How long does it take to create your average video?
I apologize for the tardy reply.
It depends on the type of video. My early ones took a lot longer -- up to a week -- because I would research the topic (the kings and the artist of the Polish Royalty set; the story of the Stickney rotary press, etc); draft a script which I would memorize as best I could; shoot a video of the main program; then, put together a slide show for the end of the video, which sometimes required searching for stamp images from the web and editing them.
Doing a viewer top-10 video could take several days of preparation finding suitable images to display in 1080p. Many of the lists didn't come with images, or else they were not high-enough resolution, so I would scour the HipStamp and Ebay listings for a suitable image. That's not as easy as it sounds, either, because of the number of dealers who use tiny, low-resolution images in their listings.
Unboxing videos took a few days, with most of the time spent on sorting and looking up the stamps I received. The video production itself only took a few hours.
I've had a couple episodes where I started it, completed it, and uploaded it all within just a few hours. Those were ones which were not image intensive, or where the images I used did not have to be edited into a formal slide complete with captions identifying them. I could just overlay the stamp image over part of the screen while I talked about it.
You'll notice my earliest episodes leaned heavily towards examining certain sets, such as the above mentioned Polish Royalty, Austria's Vacationland set, and Germany's Famous Women series. I got discouraged, though, when I saw that the number of views those videos got, compared to others, such as Most Valuable Stamps, or Free Stamp Albums, was miniscule. It seems nobody's interested in watching a program on stamps they don't collect themselves. To illustrate my point --
Here are the view counts for my first 5 videos, from 3 1/2 years ago. Four of them dealt with collecting a certain set, country, or topic:
Episode 1: Poland's Royalty series - 3,908 views
Episode 2: Austria's Vacationland Austria wacky overprints - 2,960
Episode 3: Collecting Bats on Stamps - 1,730
Episode 4: Collecting Ukraine - 4,120
Episode 5: 25 Rare and Valuable Stamps Issued Since 1980 - 62,171
And, yes, my use of the words Rare and Valuable was a blatant attempt to see if it would attract more views. The result was a 15x to 36x increase in viewership over the previous 4 videos. Do you think that spike in views might have carried over into the following videos?
Episode 6: The Stickney Rotary Press - 4,498
Color me cynical, but, it seems a lot of collectors are more interested in "rare and valuable" than they are in "stamps."
Here's another example of contrasting number of views from 2 consecutive episodes:
Episode 8: The Decline in Stamp Values Since 1981 - 23,066
Episode 9: Famous Women in German History - 5,008
And another, more recent example:
Episode 91: Top 10 Stamps Found in Kiloware (with
philatelia) - 2,882
Episode 92: A Chat with Large-Gold Philatelic Exhibition Winner - 656
Man, talk about discouraging. So I thought, why am I busting my butt and spending so much time creating content nobody (relatively speaking) wants to watch? So, I changed tack, and started producing videos that were less labor and time intensive but got more views.
You want to know my worst-performing video? While it has 90 more views than Ep. 92 above, it's also been up 2 years longer. It seems NOBODY but NOBODY wants to hear a stamp collector singing. My episode, "Ted the Singing Stamp Collector," has a paltry 746 views.
So, there you have it, more than you ever wanted to know about making stamp collecting videos.
The main takeaway is, unless you're Graham Beck, if you are aiming for a large and loyal audience, put the words rare and/or valuable in every title.
However, I hope the takeaway from this post is not, "Ted sounds kind of bitter." I'm not. No, really. I'm perfectly all right with rejection.
Okay. I've rambled on long enough. I've got other stuff to do, like getting ready to checkout tomorrow morning and relocate to another temporary accommodation.
TTSC