illusorywall
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A question about short form videos. Double post to youtube or not?
🕑 Added 2022-05-19 17:06:46 +0000 UTCThis past weekend I made a TikTok account, and I uploaded my first video there: https://www.tiktok.com/@illusorywall_ https://www.tiktok.com/@illusorywall_/video/7098385212115045678
This was also double-posted as a youtube short, where it unsurprisingly got a lot more views due to having more of a built-in audience: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0cDAZ-BcZAM
But it's now over 11k views on TikTok, which I suppose isn't bad for my first upload!
I like the idea of mixing things up a bit, where I recognize that there's a lot of people who are turned off by longer videos and won't watch mine due to their length. While I don't plan on pivoting away from longer-form discussions as my main content (it's what I prefer), I have a lot of bite-sized nuggets I could be sharing! And if this can help reach some people who aren't otherwise watching my content yet, that'd be great.
I'm feeling partially inspired by Zullie's shorter vids, but instead of going for the same thing I think I'd rather keep to the extremes; Make videos that are typically 15+ minutes in length (and sometimes a lot longer as we all know), but when I make a short it's going to be under 60 seconds or I'm not going to bother. This ensures that they're easy to make and not big time sinks.
There are pros and cons to the whole shorts thing. I almost certainly could've made more money off of the same video had I not made it a short for youtube and instead made it a proper widescreen video that was 2-3 minutes in length instead. But I'm also not particularly concerned about maximizing profit, I'm more interesting in reaching a different audience I might be missing. Shorter videos intended for mobile viewing isn't something I was doing at all previously, and there's something nice about filling a niche I wasn't touching upon.
Since TikTok is made for that I have no qualms about posting stuff there whenever, but I am on the fence about double posting to youtube. I do like how the main or "front" page of my youtube channel appears, moving the shorts into its own category below so it's neatly separated from my main content:
However, if you click on the "videos" tab it does put the shorts in there alongside everything else, and that's what has me a little uneasy about the prospect of making several of these in-between main episodes. Maybe I'm overthinking it, perhaps the front page separating things combined with the use of playlists is good enough, but part of me worries about my video tab getting a lot of shorts stuffed in there. This is all to say I'm on the fence about whether or not all of the shorts I plan on making will actually get double-posted to youtube, or if a lot of them will be TikTok only. What do you think?
Comments
Hugsized
The thumbnail format of the shorts certainly ruin the consistent style on the videos page. Personally, I use the videos tab to see which videos I've seen from a creator before and seeing shorts on the page gives the impression that you make quick low-effort content. Making tik Tok exclusive content also seems gross. You could publish a tik Tok compilation on YouTube once you have enough footage in a trivia-style video. You could even rerender the footage in proper 16:9 but I don't know how many people even care that it's in mobile format.
Samuel H Diamond
I'm too old to be on TikTok, so I'd prefer if they were also on YouTube
