With the rise of TikTok and similar off-the-cuff services people have become more accustomed to watching videos with a portrait orientation. This has long struck me as odd as it removes a viewer's ability to explore the periphery to better understand a situation or context. However, given the incredible popularity of the format, there is clearly something that people find attractive. This is clearly something that makes sense to explore if I plan on doing anything with online video long term.
A couple of weeks ago I thought that it would make sense to start with videos of Ayumi doing silly puppy-dog things. I went through all of my videos of her, of which there are hundreds, and found none of them that would work in a portrait orientation. Just about every video had been recorded in the more traditional landscape orientation with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Converting this to a 9:16 simply did not work as it would rarely allow more than half of Ayumi's face to appear at any given time. New videos would need to be captured.
At the start of March, the puppy and I got in the car and drove out to Izumi on the Pacific coast of Chiba Prefecture. There we walked along a beach well known for all the driftwood that accumulates there and recorded about 25 minutes of video using a handheld camera as well as a drone using both 16:9 and 9:16 aspect ratios. A YouTube Short was published within a few hours of returning home and, to the surprise of nobody, it received almost zero views.
Given I am a complete unknown to just about everyone on Earth, this comes as no surprise. This video was also the first "short" and pretty much consists of me walking around on a beach, because Ayumi was moving in and out of focus with most of the footage that was collected. Sure, people watch these videos on their phone, but fuzzy images are no fun.
A week later I went out for an evening drive after a rather frustrating day at work. Rain was softly falling and it offered an opportunity to try and play with reflections and light. The pocket camera was mounted to its suction arm and moved around the interior of the car as I drove to Funabashi and back. Again, a video was uploaded to YouTube within an hour or so of getting home. However, this one was watched by four times as many people as the first video. Clearly something worked. But what?
From what I can tell, there are only two real differences between the videos:
- one focuses on a person while another focuses on an action
- one is labelled mostly with English while the other contains Japanese hashtags
Perhaps the problem is the language?
Today I posted a third Short. This one involved me driving home at night with the top down on the car. The descriptions were all in Japanese without a hint of English. Interestingly enough, the view count was more than double the previous video after just three hours. Are my videos being presented to people outside of Japan? Sure, I'm geographically inside the country, but the use of English was supposed to make the videos a little more international. According to the various metrics that YouTube shares, though, over 90% of all visitors for every video are in Japan, with over 80% of them being male. So, if I want to have videos that attract eyeballs, the English should be an afterthought.
Mind you, the point of creating a YouTube channel was not to attract a huge audience, but to learn new skills while also sharing the beauty of Japan with anyone who might watch. That said, investing hours into video recording and editing only to receive a few dozen views is disheartening. Having a bit of a balance would be nice.
So, with this in mind, I think the plan for the near future will be to continue making shorts while also focussing on some of the longer-form videos. They will be made primarily for a Japanese audience, which means I'll need to improve my pronunciation a bit if there will be any speaking, and subtitles will be made available for anyone who doesn't know the language. Let's see what patterns emerge over the next few months.