I’m sick of watching terrible online videos, I’m sick of people who talk at their webcam, and I’m sick of people who film random aspects of their life half heartedly. There’s more to video than just making it and puking it onto YouTube.
If you want people to watch your YouTube videos, you need to do more than just make a video. You may think you’re the bees knees talking to your fancy built-in webcam, but unfortunately you just aren’t that beautiful or interesting to make me watch you talk to your computer. Likewise, unless you can pull of some pretty awesome trick, filming yourself in the day to day isn’t that interesting.
Making a great video is like writing a good blog post. You have to consider the entire composition of the video, what it will look like, how it sounds, how it will flow together, who it’s aimed at, and where you will host it. You need to find the arc of the story. It needs to be visually interesting. Otherwise, why are you making a video with a visual aspect?
Just like blogging, you’re not going to get it perfect every time. You need to work your ass off to make people actually care. With over 35 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube a minute, you’ve got to stand out and market that video, or people won’t care to find it on their own.
Make me care. Put some heart into your video.
And for the love all that’s beautiful, stop staring at your webcam.
Exactly! The video can’t be a lazy way not to type up your blog post. It must augment your blogging activities.
Exactly. It kills me to see good writers torture themselves on video.
Great is the enemy of good.
But is good enough?
here here…I agree with the sentiment of this article tho I harbor no delusions that people will in fact stop making bad videos. But…at least you’re fight a good fight…consider me a soldier in your army my brother
If nothing else, I figure one day my grandkids can point to this and say, “Look! He didn’t want everyone to go and film themselves talking all the time!”
Oh thank you for this! I should have said it myself. Video is all the rage with online marketers, but some people should never be on camera. That’s why we have podcasts. Please, please, please, if someone has talked you into putting video on your website, get a coach or a media consultant to help you before making a fool out of yourself and send your would-be clients fleeing.
It’s hard to be on video. A lot of people don’t get that. It’s better to consider what your strengths are before settling on “We must make a video!” or “We must write the best tweets ever!”
Absolutely. Gary Vaynerchuk built an empire on “good” videos with mediocre production value. Cisco makes great money selling Flip cams, which are “good enough.” They don’t take still photos. The have a shitty zoom function. Even the audio quality isn’t that great. But they’re compact, durable, and easy to use.
Do I want my iPhone to be “good enough”? Of course not. But demanding greatnesses first time out stops many great things from happening, because first tries are always good at best, and often horrible.
When I’m looking for content on the web, I need something that solves my problem. It doesn’t have to be amazing. It just has to be good enough.
Touché, sir.
The accent mark on Touche was a nice touch.
This was supposed to be posted a bit further up the chain - not sure why it ended up here (user error, doh!)
I beg to differ. Though a talking head vlog that is random or not communicated effectively wouldn’t be very effective. I don’t see anything especially wrong a Web cam video, especially if it contains information that I am interested in.
Of course a well-produced slick video is always preferred over a talking head (which is the most boring type of video), some people lack the skills or time.
I wonder how many of you have tried to produce a video?
It’s easy, but it’s not easy.
@urbanreporter
I have not tried to produce a video. I have been involved in filming them (as an actor), and I have produced theatrical plays, so I know that it takes a lot to get all the necessary things together.
I don’t think it needs to be slick, but if you’re just going to use video to record an audio story, why not use a podcast? I want video to have content that’s based in the visual.
You’re right in there, if you choose to get your blog post transform into a youtube video, better make it stand out.
No. No I won’t. And you can’t make me.
Well, can’t say I didn’t try.