You’ll notice I skipped week 2’s article about this journey. Thats because, well, there was nothing much to talk about. The interesting stuff came to light during week 3 after my third video, when YouTube had enough analytics about my videos to give me some valuable insights, which we’ll get into in a minute.
The stats after 3 weeks
Let’s just jump straight in with the stats after 3 weeks and 3 videos:
The biggest thing for me is passing 100 subscribers, and at time of writing I’m at 175. So if you’re reading this and also a subscriber, THANK YOU! You are a fabulous person and I wish you much joy!
The next thing is the amount of watch time. When I saw people watched my video for a total of 81.5 hours I was like “holy shit”. To me that seems like a lot for my very young channel with only 3 videos so I’m happy.
How not to bore people
I knew when I started this journey, that my videos would be a bit shit for a few reasons:
- I’ve never recorded myself talking, never mind trying to explain technical concepts
- Not having a clue what I’m doing
So I wasn’t entirely suprised that my first 2 videos have a crappy retention rate:
You’ll notice my “Learn React by Building a real Project” video and my “How to build a temperature control app in React” video both have woefully low view duration percentages.
This was because the analytics told me people were dropping off during the setup stage. Noone wanted to sit and setup a react project, type a bunch of CSS, JSX etc.
So I tried a small experiement, and opted to provide starter code on GitHub for my 3rd video, the “How to make a basic form using React Hooks”. This cut the video time by nearly 10 mins and doubled the view duration of the “how to build a temperature control app in React” video.
Growing in confidence
Another aspect to this is probably my confidence in front of the camera. I’m more confident but theres room to improve. I’m guessing this comes with time and practice (just like learning to code eh?).
I’m about to release my next video (editing is a serious pain the ass). So make sure to check back next time for the next update on my journey!