TLDR: I’m creating a new channel and deleting some content. If you want more information, feel free to read the following.
When I started, I thought about what topics and creative pursuits mattered the most to me. I couldn’t pick just one, so I decided to go after the top three. Anyone who knows me outside of a professional or school setting knows I love writing. That had to be a part of LTM. I also really wanted to take my passing interest in photography and make it more substantial. The first step with that was buying a camera. And the last part was 3D animation and rendering. I had been learning it on the side and was already using the LTM YouTube page to post my renderings.
This created a small mess of unrelated goals. On YouTube, the primary site I wanted to target for releasing my creative work, channels do best when they focus on a specific topic area. And let’s face it, a writing/photography/3D art channel makes little sense from a long-term viability perspective. I would forever be confusing the algorithm with each upload. “His channel is photography meditation videos, we get it. No! Wait… It’s short stories. NO! It’s animation.” I think you get the idea.
This became very apparent to me today when I used my work computer to view the video I released. I had an inkling that this confusion might be happening after watching some videos created by creative content producers, and wanted to see if this confusion was truly happening. It was.
The short story form had suggested videos all about photography and relaxation background music. My “The Old Graves” video had garnered enough traction over the last nine days to cause a real lack of association with what the new video should be grouped with. I grew frustrated. “I just need to show the algorithm where this video fits in,” I told myself.
I spent some time working and listening to other short story videos in between my LTM 2K videos, all while logged into my work computer. I wanted to play the part of my target audience in the eyes of the algorithm.
I managed to trigger one short story video to appear in the recommendations after using two VPNs. The VPNs allowed me to hide my IP address from YouTube and appear as different people. I also used Edge on one VPN and Chrome on the other to prevent cookies from interfering with my IP change. You can be certain that if you were among the first ten viewers of “When The Fire Comes,” only one of you watched the entire video. I was one of the other three people who completed a full-length viewing.
I shouldn’t have to go to such lengths to try to get YouTube to understand that LTM 2K are short stories. And after doing some more reflection and self-evaluation, I don’t think I will continue to use just one YouTube channel to showcase my videos. I want to separate the videos into their respective themed channels.
The current LTM YouTube channel will become the home for my stories and writing. I had to do a bit of thinking on this because depending on how you approach it, any of the three topics could stay here. The algorithm thinks it should be photography based on the recommended videos. The content that has been up the longest is the 3D art. And the largest volume of subscribers came from the stories. The last reason is the one I went with.
Many of you who come to LTM are family and friends. I’m not going to kid myself and think I have a massive following—I’ve seen the analytics. So it makes sense to me that the early subscribers were likely friends and family. These more recent subscribers are coming from the videos, and thus they are the reason to keep the writing here. They subscribe to the channel for it, after all.
The photography will move to its own channel that will have a similar name. This will also give me a chance to go back and edit these videos, to refocus on the style I want that channel to have: pretty pictures with calm music.
The 3D art will not have its own channel. That doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying to learn it, but I just don’t post enough videos to make that channel anything substantial. If that changes, I will consider creating a dedicated channel for it. For now, they will reside on Facebook since that is the audience that is most likely to care the most about this anyway.
So, what does this mean for the website, you ask? Good question, imaginary follower. This will continue to be the blog for LTM. I will post updates for both channels here, and I will continue to write the forecast with both photography and writing in mind. However, I will be removing some of the content that pulls focus away from the photography and writing. This content, if I deem it worthy of sharing elsewhere, will end up on Facebook.
These changes are going to happen this weekend. I will be creating a new channel for photography and moving the previous videos in that niche over there. I will be removing videos from the YouTube channel that don’t align with the new focus I outlined above. Additionally, I will be moving some content from the site to Facebook.
Let’s do this!