Thursday, April 21, 2022
7:44 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
The video Premieres went well last night, I believe. The two videos were both rather short, casual, and breezy. The first one appeared to conclude before I was even aware that it had begun. And the second, at least in terms of the number of minutes, was even shorter. And I didn’t have the feeling that they were dragging or that people were bored. Of course, it’s not like a vast number of people attended and watched with me. There were perhaps twenty-five people as a core and steady group who watched both videos in full. However, as I’ve noted many times, even twenty-five people is a lot of people. I’ve often thought the same thing when one of my YouTube videos is viewed one or two thousand times. Those are extremely low numbers for YouTube. In fact, they are hardly anything at all. However, when in my life have two thousand people expressed any kind of interest in anything I’ve done? I’ve done a few interesting things in my time, such as my bicycle journeys through Ethiopia and Guinea and my trips around Taiwan. And I’ve documented those in photographs and writing and emails and letters, and barely one person in the entire world even noticed. Hardly anyone from my personal circle of friends and relatives ever cares about anything I do. I could have a hundred video Premieres on YouTube and not one person that knows me personally will ever show up or even be aware that they happened. So, from that perspective, having twenty-five people from all around the world sitting down with me and sharing a video-watching experience with me is quite special. It’s really something, and I appreciate it so much. And these people that watched the video with me were so kind and showed interest. It’s not something I take for granted.
I had my usual small adventures on the technology side. For one thing, I had scheduled two video Premieres. And I wasn’t sure how that would work. I had to be careful to schedule them such that the first one definitely ended before the second one began. I wouldn’t want them to overlap. But I also didn’t want a vast gulf of time between them. In the end, it worked out, because the first video was twenty-two minutes long. And if you tack on the two-minute countdown video at the beginning, it was about twenty-four minutes in total. And YouTube Premieres can only be scheduled to start in fifteen-minute intervals. Therefore, the second video could begin at 7:30 or 7:45. I couldn’t set it to a precise minute, such as 7:27. The system doesn’t allow for that. And the 7:30 start time seemed reasonable with the first video ending at around 7:25.
This being my third time putting on a Premiere, I understood better how the countdown worked. I understood that the countdown starts at the scheduled start time for the Premiere. Therefore, the countdown began at 7:00 and the video itself didn’t start until 7:02. One thing I am still confused about is how well the videos are synced between myself and the audience. I noticed that YouTube doesn’t actually serve up the video at 7:02. It plays an advertisement first. And the ad can be two minutes long. But what happens when one person lets the ad play and another person hits the skip button? Won’t the first person be two minutes behind the second in terms of watching the video? And how many ads play during the video? I was only presented with one at the beginning. There were no mid-roll ads. But was that the same for everyone? If three full ads played during the video and one person watched them all and another person skipped them all, their two copies of the video could be six minutes out of sync. And that matters to me because I’m occasionally inserting comments about the video in the Live Chat window. And I insert those comments based on what I’m seeing in the video at that time. But there is a very good chance that not everyone is seeing the same thing at the same time. We could all be at different places in the video, separated by just a few seconds or even a couple of minutes.
A friend commented that the countdown video that I chose for the first and second Premieres made it difficult to see the numbers. In setting up a Premiere, I have a choice of perhaps fifteen different videos plus music to accompany the countdown. For the first two Premieres, I chose one that I thought looked cool and suited the tone of the videos. But when I heard that the countdown numbers were hard to make out in that video, I decided to use a different one for the Premieres last night. And I chose one that showed animated objects rolling around on the screen. I’m not sure it was entirely suitable, because the video is bright and colorful and perhaps childish. But I cycled through all the options, and it was the only one I liked. And the countdown numbers were clear and visible. And I found the movements of the objects to be somewhat mesmerizing. I liked watching it.
Up to this point, the technology was not presenting me with any trouble. However, since I was presenting two videos on the same night, I felt I should put together an intro or trailer and explain what was going on. With the second Premiere, I learned how this feature actually worked. There was a lot about it that I didn’t understand, and only in doing it and making all the mistakes did I manage to figure it all out. But now that I put together my second-ever Premiere trailer, I found a new mistake to make. I recorded my message, copied the video file to my phone, edited it, exported it, uploaded it to YouTube, waited until it was processed and ready, and then set it up as the trailer. And only after it was completely done and was public and people could see it did I realize that I had used specific times in my explanation. I was talking about how the first video was starting at seven and the second video was starting at seven-thirty. However, that is useless and potentially very confusing information. The videos might be starting at seven and seven-thirty here in Thailand, but they are starting at completely different times in every country around the world. In fact, even referencing the evening or morning is useless and potentially confusing, because it might be evening for me but morning for someone else.
I really didn’t want to get out my cameras and set the whole thing up and record the whole trailer again. But I also didn’t want to leave the trailer as it was. It was too confusing. My first thought was to simply re-edit the video and insert captions explaining that those times were based on the time zone in Thailand and that people had to refer to the times listed by YouTube on their copy of the Premiere thumbnail. And I finished that edit and exported it and uploaded it. It was all ready, but then I decided that even that was too confusing. By saying the time and then telling people that this was Thailand time, I appeared to be saying that viewers had to figure out for themselves what time it started in their country. And I pictured all these people struggling to figure out what time it was in Norway when it was 7:00 p.m. in Thailand. It appeared that I was telling people this is what they had to do. And I concluded that the best approach was to not mention time at all. I didn’t need to mention the time or the day, because both of those would be displayed prominently on the video thumbnail. So I edited the video one more time, and I deleted all the sections where I mentioned the Premiere starting and ending times. I got lucky there because I was able to cut those sentences and phrases out without causing too much trouble. The sentences on either side of the edit still seemed to flow together well enough. The flow of the trailer video as a whole wasn’t as smooth to me as the original had been, but it still seemed okay, and it appeared to get the message across. Once that was done, I uploaded the new version and set it as the trailer.
However, it turned out that much of what I said was not true. And that’s because the YouTube Premiere feature offered another tool that I decided to use. This tool is called redirect. Using redirect, you can select another video or a live stream to begin after the Premiere ends. And from the wording of this feature, my assumption was that people would be redirected automatically to the new video. I thought that if you watched the first Premiere video all the way to the end, you would automatically be taken to the next Premiere video. And that’s what I said in the trailer. At least I said that’s what I thought would happen.
But according to what I saw last night, that’s not how it works. I wasn’t redirected at all. And a friend of mine sent me a message saying that he wasn’t redirected either. In fact, I was sitting there staring at the end screen for the first Premiere waiting to be taken to the second Premiere and I ended up missing the beginning of the second Premiere. The countdown for the second Premiere had already started and I was still just staring at the screen of the first Premiere. I almost missed my own Premiere because I was waiting for this redirect to happen.
What I understand now is that this redirect feature is not so sophisticated. All it does is put a larger-than-average thumbnail of the next video on the screen. When the first Premiere ends, the screen is populated with a whole bunch of video thumbnails. You can click on those thumbnails and watch those videos. And there is one larger thumbnail on the left, and that thumbnail is for the video that I selected as the target for the redirect. And that’s all it is. When you select a video to redirect to, all the system does is put a thumbnail on the screen that people can click on. I guess it’s better than nothing. And now that I understand how it works, I can explain it to people accurately. For example, if I ever did a live stream immediately after a video premiere, I could set up this redirect, and then I could tell people that when the Premiere ends, they can click on the thumbnail for the live stream. If this redirect feature didn’t exist, there would be no way to provide any kind of convenient link for your audience. They would have to go to your channel homepage and find the live stream thumbnail themselves. So I can see how this redirect feature is useful. I just didn’t understand how it worked initially.
Some of my viewers were also quite generous, and they used the Super Sticker and Super Chat features to send me some money. I can’t say that I fully understand these two features either. I’ll have to do a bit of reading to figure out the difference between a Sticker and a Chat. During my first video Premiere, I received both Stickers and Chats. Last night, I received a total of four during the two videos, and they were all Super Stickers. There weren’t any Super Chats. So it’s not clear right now how they differ. But a major problem I had was that when someone simply left a message in the chat window, I could reply directly to them using the @ symbol. I find this system to be very clunky and inefficient, but it does work. I have to write a message back that starts with the @ symbol. And then YouTube presents me with a list of usernames that begin with the letters I type. And then I select the username from the list. And then, presumably, that person’s username is highlighted on their chat window, and they can easily see that I have replied to them. But when someone sends me a Super Sticker, that system doesn’t work anymore. I tried to reply to these people with a thank you message, but I don’t know if it worked. When I typed the @ symbol and then their username, nothing appeared. I didn’t get a list of usernames to choose from. Therefore, I have no idea if their name was highlighted in the chat window or not. They might not even be aware that I thanked them.
I struggled a little bit when it came to wording my thank you message. I wrote a thank you reply to all four Super Stickers, but I’m not sure that I ever wrote quite the right thing. Simply saying thanks or thank-you with or without a smiley face or other emoji seems too little. But you also don’t want to go over the top and get weird about it. I was trying to figure out a nice balance between too little and too much. I’m not sure I ever got there. The total from last night’s Super Stickers came to about $13 US. People sent $5 or $3 Canadian with each Super Sticker. YouTube, unfortunately, takes 30% of that. And that leaves me with $9 US to invest back into keeping Planet Doug running. But in real world terms, that’s pretty amazing. That’s 300 baht here in Thailand, and with my current life and situation, 300 baht is extremely helpful and appreciated. And, to be honest, it’s more than those videos will earn through the normal YouTube monetization.
After the Premiere, I popped across the street to have dinner at Casa Mia. I’m not entirely sold on that restaurant as a place to visit often. The service is too erratic. I never quite know what is going on. However, it is very handy in that it keeps later hours than most ordinary Thai restaurants. My Premiere videos ended at around 8 p.m., and at that time, Casa Mia was the only place in my neighborhood that was still open. Everything else was closed.
I’m still slowly working my way towards setting up the Planet Doug website, email addresses, PayPal and things like that. I’m leaning toward the simple email address of Contribute@PlanetDoug.life for PayPal. I think it’s clear and understandable, and it’s probably a good thing that it sounds professional. Other options I was considering were more wordy and more casual in tone. More fun, too. But perhaps this is not the place to have fun.
I guess the idea would be to have another email address for what they call business enquiries. I’m not sure what to call that email address. I see that a lot of YouTubers simply use the word info. Then mine would be Info@PlanetDoug.life. I don’t mind that. I could also use Contact@PlanetDoug.life. Or I could get more specific with something like BusinessEnquiries@PlanetDoug.life. But that is wordy and hard to spell. Info might be the best option.
And then I suppose I could have a simple and more personal email address. I would normally just use my own name, but then it ends up getting duplicated: Doug@PlanetDoug.life. I guess that’s not so bad. I’ll have to think about that one.
The last piece in the puzzle is a big one. And that is Patreon. I know nothing about Patreon. Absolutely nothing. Yesterday, I watched one short introductory video, and it instantly became clear that I should look into it before I do anything else. There are a lot of parts to the Patreon puzzle. And I guess the basic idea is that when someone joins your Patreon, they get perks in return. And I started to think that perhaps all of the things that I’m thinking about putting onto the website might be better reserved for a Patreon tier. This daily journal is a good example. At the moment, my idea was simply to post it on the website as a daily posting for everyone, should they care to read it. But if I’m going to take the time to write a daily journal entry, that could be a very useful perk that can be assigned to a Patreon tier. Or perhaps there could be an early access to the journal. I like that idea, because I really want the journal entries to be fully public as a story available for everyone. But I could still make it part of Patreon following an early-access model. The journal entry could be sent out as an email every day. And then that journal entry could also be posted to my website later on – perhaps a week later. The perk for Patreon members is that they are kept current in real time.
Anyway, I know nothing about Patreon, and if I manage to dig up the energy, that will be my next project. At the very least, I can open a Patreon account and start learning about it. I don’t have to make it public until I decide to. At least I assume that is the case.