MR BIFFO: NOW CONTROLLED BY AI

This is probably really boring, but it’s interesting to me (and Sanja).

So I finally took the plunge and have paid for VidIQ. If you don’t know, it’s the main YouTube SEO tool… and it has been absolutely fascinating to dig into it.

Firstly… it’s clear to me now why all the thumbnails and titles on YouTube follow the same rough format. It’s because of VidIQ. I mean, the video that went up at the weekend about the riots was the first one where the title and thumbnail were put together with the help of VidIQ, and… well, we’re at nearly 20,000 in just three days.

I’ve gone back and tweaked some of our older vids. It’s unlikely to make a massive difference, given they’re not current, but neither was the Milton Keynes video when that suddenly lifted off. Clearly VidIQ isn’t flawless, because it rated the title and thumbnail for MK quite low. I dunno what that means.

 The level of insight goes way beyond what YouTube offers creators as standard, showing an accurate metric for the number of subscribers each video brought in, which is particularly interesting.

 The haunted museum video did fine, but as we suspected we can now see that it brought us very few new subscribers. We saw our subs struggling that whole week. We can now see that the same happened for the video where we went to Rendelsham forest with the Barshens crew.

 This is clearly what was happening whenever we collab-ed with the extended Barshens universe; over time we realised people were coming for those guys rather than us and that – for whatever reason – a lot of Cheapshow fans really, really, really don’t like me.

 It’s telling that even the Holme Fen video – which has fewer views than the haunted museum – has a better watch-to-subscribe ratio that’s almost twice as high. Even our Weird Oxfordshire video has a higher ratio than the haunted museum. It doesn’t really matter, and it won’t stop us doing silly videos where we hang out with our mates, but it’s something to consider and is why it was so important for us to cultivate our own audience who are there for us, rather than inheriting one. People seem to love doing stuff with us, but I just have to stay firm with my boundaries for the time being…! At least until we’re a little more established. 

VidIQ also has a section where it generates ideas based upon what has been successful on your channel – literally, it suggests titles for these hypothetical videos. It ranks these by view predictions.

Ones that will apparently do well for us include:

• Investigating the spectral residents of a lost mansion

• The prevalence of headless ghosts in UK folklore! #ghoststories #London

• How Mythical Creatures Shaped Our History 

• What Visions Did a Victorian Man Encounter That Night? #mystery #spooky #scary

 I mean… uh… okay. I guess. I kind of don’t like taking the human creativity out of it. I get it; it’s about trying to get eyes on your content, but it also feels like trying to get views for the sake of views, rather than covering subjects that I’m interested in or passionate about. Not that I don’t want to know what visions a Victorian man encountered that night…

Like any tool, AI is good for some things – and I like playing around with it - but I’m not prepared to surrender control of my imagination and areas of interest to it just yet.

But… I’m sure plenty of people are, and it’s probably doing extremely well for them. It’s just a shame really, because going the AI route seems to round off all the rough edges, and we’re basically ending up with content that is entirely curated by software… and nobody seems to realise or even care!!!

As an amusing postscript to this... we've had a few comments on the latest video suggestion that I'm somehow AI, as part of some sort of misinformation campaign. The mental knots these people must tie themselves in is just beyond...

 Paul