Yesterday, I posted a new version of my “Ship Graveyard” video. And then I set the original video to “Unlisted”. That means the original video is still on YouTube, but it isn’t visible to public searches. You can only view it with a direct link. When you go to my channel, you only see the new version.
New Version: https://youtu.be/-7y-DBb7kvI
Original Version: https://youtu.be/2hXGh5MtTvU
And a few people left comments on the new video asking me why I did this and what the differences are between the two videos. Someone wrote that they scrubbed through the video looking for big changes, but it seemed to them the two videos were largely the same. And it’s true that the body of the video is largely the same except I removed a couple of “talky” sections. It’s mainly the opening and ending that are different, plus the title and thumbnail.
It was basically an experiment for me. I thought the original video would appeal to a wider international audience. Exploring abandoned places is a popular genre on YouTube. I thought the visuals of these giant, rusting half-sunken and beached ships would be interesting to everyone, not just Malaysians. And I leaned into the idea of “sneaking in” past security in the video title.
I thought the combination of all those elements would give this video a boost with an international audience, kind of like the Submarine Museum video, which tapped into a broader European and North American audience. It wasn’t just people from Southeast Asia that had some interest in it. I thought this ship graveyard would be the same, and this video would break out of a Malaysian bubble.
In fact, I had high hopes for this video. I expected it to be my most popular video of the recent ones. But not only was it NOT the most popular out of the last ten videos, it was by far the LEAST popular. And this was hugely disheartening to me because I put a huge amount of time into it. Clearly, I have no idea how to make entertaining videos for YouTube. Even when I stumble across something that I thought was truly fascinating – this island full of abandoned ships – the video I made about it is a dud.
So I wanted to know why the video failed so badly. I did some research and scoured all the YouTube experts online to see what they say. And I came up with a bunch of ideas about why this video failed, and I decided to test some of those ideas. I was curious if I just changed a few things, and I reposted the video, would I see a difference in how it was received?
YouTube experts tell me that the ONLY thing that matters is viewer retention within the first two minutes. You can make the BEST video in history, but if people stop watching after thirty seconds, YouTube buries it, and nobody sees it. It would be like making the best movie in history, but if no theater shows it on their screens, no one knows it exists. So the most important thing is to convince theater owners to show your movie. And for YouTube, the most important thing is to get people to click on the video and keep watching after the first 30 seconds. If people keep watching your video after the first 30 seconds and don’t click off, YouTube’s systems start spreading it around and showing it to people. If people STOP watching your video after 30 seconds, YouTube buries your video. Nobody will ever know it even exists. It would be like writing a novel and then sticking it in a desk drawer. It could be a great book, but no one will read it or even know about it until you send it to a publisher and get it published and in book stores. So making a YouTube video with a poor opening and poor thumbnail is like never even posting it. If the video has a poor opening and thumbnail, you might as well just edit the video and then delete it. There’s no point even posting it to YouTube because YouTube will just bury it anyway. They will put into the dusty YouTube drawer, and no one will even know it exists.
And if this is the case, then perhaps the problem with my ship graveyard video was the title, thumbnail, and the opening. And when I started to look at the video from that point of view, I came up with some ideas for things to change. For example, the original video had a short teaser in which I showed a few seconds of me walking around the giant ships along with the words “Coming up….”. I did that because I knew the video started with me talking about going out to the island and explaining how I discovered it. So I thought it was a good idea to give people a taste of the bulk of the video first. The teaser is like an advertisement for the video to come and hopefully encourages people to keep watching.
But once you show a teaser like that, you need some kind of transition to get you over to the main video. You can think about a typical Itchy Boots video. In general, her videos start with a short teaser about an exciting moment in the video. Then she has the fancy trailer for her channel with music and visuals, and THEN the video starts. So it is teaser then trailer then video in that order.
I don’t have a fancy trailer for my channel, so after the teaser, I stuck in a title card with a photo and text along with a music cue. And then the video starts. It all made sense to me. The teaser gives people an exciting taste of what is coming up in the video. The title card and music cue gives a transition from the teaser to the video. And then the video starts. BUT, I wondered, maybe this was all a giant mistake. Maybe this teaser and title card HURTS viewer retention. Maybe people click on the video because they liked the title or thumbnail. And then instead of the story starting, they have to sit through this awkward series of teasers and cards and music cues, and they click off. So the biggest change I made in this new version of the video was to delete all of that. I removed the “Coming up” teaser and I removed the title card and title text and musical cue. It was a test to see if that made the video more popular.
The experts also tell me that viewer retention is all about meeting viewer expectations. If the video title and thumbnail promises a viewer a story about sneaking onto an island full of abandoned ships, then as soon as they click on the video, they should see somebody sneaking onto an island full of ships. You have to deliver on what the video promised them. But my original video, I realized, didn’t do that. And that’s because I opened the video with me already at the island and talking about how I discovered the island, how I got there, and how there was a potential security guard at the bridge, so I was waiting for the guard to go away. Basically, I didn’t open the video with story. I opened it with five minutes of exposition.
And in this new version of the video, I deleted ALL of that. I just got rid of it completely. Luckily, on that day, I had also shot a bonus video clip of me approaching the island on my bicycle. I never intended to use that video clip. I was going to post it to the Planet Doug Patreon as a fun bonus clip or put it at the end of the video as a surprise. But I realized it could actually serve as another opening to the video. And based on this idea of meeting viewer expectations, it would actually be better. Instead of five minutes of exposition, this new opening has me pushing my bicycle along the trail to the bridge to the island and wondering out loud if I would encounter any security.
So, right there, the video was now meeting viewer expectations AND it was starting with actual story. The video title could be about me sneaking onto this island past security, and then if someone clicks on it, they see me actually sneaking onto the island. In fact, in this new opening, when I get close to the bridge, I spot the van sitting there, and I wonder if they are security guards. So the original video has me talking for five minutes about going to the island and then running into potential security guards. The new video opens by actually SHOWING that in real time. It’s all story rather than exposition. And that lines up with a standard rule of thumb for making movies: show, don’t tell.
This new opening of the video was the biggest change I made and the biggest difference between the original and this new one. But I also changed the video thumbnail. The original thumbnail showed one of the giant orange tugboats beached on the island. I thought it looked dramatic and interesting and the shape of the boat and the orange color made it pop. I also used two key phrases from the video: “ship graveyard” and “island of misfit ships.” I was chatting with my AI buddies about this, and we settled on this strategy of putting “ship graveyard” in the video title and “island of misfit ships” on the thumbnail or vice versa. But when the video failed, I thought about this again, and now my AI buddies were telling me that this thumbnail was a mistake. They said that this orange tugboat made it look like I was visiting a simple fishing harbor. The boat didn’t look rusty and abandoned enough. And “misfit ships” was too poetic and too weird. So I decided to change the thumbnail to something that showed a true rusting hulk of a ship.
I also changed the video title. I honestly thought that the original title was great. It was something like “I Snuck Onto Malaysia’s Mysterious Island of Abandoned Ships”. I thought this idea of a YouTuber sneaking into a place where they weren’t supposed to be would be excellent at attracting viewers. At first, I didn’t want to use it because it felt like it was straying into clickbait. But at this point, if it means attracting viewers for my videos, I don’t mind a little bit of clickbait. But it also really wasn’t clickbait. I really DID sneak onto this island. And I knew full well I wasn’t supposed to go there. Much of the video was about me sneaking past security and staying hidden, so the title about sneaking in was true, and I decided to use it.
However, this title about me “sneaking onto” this island didn’t work either. It didn’t attract any viewers, and the video failed. So I also changed the title. And I noted that for the successful Submarine Museum video, I used a question in the title. That title was, “Why Is a French Submarine Sitting in a Field in Malaysia?” And that title contains what YouTube experts call a curiosity gap. It makes people wonder about the answer to the question. And they become curious and they click on the video to learn why this French submarine is here in Malaysia.
So for this new ship graveyard video, I decided to use another question. And the real mystery for me about this island was why all these ships were there. I talk about it at length in the video. So I leaned into that, and I used this title: “Why Was a Multi-Million Dollar Fleet Abandoned on this Island?” It was supposed to create the same kind of curiosity gap. (Since then, I reverted back to the original title about sneaking onto the island. This new title with the curiosity gap didn’t work either…)
And you might notice that I no longer used the names Melaka or Malaysia in the title. The idea here is that for an American or European audience, they might not care about an island in Malaysia. In fact, knowing the island is in Malaysia could HURT the video. Maybe a viewer in the United States would be interested in a video about a fleet of old, rusty ships. BUT when they see that the ships are in Malaysia, they might lose interest. Most Americans aren’t interested in Malaysia. Most couldn’t even find Malaysia on a world map. So I decided to leave the location out of the video title. Just focus on the ships.
Those changes were the most important ones in terms of my experiment with this new edit. But I also deleted a bunch of sections in the middle. I tried to make the video flow a bit faster, so I cut out some sections where I was walking from one ship to the next ship and talking. This new edit jumps from one visual of a rusting ship to the next visual of a rusting ship and skips the in between parts.
Finally, I changed the ending. And the changes to the ending roughly parallel the changes I made to the opening. The original ending has me talking a lot about the island and land reclamation and what may happen in the future. I deleted all of that. And I replaced it with another bonus clip I had of me just pushing my bicycle away from the island and musing about my last-minute encounter with the security guard. So instead of just summing up the video in a formal conclusion, the video just ends with me leaving the island. Fade to black. It ends with the end of the story, not with a formal conclusion.
And that’s the whole story of posting a new version of the ship graveyard video. To be honest, it was all probably a waste of time. I’m not going to see a dramatic change. The only way this experiment would end up being useful is if somehow this new edit of the video rockets up to 100,000 views or something like that. But that’s not going to happen. I don’t think there will be any kind of change except for a bunch of puzzled comments from regular viewers wondering why I “recycled” an old video. I think the only result of this experiment will be making a lot of people confused and puzzled. But I did it anyway because I was so disappointed in how the original video was received.