I don’t have any experience with running a YouTube channel. But I’m curious as to what kind of content you intend to have.
What puzzles me is why so many YouTube channel hosts aren't podcasters instead. Why is it a video presentation when only the audio has value? You’re typically looking at some person with wires coming out of their ears, filmed from the awkward vantage of a computer or cell phone camera, with the clutter of their house as the backdrop. There’s just nothing interesting about it whatsoever. Only a very small percentage of the population is beautiful or worth looking at for an extended period of time. In former times, the expression was, “now there’s a face for radio.” At least in the olden days of the television chat show, there were usually tasteful sets, and you had several camera angles, and the guests were allowed to smoke. I think smoking aids in the collecting of one’s thoughts—when you have to pause for lighting and dragging and puffing. Most of the best YouTube channels are the ones that offer archival content from decades past. I recently watched
Allen Ginsberg being interviewed by William F. Buckley on Firing Line. They were not handsome men, but they both had interesting faces. It would have suffered as radio. But what the internet offers is the reign of the amateur. There’s not a patrician Catholic intellectual or a radical Jewish poet in every bedroom. Now it’s just an average person with casual banter. “Hey guys, what’s up? Don’t forget to subscribe. So anyway, whoa, there’s a lot going on with X, Y, and Z, and I have a lot to say” and then a long unscripted, uninteresting stream of consciousness. And nobody smokes.
I think there are ways for amateurs or semi-professionals to offer good content, though. There’s a hobbyist musician named
Edward Boensnes who takes public domain silent movies and scores them on his home organ. And there’s an art historian named
Micah Christensen who tapes his lectures and then puts them on YouTube with the relevant paintings on the video feed. These are good channels. But thank the heavens for the people who put up the old shows like Dick Cavett, Mike Wallace, and
Firing Line. Anyway, I’m not sure what you have planned, but that’s just my unsolicited take on these things.
