Since I started creating content in January of 2015, I have tried to watch and learn from "analytics". I put that in quotes because different platforms show different levels of data. A lot of programs out there promise the ability to see your data and actually learn what to do with it to improve performance. I don't call bullshit very often, but their claims are applied to any size profile as long as you can pay.
Obviously, you can learn from your data and apply changes based on that data if you're a big channel with lots of content. My channels have never been big enough to have a large enough data set to tell me anything except that a portion of people have little to no interest in my content for some reason. The data set is not large enough to tell me why, so I haven't been able to use it to determine what worked and what didn't. I never had the data to see what to change and what to keep the same. Those hucksters insisted they could teach you how to use data (for a fee) to improve your channel performance and almost guaranteed that it would work for everyone (who pays them).
It's not a black and white issue, obviously. Like I said, if you have a small channel with a large enough data set, then you can do something with that data.
I'm finally there with one form of content: short form vertical videos.
I resisted vertical video for a long time because it's garbage. I still think that phone's shouldn't even be capable of rendering video in portrait mode, and should require you to acknowladge that your degenerate, retarded vertical video will look like trash at least three times before starting to record in portrait mode (photos are fine) but then still render the video in landscape, because fuck you and your vertical video.
That being said, it's actually performing for some reason.
The data is in, and it looks like YouTube and Instagram tend to perform decently regardless of what kind of content I'm posting as long as I hit the right tags. I'm even getting engagement. I should note that there are two types of vertical videos I'm producing. The first is the actual recorded on my phone that I post from my phone, and the second (which is more common at the moment) is edits of my pre-recorded videos and live streams shortened up to tease those videos on the other channels. Like I said, all of those perform about equally on Instagram and YouTube (shorts).
TikTok, on the other hand has massive discrepencies between content types. I'm not sure the reasoning, but the edits to promote the pre-recorded content don't peform well at all, where the phone videos work incredible well on that platform. I suspect there could be a number of factors, and I think I actually know a couple of them. First, I record and edit the phone videos in CapCut, which was recently acquired by Bytedance (the owner of TikTok), so anything created in CapCut is naturally going to perform better than other content, even if it's the same. It's basically advertising for thier product. The other factors could be the type of content I'm promoting with the edits. It's mostly conspiracy content )even though it's debunking The Guardians/RDD/CSRQ), and those tags are pretty inactive and not very popular. It may be supressed, but it's also not very popular in general. The other edits are my new personal stories, and that just takes time.
The lesson here is that I can put more focus in TikTok into phone videos, which will perform fine on the other platforms anyway, and de-emphasize the edits. That was always part of the plan once I catch up on those anywah, but it does mean having to write more jokes, and find more topics for said jokes, until I can find a common schtick for those.
The bottom line is, I'm actually learning and I may actually grow a bit. And I'm enjoying the content, so trying to grow isn't a chore.
