What am I even doing? My approach to YouTube.
Being a creator is a weird and wonderful thing. This is how I do it.
One of the most common comments (and emails, and Instagram and Twitter messages, etc.) I receive goes along the lines of “How do you make so many YouTube videos?” And that’s actually natural: I am Reece Martin, transit YouTuber, and I think many people forget the second part.
A weird thing about people who do YouTube is that they often learn a lot and have similar experiences. That said, communication between creators isn’t as substantial as it probably should be, because YouTube simply does not have a feature set that easily enables this. I personally know and talk regularly with a couple of YouTubers, and while I value these interactions a lot, they are still quite limited. Because of this, I think people’s experiences on this platform — and just generally people’s experiences as professional creators — isn’t well understood.
So, how do I do YouTube?
At present, I make two videos a week for the RMTransit YouTube channel, though historically that number was much higher. For all of 2021 and roughly half of 2022 I was creating four videos every week — more than most creators, and that choice has always led to a lot of questions.
Before we get to that though, what does creating a video entail?
My video production process (for the average talking head video where I am talking about a specific issue or system or project) usually begins with a random offhand thought or a comment left on another video. I do keep a long list of ideas for times when I don’t have any, but I almost always prefer the spur of the moment ideas that come to mind, because their raison d’etre is immediate in my mind. Now, originally in the channel’s early days, creating a video really just meant having a general sense of what I want to talk about and then going at it, but that’s gone from being how I produced almost all of my first 50 talking heads to how I make zero of my latest videos. I actually think the speaking-off-the-cuff style tends to come off as more natural and much less cuts, but I would often end up missing addressing points that were important to me, or just find it difficult to complete the video from stress. Recording a video still feels a lot like public speaking to me, and while I have gotten better, I also absolutely feel like I put on a persona when I make videos that does not really reflect what I am like in real life, for better or for worse.
Now, actually getting to the read means writing something, and this is often the hardest part of making a video. Not only do I need to collect my relevant thoughts on a topic, but I also need to decide what not to say. That in itself is one of the hardest parts of doing YouTube or really any creative opinion or informational piece: the tradeoff between coverage (which people will comment about if they are unsatisfied) and length as well as density (which in excess will get very little attention). Research is also a critical part of this writing process as well, especially for the more formulaic videos I do explaining different transit systems — although the way I do that is sort of unconventional or perhaps unexpected. That is because I am already really engrossed in the public transport field via tons of different books, websites, and other people talking about city issues, and that means the way I collect knowledge looks unusual and probably warrants its own video.
Getting through actually recording and editing videos has become simpler in the last year or so, thanks to help from an editor as well as just experience, though as video releases have reduced in frequency, the amount of postproduction work has gone up, first releasing videos early to supporters and gathering feedback to generate a better final version. Once that’s together, a video is ready for release, on a date which in 70% of the time is already predetermined when I start working on a video, meaning I have to be pretty good at predicting how much time will be needed to complete a given project.
That is when the time comes to release the video, which is actually something that most YouTubers I talk to, myself included, take way more seriously than I think anyone who only consumes YouTube content realizes. You see, releasing a video is an involved process: Once you’ve got the video up, you may still need to think about what to title it, and what the thumbnail should be — and this is something that is actually both very challenging to determine, and also massively important. You also need to actually post your video (few creators I know are satisfied to use the automatic upload feature which does exist), and then share it to what could be several different social media platforms. You’ll then likely want to watch the video in the YouTube analytics system as the views count up, comparing it to your expectations and to previous videos. Most creators I know also still interact with comments to at least some extent (I try to reply to all of them in the first hour), which adds extra work as well. Of course, if comments start popping up a few days later all discussing or complaining about the same point in your video, you’ll likely want to address that.
So now time to get to the big-ish questions: Why so many, and how?
Creating a lot of YouTube videos is in my eyes good for a bunch of reasons, especially if you’re stressed out by video performance or are trying to have YouTube be a stable income source. Here are some of the main things I have found:
When you make more videos, the amount of risk and stress around an individual video is much less — you’ll have another up soon and you need to work on that so you don’t have much time to worry. Yes, by forcing yourself to package videos up and release them, you will learn how to create something which is good enough, and not be paralyzed in your decision making, which I think is huge — you can always do a follow up!
When you make more videos, you can cover a wider number of potential audience groups — expanding your niche. You can also vary your content more, which lets you do more things at once, but also experiment with different types of content without annoying viewers who liked a particular format.
When you make more videos, you can rapidly build up a back catalogue of videos, and if they are evergreen (i.e. they aren’t news or have long term relevance) those videos can continue to generate some views and could even take off months or years after making them — something which most YouTubers have at least a story or two about.
Probably most important of all — when you make more videos, you learn faster. You quickly figure out how the video creation and release process works, and you can test things out easily, quickly reverting if things go awry. It’s a lot more stressful to try something new when this is 1/4 of your video production for the month.
How is that possible?
When you make a lot of videos you get much more efficient. A lot of resources like graphics only need to be made once (if you are organized that is) which means that using the same graphic again to talk about something different is free, so to speak.
Talking head videos are popular, and they can be incredibly basic. I certainly put together some talking heads with few clips overlaid in my early days, and such videos - especially if they don’t have animations and the like can be very quick to make.
Filming B-Roll (for me videos of transit vehicles and the like) is really time consuming, but thanks to my many series of videos on things like stations and construction work, I usually would be collecting it while producing a completely different video — then being able to reuse it in the future. I’ve built out a really big library now so I can pull up clips from almost any Canadian city (or others I have visited) for free.
Writing videos can be made faster by doing it when inspiration strikes — I have written a large number of my videos (even if just an outline) during a quick trip on transit using my phone. These kind of relatively in depth outlines are really quick to turn into full scripts.
That being said, in some ways managing the actual creation part of YouTube is the more straightforward part — managing the community from comments, to emails, to direct messages, and more ends up becoming very time consuming. Often people will ask questions that would probably better be Google’d, though as a person who tries to be helpful I often respond anyways. I’ve also found people will frequently just request meetings on Zoom and the like to discuss various matters, and this is the sort of thing that just becomes completely impossible to do at any scale, even if you want to.
You also need to plan for the future as a creator. Unlike with most jobs (sadly a decreasing number) there is almost no certainty about what the future holds. Sometimes a big news story comes up and you want to do a related piece. Sometimes for no apparent reason some algorithm decides to stop serving your content. Things can come crashing and burning down almost instantly and you often have little to no recourse, and for me this has me avoiding doing things like stockpiling content or prewriting scripts long into the future. That’s because if the direction of content, or my own personal style needs to change for one reason or another that all becomes wasted work.
So, I’ve now discussed a lot of the logistics and my learnings around doing YouTube, but that doesn’t answer perhaps a more fundamental question — why? This is actually something I think a lot about, because it drives the things I focus on talking about in videos. If my goal for YouTube — even in the niche of transit — was only to make a living, then I’d probably stick to broad topics and make a lot more loud black and white statements, because this type of content just seems to perform far better, even if the lack of nuance puts it a lot further from reality. That being said, I also was doing YouTube in University long before I was being paid, so that really did just come as a way of extending my ability to do something I already enjoyed.
I think ultimately, the reason I make videos is that there is a niche that I want to fill, and to some extent it is being filled now by more creators — but it also isn’t. Specifically, things started with something like this problem statement “there is no online content which nicely catalogues the public transit systems of Canada in video format” which was then augmented by “the Toronto region is undergoing one of the biggest urban and transportation transformations in the world, and that process — its ups and its downs should be documented, with learnings shared for the benefit of Canada and the rest of the world”. These two main ideas lead to a lot of the early videos I made on my YouTube channel, surrounding Canadian transit primarily. This then expanded with another broad idea “discuss major transportation projects and systems around the world in a global context”. The point here is that there is a lot of value in having transit advocates and enthusiasts have knowledge that is grounded globally, because it can really help with calling out when something (a single line subway-tram hybrid, for example) might be a bad idea, or where there is a solution that we should try, but are not (mixing trams and mainline trains). I think the final thing that I introduced to my channel was directly advocating for or against certain ideas, often because I felt many North American transit projects were abusing the language and technologies used for systems on other continents to create strange hybrid systems, or bad solutions for high prices.
Of course, part of this is also just about sharing knowledge. Often somebody has a sense that something isn’t a good idea, but doesn’t have alternatives or a strong list of reasons why something is bad, and I’d like to think my videos have at least sometimes provided that. There are also cases where someone knows something to be true or at least believes it to be true, but for one reason or another doesn’t want to talk about it — enabling people, especially at transit agencies and working on transit projects, to point to a video instead of saying something they don’t want to.
Possibly the most important and impactful, but also the hardest thing to measure in my personal opinion is just… shedding light. I think it’s amazing given how global the urbanism community tends to be — with references frequently made to Paris, Hong Kong, New York and Tokyo — just how siloed things feel in transit. Even the Paris RER or Tokyo Metro, truly legendary transit systems in legendary cities, are not that well understood by the average transit advocate or enthusiast, and I think that’s a problem because without knowing what is possible you 1) cannot call out claims about things being impossible and 2) won’t know where to aim!
So, that’s a shot at describing my approach to YouTube — the how and the why. I hope some of this was useful, and if you have more detailed questions I would be happy to write subsequent posts interspersed with my regular musings about cities and transit.
You have a great channel, Reece. Toronto needs your enthusiasm for transit!
Enjoy your channel. You are doing a public service and helping save the environment by making everyone aware of transits potential.