We (my research group) have had a YouTube channel for a while, but it had less than a handful of videos until last week, when I decided to start posting more.
A small YouTube channel is still pretty large. We currently have 19 subscribers,1 which is not very impressive for a YouTube channel. There is, after all, a dog with 4m subscribers. We had 205 views over the last month, when I’m sure there are cat videos that get that within a few seconds of being posted.
However, 205 people learning a bit more about our work is excellent! I have given invited keynote talks at conferences with 25 people in the audience. And these videos will stay up so — unlike for an in-person conference — viewership can keep growing.
I am also reaching people who would not have been able to attend an in-person event.2
Avoid success at all costs. Audience capture is a dark force which leads those that depend on their audience to pander to it. This often turns out to be contrarianism, leading down a path of intellectual collapse. However, low audiences means no audience capture.
This may seem tongue-in-cheek, but my main goals in all of this are still scientific: I want to do cool microbiome science and I want people to know about it. If YouTube helps that goal, then that’s great; but if YouTube becomes a goal in itself, then I will have lost the thread.
If I reach 205 people, but those are 205 people who are interested in microbiome research and a fraction of them cite our papers, that’ll have been worth it. Again, for a comment on how warped internet numbers are: very few of my papers have 205 citations, so getting even one or two more citations per video would be an amazing success!
This logic also applies to this newsletter and the group’s newsletter: all else being equal, I want more subscribers, of course!3 But, all else being equal is important in that sentence: we mostly want to reach the right subscribers: people who might really be interested in our work, not just get as many internet randos as we can. Let the funny dogs cater to that market.
Publishing okay videos is better than publishing no videos. I originally thought of posting a GMGC video over a year ago, when we first published the paper. Today, I finally did it. To a large extent, this is because, I just decided to post videos that are less polished: I took some pre-assembled slides, did one practice run, recorded it, fast forwarded through it and hit upload. Total time was less than an hour (because the slides were already done, but I have been presenting this for years). Was it the best it could have been? No. Is it better than not uploading anything? I hope so.
The videos
I plan to post three types of videos: (i) conference style, (ii) tutorials, (iii) everything else. The latest is a conference-style presentation on the GMGC (global microbial gene catalogue), which we published in Nature last year.
I also, just as I was writing this post, opened a bilibi account, where I currently, have zero subscribers. So, the total subscribers for our videos is 19.
One of the arguments for online events is that not everyone has the resources (in money, time, the right nationality to get visas, &c) to attend in-person events, while online has fewer barriers. This is absolutely true. I just think that, for now posting on YouTube is a more effective way to accomplish these goals.
In fact, having attended a few, I now think that online conferences are, so far, a failed experiment. Since in-person meetings restarted in mid-2022, I have had the opportunity to compare the value of attending them to the ones we had during the pandemic and I simply decided to not participate in large multi-day online events anymore. I think small online gatherings can work well, though.
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