Ten Years Of YouTubing

Yesterday I made a post celebrating my 10 years as a blogger. And therefore by definition I’ve also passed my 10th anniversary on YouTube, so it seems only right to do a post about that too. My YouTube channel actually came first, in the second half of 2015, but there’s only one video I’ve kept from the two I filmed as an experiment back then, before I started posting more regularly a year later, in August 2016. With everything else going on last year, the milestone passed me by, so now’s as good a time as any to reflect on it.

Of course, I could do a video about this, buy as well as my general reflections I want to explore the statistics behind my channel like I did for my blog yesterday, which will naturally be easier to go through in written form. While statistics will be of no interest to some, I’m interested in seeing them personally as I don’t normally pay any attention to them, and they’re a nice way of marking a point in time that I can refer back to in another 5 or 10 years if I’m still blogging or filming then, to see how I’ve progressed.

It will also help me to complete a streak of posts here on my blog, as when I do my Favourites post tomorrow I’ll have posted every day for a week for the first time ever. So that seems another nice way to mark my 10th anniversary, following my most prolific month ever, as I made 13 posts during January, largely thanks to all those Freddie Mercury exhibition posts!

Contents

• Reflections
  • Introduction & Thanks
  • My Videos
  • Guest Appearances
• Statistics
  • Views
  • Sources
  • Locations
  • Demographics
  • Devices

Reflections

Introduction & Thanks

Making videos has always been a secondary activity to me. I feel much more comfortable writing than sitting in front of a camera, and it gives me much more flexibility when editing. I can change what I’ve written in a blog post whenever and however I like, but with a video I can only work with what I’ve said when I recorded it, and once it’s uploaded it’s almost impossible to make any changes. I’ve made one or two trims to old clips occasionally, but only if I’m comfortable that the change isn’t noticeable so it still flows well. It’s also quite time consuming to edit a video, create the subtitles and set up the other details on YouTube. Having a program that converts speech to text has helped, but even then I still have to read and edit the subtitles to fix things. I’m not a professional video maker in general either (as if it’s not already obvious), so my clips have always been quite basic, though that’s arguably a good thing as it keeps them authentic.

All that said, however, I’m very pleased that I’ve been able to run a YouTube channel all this time, and while my subscriber count of 903 is minuscule compared to the big vloggers, it’s still a big number, far more than I ever expected to get when I started!

So thank you very much to everyone who has subscribed, I really do appreciate it, because if nobody bothered then I’d have no incentive to keep it active. And I have no plans to get rid of it, I do want to keep it ticking over. It just hasn’t been easy to devote much time to it during the past year, so I haven’t got back into my stride with it yet.

My Videos

The oldest video on my channel is from September 2015, called Interacting With Disabled People, where I sat in my study in the converted attic of my old house and spoke about Scope’s End The Awkward campaign. Ironically I felt very awkward doing it, because I wasn’t used to filming myself, so it’s not great, but it got the message across. A year later I wrote a blog post about it as well, initially just posting the transcript before turning it into a proper discussion post. Once I’d built up a substantial number of blog posts, I then backdated it to align with the date of the video. Indeed, several of my early blog posts started out as transcripts of my YouTube videos, as it was quick and easy to do so, before I edited them properly as my blog evolved.

So in my early years on YouTube I posted videos about being visually impaired, along with old holiday videos and lots of random clips from my explorations of London. And while I’ve continued to post sight loss, travel and London videos since then, I also got into the habit of doing monthly Favourites videos from Christmas 2017 onwards, to collate everything that I had done and enjoyed, to go with the roundups on my blog.

It became a big commitment, as both the blog posts and the videos were a lot of work, so they were very time consuming. But I kept it up for over 7 years, barring a few occasions where I had to combine two months together, and a break I had for a few months in 2022. I’m pleased with how they turned out, and they’ve had a steady following, albeit not huge, as my blog posts get far more hits. My favourite of my Favourites videos is the one I did for my 40th birthday, as I enjoyed putting together the montage of my life at the start of it, and I managed to edit it to be exactly 40 minutes long.

I stopped doing those Favourites videos in spring last year, as I had to turn my attention to caring for Mum, and have only posted a few little update vlogs since. And that has made things a lot easier. I know of a few people who miss my Favourites videos, but there hasn’t been a big clamouring for them to come back. So I’m not currently rushing to return to that format, but we’ll see what happens. I might go back to it, or I might be better off doing simpler vlogs or podcast-style videos. I’d like to do something, as I feel like I probably ought to, but I haven’t given it any thought yet to be honest, as it’s not been high priority with everything else going on.

Beyond those, other videos I’m particularly proud of include the What Is Normal? documentary about me that was made by students from Met Film School, my charity abseil, my helicopter ride, an hour’s worth of Illuminated River footage, and an audio interview with visually impaired actor Gillian Dean. They’re all pretty cool and unique compared to the average videos I make.

Guest Appearances

I’ve also had the honour of appearing in videos made by other people, including my first meeting with Emily from Fashioneyesta, a documentary on assistive tech by journalism student Yiwen Feng, a panel discussion on designing for disability by Inviqa for their virtual CXCon event during lockdown, and the creation of a human version of the British Rail logo led by railway enthusiast Geoff Marshall. They were all good fun and very interesting in their own ways.

I’ve appeared in videos by the RNIB as well, regarding their How I See campaign and audio description at Christmas. And I’ve done a lot of volunteering for the Aniridia Network over the years, which has included giving a talk on growing in confidence and having a chat with James about being in our 30s with aniridia, as well as putting together an Aniridia Day campaign trailer in 2017, and editing all of the conference videos on their channel since 2018. So that’s all been worthwhile too.

Statistics

So now on to the nitty gritty of the data. This is the first time I’ve dug into my dashboard on YouTube for ages as, just like my blog, I’m not trying to become a big star, so I’ve not been trying to earn money or millions of views. So these figures won’t be remotely significant relative to the big stars, but for me as a casual amateur video-maker I’m very happy with them.

All of these figures relate to the lifetime of my channel since it opened in August 2015.

Views

Since my channel began, it’s attracted 400,034 views, with a total watch time of 12,843.1 hours (almost 1½ years!).

My most popular videos have been:

1. World Trade Center – May 2000 (99,432) – This is totally understandable, and it’s quite exciting to think that a video of mine will have over 100,000 views soon, notwithstanding the tragic circumstances that are leading people to watch it in the first place.
2. Living With Nystagmus (18,322) – One of my earliest and most important videos, so I’m glad it’s continued to do well over the years.
3. New York Streets & Times Square – May 2000 (13,827) – This video was, to my flattered surprise, featured in a random article by Gothamist in 2019, so that gave it a boost as noted in the source figures below, on top of curious viewers from the World Trade Center video.
4. Living With Aniridia (13,195) – Considering this condition is much rarer than nystagmus, I’m delighted it’s had a lot of interest.
5. Barking Station (12,923) – This was the station I sponsored for the All The Stations project, so I decided to explore it. I didn’t expect it to get so many views, but it’s amazing how many railway fans like this type of content.
6. Def Leppard – Hysteria (30th Anniversary) – Unboxing (11,553) – Unboxing videos have always been popular on YouTube, and this is my first rough attempt at one.
7. Busker – Contrix (Beatboxer) (10,904) – Most of my videos of random buskers get very little attention, so I was very surprised when this one seemed to go a bit viral. It turns out Contrix is a big name in the beatboxing world.
8. Audio Description On YouTube (8,441) – It has long seemed frustrating that YouTube hasn’t allowed people to add audio description to their videos, apart from the odd experiment here and there. However, it transpires they did eventually sneak the feature out, burying it under the Languages setting for each video. There’s a nice video by Carrie On Accessibility on how to find it.
9. London Helicopter Ride (6,715) – This was an amazing experience, and I’m glad I was able to get so much footage of it.
10. Being In A TV Audience (4,546) – My experiences of being in the audience for Mock The Week and The Last Leg. I really must try and do that again one day, although it’s harder to get to the filming of some of the shows I like since the closure and demolished of the ITV Studios building on the South Bank, forcing productions to move much further afield.

Sources

The top 5 sources of views are mainly from within YouTube itself:

1. Suggested videos (144,860) – These are where my videos were suggested alongside other people’s clips. Unsurprisingly, 4 of the top 5 videos that led to me are about the World Trade Center. The other is a latex-related video, and the word latex led a lot of people to my channel because of some old videos I posted from the Great British Tattoo Show, an event I attended out of curiosity during my first year living in the city. I later deleted them as they didn’t fit with the themes of my channel.
2. YouTube search (92,211), of which the top queries were Aniridia (3,662), Latex (3,434), World Trade Center 2000 (2,644), Barking Station (1,507) and Contrix (749).
3. Browse Features (87,064) – 82,186 of these were from the YouTube homepage, the rest coming from people’s watch history (3,138), Watch Later playlists (854), subscription feeds (612) and personalised playlists (55).
4. External (35,222) – The top views here were from Google searches (15,921), Facebook (1,606), Gothamist (1,347), my blog (1,187) and other embedded YouTube players or referrals without a clear location (827).
5. Channel pages (13,000) – 11,452 of these were from my own channel page, obviously. The next highest were Fashioneyesta (29) and Scope (21).

Locations

The countries most of my views came from were:

1. UK (83,661) – The vast majority of these were from England.
2. USA (60,217) – The most views were from New York, California and Texas.
3. Germany (21,140) – The top 3 places here were North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
4. Japan (10,782)
5. Brazil (6,479)
6. India (5,095)
7. France (4,655)
8. Mexico (3,483)
9. Italy (3,326)
10. Poland (3,314)

Demographics

81.2% of my viewers are male and 18.7% are female, with the remaining 0.1% being user specified. It’s a shame it’s so heavily weighted one way really, but there isn’t much I can do about that. I did wonder if the latex keyword was heavily skewing it, but even in the past year without that being a factor, it’s still 77.7% male.

In terms of ages, most of my viewers are of a similar age to me or a bit older, which makes sense. I haven’t been doing anything that would particularly appeal to the younger crowd, although they’re still more than welcome of course:

1. 35–44 years (30.33%)
2. 45–54 years (20.93%)
3. 55–64 years (18.56%)
4. 25–34 years (15.08%)
5. 65+ years (9.62%)
6. 18–24 years (5.15%)
7. 13–17 years (0.34%)

Devices

People have been watching my videos in a variety of ways, with the number of views as follows:

1. Mobile Phone (192,756)
2. Computer (102,062)
3. Tablet (66,109)
4. TV (38,548)

And in terms of operating systems, most views have come via:

1. Android (181,847)
2. iOS (82,080)
3. Windows (80,632)
4. Macintosh (17,995)
5. Smart TV (11,291)

So it’s quite an interesting mix of systems being used, although Android mobiles seem to be particularly popular.

It’s also nice to see that 66,345 views have involved the use of English subtitles, so it’s been worthwhile adding those. There’s also been some usage of auto-translated subtitles in other languages too.

Conclusion

And I’ll leave it there. YouTube has a myriad of metrics that I’m not going to bother with, I’ve just picked out the most relevant and interesting ones. I hope you found it interesting if you did look through that though.

But once again, thank you so much for watching my videos and reading this blog, it really does mean a lot, and I hope you continue on this journey with me in the months and years ahead!