That’s the perennial question for every YouTuber, isn’t it. How do you find your audience–who is out there, and how do you get their attention? It always strikes me that YouTubers who frequent internet forums with these questions seem totally unaware that they themselves are somebody’s audience, too. They’ve come to think of themselves as “creators”, as separate entities floating in space, woefully out of touch with the people on Earth. What does your audience want to watch? That isn’t the right question to ask. What do you want to watch?
f you’re desperate for viewers, try this: use thumbnails with half-naked girls. Use suggestive, sensationalist clickbait titles: “The day I almost DIED”, “The REAL REASON nobody buys APPLE anymore”, “Russia HACKED me!”, and so forth. Leave your links everywhere, spam people. Clutter your thumbnails with red circles and exclamation points. Congratulations, you’ve attracted 2,000 viewers now and lost all your dignity.
Walt Disney used to say, “Quality always wins”. It’s not entirely true, but as a strategic philosophy, I like it better than the one described above.
I’ve recently set up a second channel, a separate channel, called Humanivideo.
Every day I upload a few classic copyright-free cartoons, usually Popeye or Betty Boop, cartoons that I loved as a kid and that I still rate highly. I could have named the channel Retro Classics Spectacular or Vintage Cartoons Galore Paradiso, but me being me I had to give it a weird, unappealing name of course. The channel art is supposed to be ugly, but, again me being me, I took great care into making it look ugly. Originally Humanivideo was intended to be just a budget channel, a promo tool, a “gateway” of sorts to my real channel, Tales from Weirdland, but again, me being me, I’ve taken on the role of amateur curator and try to present these cartoons well, with nice thumbnails, the best video quality, some handy information in the description box, and more.
And another thing is, by uploading old cartoons to that side channel I can keep up a regular uploading schedule, and thus please YouTube’s algorithms, which are inherently animator-unfriendly as they reward creators who upload often and publish longer videos. (Animation is months of work for minutes of screen time.) In a way, it’s like I’m sending out Popeye and Betty Boop as vedettes every day, as travelling salespersons. “Go and tell people about Tales from Weirdland!” You just have to be a little creative in the marketing department.
The 1939 Popeye cartoon Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1939) is one I remember very well. Of the three Popeye Color Specials by the Fleischer Studios, that is the one that made the biggest impression on me as a kid. It was actually one of the first things I looked for when I discovered YouTube. There’s a wonderful balance between the funny and the creepy, and the music is great and suggestive throughout. I love the vibrant colors, even though they faded somewhat. The backdrops are all little pieces of art, and atmospheric, the sight gags are nifty. “The laaaamp….” “I’m a feesh!” I’m positive that the cartoon helped to shape my artistic character.
Another animated short that I have really fond memories of, is Betty Boop’s Birthday Party (1933). It’s just a wonderful piece of work, with all these rubber hose characters bouncing and swinging, and singing. My grandfather was one of the first people to own a VCR, and this was one of the first cartoons he taped–for me. I watched it endlessly, and even now, many years later, the birthday song occasionally gets stuck in my head. “This is Betty’s birthday party daaaaash….” 1933–Marilyn Monroe was 5 years old. The Golden Gate Bridge was being built. And Hitler, well…
Look at the birthday cake though: Betty Boop is 14 years old.
I’m always fascinated by the voices in these cartoons. They’re the voices of ghosts. They’re coming to us through old wires, resonate through hollow tubes, their tinkling merriment long gone. You’re listening to the dead, but they themselves don’t know that they are dead.
Betty Boop cartoons were pretty raunchy actually, for their time. Before the Hays Code in 1934 (officially the “Motion Picture Production Code”), which imposed moral restrictions upon motion pictures, it was basically: be as suggestive as you want; you can tease, be naughty, show glimpses of underwear, wink, nudge. This Code lasted until 1968, after which Hollywood degenerated into the Gomorrah that it is now. The Betty Boop cartoons never recovered from the restrictions: in the later cartoons, she’s demure and boring, and most of the stories center around her dog and his wacky shenanigans.
The reason that the Code affected Betty Boop cartoons, by the way, is because they were theatrical cartoons: they weren’t shown on television–there was no television–they were shown in theatres, before a main feature or as part of a Saturday matinee. “Many people don’t realize that”, as my brother used to say whenever he had finished some trivia-filled monologue to an uninterested audience.
Above: obvious sexual harassment in the 1932 Betty Boop cartoon, Boop-Oop-a-Doop. “Do you like your job? Hehehe…” In another cartoon, Koko the Clown and Bimbo also join in on the leg rubbing, shamelessly.
So anyway, that’s my Humanivideo channel. It’s my own little Library of Congress. Like Tales from Weirdland, Humanivideo features videos that I’d want to watch myself. That has always been my main interest in doing all this, this YouTube stuff. Perhaps you’ve noticed, non-existing reader, but I never ask viewers to like, subscribe, share, and so forth, i.e. encourage viewers to “take action”, as it’s called in YouTube guides. Broadly speaking, my philosophy is that if I have to remind people to do all those things, something’s not working right.
The only thing I take into account when uploading new videos is: what are the best times to upload? The answer, apparently, is Thursday/Friday in the afternoon, as this gives Google/YouTube the opportunity to process your stuff in time for its busiest hours in the evening. So upload between 12-3 PM when you’re in LA, and between 9-11 PM when you’re in Europe. Saturday is OK too, or Sunday if Saturday isn’t possible. But I’d avoid Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, unless you’re a big YouTube star, in which case it doesn’t matter obviously.
Right.
Currently I’m working on a pretty elaborate, ambitious Star Wars-themed video. Should be good. Anyway, until next time. Oh, by the way, the girl in the thumbnail above is called Eve, and she’ll make an appearance in a later video.
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