This image PR episode £1,800, YouTube video subscription.
It is posted by a user and in about 15 minutes long.
The summary is how to subscribe to and watch YouTube video series with suggestions.
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Hello, this is Huka, welcome to Hacker Public Radio and this is another exciting
episode, not part of any particular series in this particular case, but something that came
up actually when we were recording the last community news.
It started with something that C PROMPED had done, C PROMPED did a show a couple of weeks
ago.
It was kind of like three different cool things he wanted to talk about and one of them was
Crash Course Astronomy and I said to Ken, yeah, I know all about Crash Course Astronomy
and all of the other Crash Course and we got to talking and so as you know, if you talk
to Ken about almost anything, he'll say I want a show, so I said, yeah, okay, I can do
that.
So I want to talk about YouTube video subscriptions, which is actually a big thing for
me because although my wife and I do have a cable TV subscription, I've maintained
I could give it up easily because so much of what I am interested in is online anyway.
Now for a lot of people that might mean something like Netflix or Hulu, but for me it
means stuff like YouTube and video podcasts and things like that.
This is the golden age of narrow casting, as opposed to broadcasting.
Because YouTube gives so many creators the opportunity to find their own audience for things
that don't appeal to the masses.
The television show needs to reach millions of people to be economically viable to advertisers,
who pay all of the production costs.
But with the rise of services like Patreon, a video series can be viable with just a few
thousand viewers, as long as they're willing to pay a small amount, often as little as
a dollar a month or a dollar per video to support the creators.
For less money than the salary of one Hollywood star, you can have an entire ecosystem
of interesting videos.
The ones I like might not appeal to you, of course, but that is the point, a thousand
flowers can bloom in this environment.
Now Patreon is an important part of this.
I have a link in the show notes, but you've probably heard about PATR-E-O-N.
It's a subscription site that lets you pledge to support creators of content.
You give them a credit card, they can charge, and then make your pledges.
You could pledge in a variety of ways.
But for these videos, I typically pledge either per month or per video.
At the end of the month, my credit card is charged, and Patreon sends me an itemized statement
of what I've paid for.
Now to be fair, none of these videos is behind a paywall.
So you could free ride on this, but I'm sure no one I know would do a thing like that.
If I subscribe to a series, I'm willing to pay for it if they ask.
Now, there are a few that don't, because they are well supported by advertising, at least
I assume that's what it is, because I don't see them asking for donations.
But many of them do rely on that.
So what are some of the YouTube subscriptions in particular that I like?
Well, let's talk about YouTube subscriptions.
YouTube, you can do a video series, and if you have a video series and you watch the video
on YouTube, you'll see a button under it that says subscribe.
Now that doesn't do a whole lot, that doesn't do nearly what I think it ought to do.
It does build stats for the creator, but for advertising supported series, building stats
actually does matter.
If you can go to advertisers and say, here's all the people that subscribe to my series,
you know, maybe you can get a better rate for your ads.
One thing it does let you do is sign up to get an email when a new episode is released.
Now, to activate this feature, log into YouTube with your Google account, and on the left
side, go all the way down to the bottom, and you will see a button to manage subscriptions.
Click on that, and you'll see that you can put a checkmark to get email updates for pretty
much any subscription.
I like to do that, and then I have arranged to have the emails in a folder in my Gmail,
and then I can delete the email when I've watched the video.
Now what I would love to see happen, and maybe this will at some point, I'd love to see
some way that I could automatically, when I subscribe to these things, have, you know,
here's the videos you haven't watched yet, and you know, maybe have them show up on
TV or something like that, just simplify my life a little bit more, but YouTube has not
done that yet, you know.
But I would love would be something that just says, here's all the videos for things you
subscribe to that you haven't watched, but meanwhile, I have to do it manually.
So on the YouTube subscriptions, first of all, there are a couple of major creators that
I really like to follow, and the first one is a two brothers that started off as the
vlog brothers of ELOG, a video blog, I guess, and that's, these brothers are Hank and
John Green, and they have a pretty good collection of videos here, and they started as
far as I can tell by sending videos back and forth to each other, and that continues.
But then they got serious and created a convention called VidCon, link in the show notes,
that showcases many of the video series creators in their work.
YouTube then got the idea to promote an expansion of videos and provided money to support
new work from folks like them.
This led to a group of videos under the heading crash course, which is not one series,
but a collection of them.
The first ones were world history, and biology, then they had an American history, literature,
ecology, chemistry, psychology, and so on.
And of course, the one that C prompt mentioned, which is astronomy, which is hosted by
Phil Plate, so it's a lot of content there.
They also have a series of science-related videos under the general heading of SciShow,
and so they have a SciShow space, SciShow Talk Show, and then just general SciShow videos that
come along.
Now, when the YouTube seed money ended, they switched to a crowd funding model and just
recently moved on to Patreon.
They also partner with PBS online for some of their series, PBS for people outside
the United States is the public broadcasting system, so it's like the BBC, but an American
version.
Now my favorite show from this group is one called healthcare triage.
This is a doctor who gives straight analysis based on actual studies.
He explains which studies are more reliable and why they are more reliable.
So I guess I'm a bit of a data geek, but that really appeals to me.
Plus, I have worked for a few hospitals in my career, and previously taught a little about
healthcare economics, so this is something of interest.
So anything from the vlog brothers, you would probably enjoy.
Then there's a fellow called Brady Heron, and he's a video producer originally from Australia
who went to the United Kingdom, worked for the BBC for a while, and then decided to become
independent.
And he has a fascinating group of video series that I think a lot of geeks would like.
Twitter file, which is about the history and underlying technology of computers.
If you ever wanted an all about flip flops, nandgates, and acorn computers, this show has
covered all of them.
Deep sky videos.
This is all about astronomy, including a detailed look at the telescopes at the European
Southern Observatory in Paranal, Chile.
Perfile, all about mathematics, and the unusual numbers that pop up, what is the largest
number described?
Well, they covered it.
Objectivity.
They look at objects from the history of science, and it didn't particular the collection
of the Royal Society in England.
Periodic videos.
This is an award-winning series on chemistry, demonstrating some fun experiments.
Mr. Martin Polyacoff is the host, and then 60 symbols, the world of advanced physics.
This covers everything from quantum mechanics to relativity to stream theory.
So Brady Heron is obviously doing a lot of good stuff, and if you just checked that out,
BRADY, H-A-R-A-N on YouTube, you can see all of the stuff that he does.
Now, in addition to that, those two big groups of things, there are a lot of YouTube series
that I love that I'm going to now mention, kind of miscellaneous, a little bit, although mostly
science.
First is Alton Brown, who was famous as the host and creator of Good Eates on the Food
Network.
He's known for a scientific approach to cooking and food, and I enjoy his videos.
He hasn't been too many of late, I think he's been on the road doing a traveling show.
BBC Earth Unplugged, which is science videos from the BBC, and when called Braincraft,
it's about the science of the brain, and it's produced by PBS Digital.
Brain stuff from how stuff works.
So that's kind of a smaller collection of things, so I have several things from how stuff
works.
So this particular one is a science-related one, they do some others.
Then there's a series from Candy Rat Records.
This is a label that specializes in Good Tar music, and a number of my favorite people
record for them.
They've very sensibly published videos on YouTube to promote their artists, and I have purchased
a number of CDs as a result, so that's a good thing.
Dan Carlin, Dan Carlin is the host of Hardcore History and Common Sense, which are
two of the audio podcasts I subscribe to, but on this channel is the occasional video.
FW Thinking, FW for Forward, I think, which is mostly about the future and how it will
be different, how stuff works, which is kind of a general knowledge show.
It's okay to be smart, another science show from PBS Digital, so they just did one
on cloning, for instance.
Then another one called Kurt Scazacht, I've got it with soon by the name that comes from
Germany, although it's in English, one video a month on a science-related topic.
Mental floss, well, there's several different mental floss series, and they all have to
do with trivia in one way or another, just fun little stuff.
Then minute-earth and minute physics, which present short science videos, which you might
guess from the name minute, they're not terribly long, you know, a lot of these things are
like two or three minutes long, so it's not going to chew up a ton of your life.
Then NASA E-clips, which is videos from NASA Nature Video, that science videos that
come from Nature Magazine, which is one of the major journals in science, physics
girl, and physics girl does really interesting experiments to illustrate concepts and physics.
Piled higher and deeper, or also known as PhD comics, and that also, they do science videos,
no fixed schedule, just every once in a while, and another one shows up.
Space Frontier Org, occasional videos on space-related topics, I don't see a lot of activity
there.
To K's take, yep, George to K has a video channel, so what's not to love there.
The Frugal Computer Guide, how to videos, does a very good job, you know, if anyone likes
the Libra office things that I've done, he has done some stuff on Libra office base,
and their videos on YouTube, and they're very well done.
The Veritasium, which is another science-related series, then one called V-Sauce, kind of
hard to describe it, it's a very quirky look at it odd topics.
And finally, welcome to Night Vale.
Now, welcome to Night Vale is an audio podcast that I subscribe to, but they also throw
up videos from time to time.
By the way, that podcast is one, everyone should be listening to, it's pretty awesome.
So, it is obvious that I subscribe to a lot of science-related channels, but that is what
I enjoy.
Now, with all of my subscriptions, I probably averaged six to seven new videos a day
that show up in my mailbox, but with so much content now available on YouTube, the chances
are that you will find lots of things you like, so I would urge you to give it a try.
And so with that, this is Huka, for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, reminding everyone
to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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