it probably isn’t commercial use for you, but since you do upload it to a commercial platform who’s entire business model is to let everyone upload and view things for free, it may be commercial use anyway? Headache material.

So yeah, CC0 and CC-by are absolutely great to use on YouTube (and anywhere else). They are widely recognized, the license cannot be revoked, and even the attribution requirement is fairly flexible.
While you should always provide title, author, source and license as attribution, the license cuts you some slack and says that it’s okay to comply with the requirements “in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.”

Rule 3: Avoid risks.

Operating on the assumption that you value your channel as a whole more than any single video you upload, I’d say it’s generally not worth it to take risks in this matter. If you violate someone elses copyright in your video in some form, it may be fine for now. It may only get copyright claimed and monetized — but that can change at any time without notice. Any single copyright claim has the potential to turn into a copyright strike over night, and as you probably know, it only takes 3 of those to get your channel terminated forever.

Avoiding risks also means that you should double or triple check that you actually got permission to use the material in question. So here’s some advice for some common pitfalls:

Authors often give away exclusive rights to their publishers. This means that if a musician is signed with a label, the label probably has exclusive usage rights on their music. The musician therefore cannot give you permission to use their music, you’ll have to ask their label instead.
Reuploaders sometimes claim things to be under free-to-use licenses when they actually aren’t (“License laundering”). Make sure that it’s actually the original creator who states that their work is under a free license.
Remixes, mashups and other derivative works often are incorrectly licensed under creative commons licenses. Make sure that you can not just only use the remix, but the work(s) the remix/mashup/… is based upon as well.
Make sure you know your local laws, not just US copyright law. While the US law is important to how YouTube deals with things, local law is important if you actually end up getting sued. And local law can be quite different to what you’re used to, for example, in France, buildings are copyrighted and there’s no exceptions to take pictures of them (“freedom of panorama”). And while the Eiffel tower is old enough for copyright to have expired, the light installation on it isn’t, so if you’re taking pics of the Eiffel Tower at night, that’s already a copyright violation.
Don’t believe everything what you read on the internet. I said it before and I’ll say it again, copyright is a bitch and absolutely stupid to understand, so there are a lot of misconceptions around, and I definitely held a lot of those when I was younger, and I don’t know which misconceptions I still carry around with me. So please double-check everything I say as well

One more thing: The EU recently had a copyright reform, which now requires YouTube (and all other platforms that allow user-generated content) to have a license for all content that’s being uploaded to them. This law is going into effect in pretty much exactly a year. We don’t yet know what this entails and whether the entire business model of a UGC platform makes sense after this, but no matter what, as long as you’ve got permission, you can take your works wherever you want.

Overall, don’t fuck with copyright, or it will fuck you. There is a copyright case in Germany (“metal on metal“) about a song which used just TWO SECONDS of a different song, which has been going on since 1999. It has been going all the way up to the European Court of Justice, the German Federal Constitutional Court, and somehow passed through the German Federal Court of Justice four times while doing that, and it still is ongoing. All of that could’ve been prevented by just asking for permission.

If you do need to make use of copyright exceptions, whether that is fair use, freedom of panorama or a right to quote, do ask a lawyer and make sure that you actually understand correctly how these exceptions work. Where to find freely licensed material?

Here:

→»»» Free Music, sound effects, photos and videos for your videos «««←

This is a spreadsheet of various sources I found over the years. I tried to only include sources if they
a) are absolutely free, in each case free of cost and also usually also without any sign-ups necessary, and
b) allow the works featured to be used freely, ie without a restriction to a certain platform, so you can take the videos you make with them to whatever platform you’d like.

You can add to the spreadsheet if you want to.

The spreadsheet is licensed CC0, and this guide is licensed CC-by 4.0.

Starting a Gaming Channel on a budget

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 09:49:31 GMT

So if you want to get started with YouTube, especially as a gaming channel you might not want to spend a fortune on equipment just to try it out. I mean it’s the same with every hobby. You don’t start archery and buy the best bow on the market, but you don’t start with the cheapest toy either.

In this guide, we will talk about some core factors of getting started with a YouTube channel producing gaming related content and how you might be able to reduce expenses for yourself.

Remember though: It’s always advised to upgrade your equipment to meet industry standards if you want to go semi-professional or even full time.

Software

All of these are FREE:

Video recording: OBS, Shadowplay (Nvidia) & Xbox GameBar are free recording tools and OBS as well as Shadowplay are even able to stream
Video editing you can use DaVinci Resolve but have a look at this thread as well https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubegaming/comments/ghapmc/the_best_video_editor_for_gaming_videos/
for thumbnails or overlays, you can use the following
- Canva (online) – https://www.canva.com/
- GIMP – https://www.gimp.org/
- Krita – https://krita.org/
- Photopea (online) – https://www.photopea.com/

Budget for software: 0,00€

Hardware

Essential:

PC. If you want to play some basic games and do a little video editing this setup could be interesting to you. If you are a console player, well, you still need it in combination with a capture card for recording and editing. The base for the PC would be an AMD Ryzen APU (~80€) this could be paired with either a B550 motherboard (~140€) or a B450 with an UPDATED BIOS (~90€). For video editing you should get at least 8gb of RAM (~35€) and because it is an APU it has to be a bit faster than the minimum which can be easily upgraded by buying a second stick of RAM. Pair this with a low-priced power supply like this Xilence (30~50€) with a budget casing such as this LC-Power (20-30€). As for storage, a simple 500gb HDD by Western Digital (~25€) will do just fine but that depends entirely on your needs and workflow with video data.
Capture card. For console players capturing their gameplay is a big task to get around. Most HDMI consoles can be grabbed and looped with a simple AVerMedia or Elgato capture card ranging from 20-120€. For retro consoles, you might want to look for a SCART/Composite/YPbPr Grabber (Hauppage).
Audio. Audio is the most important thing for a channel. You can get away with a slightly blurry video (many people still watch in 480p anyway), but you cannot get away with poor audio quality as even the shittiest smartphones have a decent speaker or in-ears included nowadays. As for the model, anything not totally cheap which isn’t a headset will probably do, but here are two examples for mics in the upper and lower end of the spectrum:
- Røde NT-USB-Mini ~120€ (stand and pop filter incl)
- t.bone SC300 ~30€ (stand and pop filter not incl)

Budget for essential hardware when you still need a pc: ~330,00€ up to ~600,00€Budget without the pc: 50,00€ up to 240,00€

Optional / nice to have:

Better GPU/CPU. If you want to play video games that are more intense than your favorite block game you can always add a GPU (~150€) but on the bright side you don’t need an APU and can go with a better performing CPU (~125€)
Facecam. Adding emotion to your first Victory Royale or getting that sweet Penta Kill in an early League of Legends invade makes the difference between boring and engaging content. Sure you can scream the whole house down but a facecam with some tears of joy will do the job without causing permanent hearing damage. Usually, a go-to solution when it comes to facecams would be the Logitech c920 (~110€ usually) or something similar from Microsoft but due to current shortages, you might want to actually look at your local tech store instead of paying horrendous prices online. Or look for second-hand alternatives.
Lighting. If you are using a somewhat cheap webcam, you want to give it as much light as possible so the lack of sensor quality doesn’t affect you as much. The darker your face/background the grainier the image recorded will be. A cheap way to get yourself lit 🔥™ would be softboxes. Those can usually be bought for about ~20€ ppc and any product will do as long as it has a light diffuser. As an alternative, you can look into getting LED panels which often are more expensive. Or you can go redneck engineering style with construction spotlights and baking paper. As an alternative to buying lighting, you can look into Facerig (~15€) which gives you the option to replace your real recorded face with a virtual one.

Remember eBay is a good place to look for 2nd hand gear as many kids try YouTube as their hobby and give up after a couple of weeks. So usually you can find nearly new equipment below the normal market price. Of course, due to corona, the market is relatively empty at the moment, but this will change in the future.

Big thanks to u/LeoWattenberg for a second pair of eyes and valuable input as well as u/emmaeinhorn for working out a low-budget PC.

I hope we could give a quick overview that you don’t need a fortune to get started with a classic gaming YouTube channel. You may already have some parts at home, so you might even get away a bit cheaper. We haven’t touched mobile gaming so far, cause that is a whole other story. But please let us know if you are interested in learning more about that as well.

YouTube also released a video with some tips on making videos look good with little to no equipment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJf_aWFYchY

How to not fuck up your thumbnails – a YouTube Tutorial

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 21:59:29 GMT

Moin.

When browsing YouTube, I find that a lot of good content has kinda mediocre thumbnails, and more often than not, gets very few views as a result of it. So, I wrote this guide to help you with them.

Thumbnails, Titles and descriptions together work like a poster: The thumbnail there to grab your attention with its visuals first and foremost, the title is there to be interesting and to tell you what that attention-seeking visual is about, and the description contains useful information – on a poster, it’d be where and when the event happens, on a video, it typically is important links or additional clarification to the title.

Your video can be the best video ever made, but if it has an uninteresting thumbnail, nobody will watch it.

So with that in mind, here’s some things I often see which really don’t work at all, and some tips on how to improve them:

Don’t repeat the title in the thumbnail

Your thumbnail and title are always being shown together. There really is no need to repeat it, especially not word for word. It may be useful to paraphrase a few words from the title in the thumbnail if those words on their own are attention-grabbing, but entire titles generally aren’t attention-grabbing, especially not if they’re search engine optimized.

GOOD: A part of the title is being paraphrased in the thumbnail. Now imagine how this thumbnail would look like if it had the full title and the fortnite logo in there as well. It follows the rule of thirds.

BAD: An extraordinary lazy thumbnail, featuring nothing BUT the title.

Don’t just use the default game art and a number in your thumbnails.

There’s two problems with this: For one, the default game art is just that. Default. It’s being used by anyone on this planet who makes a video about this game, so it doesn’t help you stand out at all. For another, the numbers don’t help you in the thumbnail either. Your viewers don’t have a mental model of “ah yes, last time I watched part #193, can’t wait for #194”, they’re just watching your video (hopefully!) and looking for the “watched” indicator YouTube gets them. And the number in the thumbnail doesn’t even help with SEO as thumbnails aren’t searchable. On top of that, a number also isn’t attention grabbing, but that doesn’t really matter anymore here as the rest of your thumbnail isn’t either if you use the default game art.

So, don’t use the default game art for all your thumbnails, instead make your own thumbnails which are distinct from each other.

BAD: The same thumbnail everywhere. Note that some of these videos do have fairly high view counts, but that’s because they are titled after the game missions, so people stuck on the mission could find the video (SEO). The numbers don’t add anything to it though; note how the video without a mission title only has 7 views.

GOOD: Different thumbnails for each video. The similarity between the thumbnails helps showing that they belong together and are a series. They follow mostly the rule of center.

Make it mobile friendly

While you make your thumbnail on a big screen in Photoshop or something, it’s being shown in quite a small resolution to your viewers, especially for those coming from search and those on mobile. So when making thumbnails, zoom out until it’s 10% of the original size (or half as wide as your phone is in portrait mode) – if you can still read everything and recognize what it’s about, it’s a good thumbnail, if it isn’t, you’ll probably need to enlarge some things.

This also means that you can’t really have too much on-screen, as it all needs to be quite large. As a rule of thumb (haha), having more than 4 elements in your thumbnail probably is too much (elements being people, items, words, etc.)

BAD: A thumbnail which would look somewhat okay on a big resolution, but just doesn’t in the tiny format that you see on YouTube.

GOOD: Only 3 elements: The dude, a minecraft watch, and a very simple minecraft world background. This thumbnail even works at <50px width, it’s that legible. It also follows the rule of thirds.

Saturate it! Up the contrast!

Thumbnails only need to grab attention, so they don’t need to be the most realistic or aesthetically pleasing images. Which means that in general, whatever source image you have, you can just increase saturation to the max and maybe add some more contrast as well and have your thumbnail stand out more than what you started with.

Example: Cranked up the saturation to the max and increased the contrast by a bit for a thumbnail in GIMP. It’s not true to the original and the clouds are starting to look weird, but it is quite a lot more catchy. It follows the rule of thirds.

Composition

For thumbnail composition, normal photography rules apply: Try to apply the rule of thirds, at least in one axis, to make things look nicer. As a result of that, you’ll also automatically get enough head room and lead room, probably. Shot composition is an entire topic on its own which has been covered by many people who are more competent than I am, so you’ll find a lot more on this elsewhere.

For examples for this, look around the other examples given here. I wrote next to them which compositional rules they follow.

One thing to keep in mind though is that there’s the timestamp in the lower right corner, so avoid putting anything important in there.

BAD: Even the big ones make mistakes. I wonder what the impossible Pu is.

Idea: Make the thumbnail before the video

A lot of gaming videos are made by the creator first recording a few hours of footage and then trying to squeeze that together into 10-ish minutes of actually entertaining and coherent content, and after that, title and thumbnails are decided. And while this certainly works, you can also go about it from the other side: Start with making a catchy title and thumbnail, and then think about what the video for that would look like, and subsequently try to record footage which matches this vision.

Overall

Making thumbnails is a very important part of making YouTube videos. They aren’t something that can be slapped together in 5 minutes, you’ll actually need to put in some effort into making them clickable if you want people to actually watch your videos.

I hope these tips have helped you. If you have further questions, or other tips you’d like to share, please share them in the comments!

Simple YouTube SEO for Gaming Channels

Sun, 06 Jun 2021 21:27:50 GMT

The central question that leads to this guide is: “How do I get more views?” The short and simple answer: Optimize your videos for search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is some kind of black magic that, when used correctly, makes your videos appear in the search results. It’s easy to learn but hard to master and requires constant research, adaptation and having a calendar on your mind. More on that later!

By the way: A video that ranks high does very little for you if nobody clicks on it. So make sure you’ve got a good thumbnail for your video! We already have a guide on making good thumbnails, so this won’t be discussed further here.

For small channels, having good SEO vs not having it is probably roughly equivalent to doing self-promotion on subreddits after uploading a video. In other words, you can probably expect about 10-20 views from it in the first week for a similar effort. However: Unlike self-promotion, the effects of which will completely drown within a few days, the effects of good SEO generally last for months and years.

So stop wasting time on self-promotion, use that time for better SEO instead!

Keywords

Keywords are used by the YouTube Search engine as well as the Google Search engine to surface content. They generally are placed in your video metadata (title, description, tags); YouTube has a hard time making them out if they appear only in the video itself and in the thumbnail.

Let’s say you tag your video about a cat with the keyword cat. When someone searches for cat later they will find your video because the keywords match. When someone searches for dog the video won’t show up because the keywords didn’t match.

Note that keywords are just as much about what people are searching for as they are about what your video is about. So if you can not only match single words, but entire phrases with what people are searching for. For example, how to tie a knot is a thing people search for, so using the key phrase tie a knot or even the long-tail how to tie a knot phrase somewhere in your video is gonna be better than just the one keyword knot as it more closely reflects what the user is searching for.

That said: Having keywords is useful if you want to be found on a keyword. Even a 1:1 match of your keywords to the search word doesn’t guarantee you’ll rank #1, for that, YouTube uses metrics that are sorta out of your control, namely watch time, user surveys and a lot of other factors.

Tips:

Even though YouTube can detect misspellings and adjusts them during a search automatically, you want to check that your keywords are spelled correctly.
Use more than one keyword/keyphrase per video. There’s probably at least half a dozen relevant keywords for every topic.
Do not use keywords that are completely irrelevant to your video. It can lead to strikes and/or your video getting de-ranked (source)
Do not spam keywords. Same as above.
Avoid being too specific with your keywords, especially if that keyword isn’t much searched for. See the Search Volume section for more info.
Avoid being too generic with your keywords, as probably quite a lot of others will use the same

Title

Note that titles serve a dual purpose: A title needs to both provide context for ranking the video in search engines, as well as encouraging viewers to click on your video in particular. And you only have 100 characters to do that.

Tips:

Keywords you place in the title have the strongest weighting in search, compared to keywords that only are mentioned in description and tags.
Make your title unique. No two videos of yours should have a title that’s just a number apart (eg Minecraft Let’s Play #1 and #2).
Clarifying brackets can increase CTR. A Study by Outbrain and Hubspot from 2014 [PDF] showed that simply adding brackets to the title can increase the CTR by up to 38%.
Videos are less likely to be recommended to new viewers if their titles and thumbnails are:
- Deceiving or misleading: Misrepresents the content of the video.
- Shocking: Includes offensive or outrageous language.
- Disgusting: Contains gross or repulsive imagery.
- Gratuitous violence: Unnecessarily promotes violence or abuse.
- Indecent: Implies sexually suggestive or lewd conduct.
- Loud: Uses ALL CAPS or !!!!! to overemphasize titles. (source)
You can optimize on long-tail keywords by basically including entire search terms word for word in your title. (In-depth guide)
Titles longer than 60-ish characters may get cut off in some views (you can use thumbsup.tv to check). Make sure that, if something is getting cut off, it’s the least important bits, eg series names, branding, and other words that aren’t directly related to making your title juicy to click on.

Description

Similar to the title, the description contains a lot of information about the video. If you give a small summary of what is happening in the video it can help the viewer understand what the video is about and within that summary usually you automatically use keywords that are relevant to the video’s topic. Instead of just placing random keywords into your description to please the mighty SEO-gods you should rather write for people not for machines, that means descriptions with full sentences are better for your ranking than bullet points.

Again: keep in mind what people are searching for to include phrases and keywords into your text.

Tips:

Even though you can fit 5000 characters into the description, it is advised to keep the most important keywords up top (“above the fold” or “ATF” meaning the first 3 lines of the description since they can be seen by the viewer without clicking “show more”)
- If you have links which are more important than SEO to you (eg donation, merch or sponsor links), you may put them above the fold instead of a keyword-rich description.
Avoid spamming keywords in your description, eg a block like “minecraft, minecraft smp, minecraft minigames, [...], minecraft best bedwars plays, minecraft i troll my friends”. This is a bad practice which doesn’t only downrank your video in the search results but can actually get your channel terminated (source).
Below the fold, you can put all sorts of useful stuff in: Links to your social media, your merch, maybe a short description what your channel is about, your timestamps for your chapters (see next section), and maybe another extra paragraph with some more info (and keywords) about your video that didn’t fit above the fold.
You can @mention other channels (that have >1k subscribers) in the description. Very useful for collabs.
If you add affiliate links or otherwise paid links into your description, mark them as such. Depending on your local laws, there may be strict requirements on how to mark them.

Chapters

YouTube Chapters are a relatively new feature since they were released in late 2020 to the public and not many people make use of them yet. Coming from the description keywords, chapters are basically keywords with a timestamp. They look clean, help the user navigate your video and not only get shown on the YouTube search results but on Google, too.

An example for their use in a gaming content environment:If you have solved a specific puzzle in “Breath of the Wild” or looted a specific grave in “Tomb Raider” putting a timestamp into the video at those strategic points will get you more reach. For example:
0:00 find the entrance to XYZ
0:31 platforming
1:23 legendary item ABC hidden in XYZ
or something similar to that.

Tips:

For chapters to show up you have to have at least 3 of them, each must be at least 10 seconds long (make them 15sec to be sure) and the first one needs to start at 0:00 (more info)
Keep in mind to have strong search terms for your chapters as they also show up in google search and not only in the YouTube search

Cross promotion of your own videos

Showing the YouTube algorithm you are not a one hit wonder and you actually produce more decent content than just one video improves your ranking. Videos uploaded by the same channel that are linked in the description are more likely to be recommended in the sidebar as well since they are seen as related to the video.

Tips:

Only link 5 of your videos that are related to the videos topic
Repeat the titles of the videos you have linked
Don’t use link shorteners (eg bitly) whenever avoidable
Link to videos that a viewer of the current video would probably also like to see.

Tags / Hashtags

Let’s make quick and painless: You can basically forget about tags, they are just useful if you already are in YPP to categorize your video for possible advertisers. Hashtags on the other hand just got a reworked landing page so this might be something you should keep an eye on.

Tips:

Only 3 hashtags in description get placed above the title, every additional hashtag is hidden.
Go to the hashtag page to see how often a particular hashtag is being used. Make sure the hashtag is at least somewhat used by other people, so there’s a chance someone will click onto the hashtag on other videos
If you use Tubebuddy or similar tools, using tags for possible search queries can be helpful to see how high you rank for these terms at a glance.
if your video has more than 15 hashtags, they will be completely ignored in search. [Source]

Competition

When you search for a video on YouTube, only 4 videos are shown on desktop and 2 videos are shown on mobile until you need to scroll down. Obviously you want to rank as high as possible so potential viewers don’t need to scroll to even get to your thumbnail.

Competition is tied to individual keywords, not your video itself. Even if you are on the second page of results for one keyword, it’s possible you rank quite highly for another one.

Tips:

Look at the age of your competition. If it’s several years old, chances are that things changed since then, and that you’ll be able to outrank it.
Think about what value-add your video has compared to everyone else’s. For example, unless you have found a shoelace-tying technique that allows people to do it with one hand, upside down, backwards and in reverse, there’s little reason for YouTube to rank your video over the thousands of other shoelace-tying tutorials.
Look at how good the videos of your competition are. If they’re kinda meh, chances are people only watch these videos because there’s no better alternative and that their stats (especially viewer retention) is pretty low. If you can do better than that, you’re likely to rank higher than them very quickly.
Look at how popular the competition is. It’s easier to outrank someone with 20 subscribers and 2000 views than it is to outrank someone with millions of subs and views.

Search Volume

Search volume describes how many people actually search for the keywords you are using in the title and description.

To get more information and inspiration you can use https://trends.google.com as a good and free tool to find out if and how many people are searching for a specific term and it will even show you similar keywords you might have not considered when constructing your metadata (title and description).

Tips:

You can use VidIQ or TubeBuddy to identify search volume / competition more easily
Search volume changes over time, for example, cookies are most searched for around Christmas. You can use this seasonality to your advantage.

Closing thoughts

While SEO is very important for a video to have, not all videos will rank well. YouTube’s main metric for ranking is user happiness, ie how happy viewers are with the videos they’re watching, and the way you optimize for that is to make good videos that people enjoy watching. And to do that, you gotta have good ideas and good execution, all of which comes with practice.

What I want to say with all this is that there’s a limit to how useful SEOing any particular video is. It’s a bit like fishing: Putting bait on a hook is better than having no bait at all, but better still is having 2 hooks with bait. Or 3. Or even more. So instead of obsessing over a single video, go and make a new one instead.

Koytek Wattenberg Media - YouTube Tips

The Creator Co-op: Why the Future of VTubing Should Belong to the Talent

VShojo’s Collapse Isn’t an Exception – It’s a Symptom

Same Old Story: From MCNs to Hollywood

The Real Problem: Misaligned Incentives

But Why Chose an Agency in the First Place?

So What’s the Alternative? A Creator-Owned Co-op

How a Creator Co-op Could Work

1. Flat Fee, Shared Services

2. Tiered, Opt-In Services

Legal Foundations: The European SCE

Privacy & Identity Concerns

One Person = One Vote

Multiple Brands, One Co-op

Aligned Incentives, Real Autonomy

Some Will Walk Away

Final Thoughts: Build the System You Want to Be Part Of

YouTube Channel Banner Template (UPDATED 2024)

Channel banner measurement basics

Advanced Usage Tips

Getting Started with YouTube Live Streaming

Create a YouTube Stream

Connect OBS to YouTube

Useful YouTube Streaming Features

Getting started with OBS: A beginner’s guide

On Bitrates, Framerates and Resolutions

Example

Recording videos

Scenes and sources

The best 7 methods of secondary stream usage

The formats

How to split up your formats between channels, or: Should VODs be kept online?

Conclusion

The Wattenberg-Indicator

The SEE–NTS Model / Wattenberg Indicator

Using SEE–NTS for Content Programming

Limitations

Overall thoughts

I got a strike. What now?

Is it a community guideline or a copyright strike?

What to do if you get a Community Guideline Strike

What to do if you get a Copyright Strike

What to do if your YouTube channel got terminated

Be a YouTuber, not a NewTuber. Make great Content.

A Great Idea

Being self-critical

How to figure out what part didn’t work

Fixing the things that don’t work

Conclusion

How to get clicks on YouTube thumbnails: The AIDA model

Step 1: Generate Attention

Step 2: Generate Interest

Step 3: Generate Desire

Step 4: Action.

Conclusion: How to increase thumbnail CTR using AIDA

AVerMedia NEXUS AX310 & Streamer MIC 330 – Review

Live Streamer MIC 330 AM330

Live Streamer NEXUS AX310

Audio Interface

OBS Integration

YouTube Integration

System Features

Conclusion

How to use Social Media to grow your YouTube Channel

3 Ways that DON’T work

Promoting your Videos in Reddit/Discord/Facebook Communities

… but it’s not always so simple

Create Teasers for your Content

Using Social Media well

Social Media Strategies

Grow your Brand, not just your Channel

Let’s talk about money & sponsorships!

Production costs

Market value

Taxes

The Audio Guide to Happiness, or: How to make your Streams & Videos sound good

Which mic to buy?

What to look at when recording?

Software

Mobile Producion for Everyone