YouTube
Our Final Long-Form Content:
The finished interactive video
Reflections on using YouTube as our main platform
Once our production was finished and edited together we began to upload the content. Here we found that YouTube was definitely the best platform for our project. Although it was difficult to upload the videos in the correct order and add the cards, despite us already having some experience using this site. Whilst other sites mentioned previously have tutorials and guides on how to upload content, we would simply not have had enough time to learn and master these methods, meaning that YouTube was the correct decision for us after all. YouTube was also a well known platform within our target audience, meaning that people we reached knew exactly where to find it and how to operate around the site, compared to something that they had never heard before, or would have had to create a new account for. These would be extra steps that could have dissuaded viewers from watching our content.
Why YouTube?
Upon deciding that we were going to do a ‘choose your own adventure’ video, we looked into different platforms that support this genre of video. A lot of these platforms are custom built for this purpose. The main 6 platforms we looked into were:
RaptMedia
This platform is good for commercial use and professional productions. The transitions between the different videos are very smooth. It is however too expensive for our purposes.
WireWax
This platform excels at short, 15-30 seconds, however it is also more suitable to productions with a large budget since it is rather expensive.
EKO
This platform is a very professional platform, all the examples we saw on this site were very well executed and the site only boosts the great production. After looking into it, we found the user interface confusing and not easy to navigate. The site also requires the user to code the transitions which is not something we have the skills required to do.
WooTag
This platform didn’t have many examples that were similar to the project we are trying to achieve. The interactions with the user were not in the style we thought were the most suitable for our project.
Wideo
This platform had great templates for Instagram stories and would help in making micro-content for the project. But we did not think it to be suitable for uploading the main content onto.
YouTube
This is possibly the most well known platform for uploading videos to. The majority of people know what it is and how to use the platform. We thought this platform to be the most suitable for our production, and is accessible on both phones and computers.
We chose YouTube to upload our content to, since it is the most well known and trusted platform out of all the contenders. This maximises our chances of the series getting recognised by more people outside of our community and people sharing with their friends.
“A thumbnail must have an image of a face to build a stronger connection with the viewer. If eyes are on a display screen, it can be successful to touch your heart and soul. When you share eye contact with any visitor, it creates a curiosity in the heart of the viewer to explore the video in-depth. In addition to this, an eye is a medium to communicate and read the emotions of an individual.” [7]
“3 in 4 adults report watching YouTube at home on their mobile devices”
“YouTube mobile users are 2 times more likely to pay close attention while watching YouTube compared to TV users while watching TV”[8]
Other Content on the Channel
Short interviews with cast and crew after the last shoot day
Final Reflections of the whole project
Analytics
How our videos performed
In the first 4 days of the video being up we got 195 views which we were amazed by. You can see from the graph that we got a steep amount when the video first premiered which was nice we aimed to get it up at 9 30pm because we knew that a lot of people we had spoken to check social medias just before the go bed so puting it up in the evening was more likely to put it near the top of their feed.
In the first 4 days of the video being up we got 195 views which we were amazed by. You can see from the graph that we got a steep amount when the video first premiered which was nice we aimed to get it up at 9 30pm because we knew that a lot of people we had spoken to check social medias just before the go bed so puting it up in the evening was more likely to put it near the top of their feed.
The average view time is 18 seconds which looks bad on paper but this is when the decision comes up so it works well. One thing we found out when uploading the videos was they need to be a minimum of 25 seconds to get an end screen card sp we had to add some black to the end of shorter videos so there could be an end screen card which means technically we have 100% view time on the main video it just shows people didn't sit there and watch a black screen
Here we can see that most of our views were from people who pressed our links from Facebook and Instagram. But we did still have a few people watch it by finding our channel and direct searches on youtube.
The most picked ending was the go back to sleep ending but from the comments, we got that makes sense as it related to our target audience the most
After the Sleep ending the Keep USB (True ending video was the next most popular ending which was good because a good amount of people got to see what we wanted them to see)
Our full interview on our reflections on the project had more views than our smaller compilation interview but looking back on this it most likely because people saw the Instagram reels and Facebook posts and thought the compilation was just them all as one video and not a funny mash-up of them.
The longer interview didn't have a great watch time but this was more of a video for us so we could look back on what we had done after future projects and see if we had improved on what we had done we just put it on youtube just in case people wanted to know what we thought about the project.
