Speaking as someone with some skin in the game, Youtube is a platform for selling advertising. Any side-benefit of it being slightly useful as an educational resource is entirely coincidental to its core business, which is being an effective tool to deliver adverts to a target demographic that an advertiser thinks will deliver value compred with other marketing efforts.

The returns on making detailed technical content are minute, as few advertisers see students and tech engineers as a good target for sales, one group being penniless, the other being far too savvy to sell anything to.? That means the payment per video is tiny, perhaps a tenth of that from consumer tech promotion and other high-value content.? A well-made educational video on RF technical subjects might only get a few tens of thousand views, making perhaps $3 per 1000 at best. I usually estimate from 1 to 2 hours work per minute of finished video, so a 25 minute video would take perhaps 30 to 50 hours work, sometimes much more. If it makes 25000 views, that's perhaps $75, so less than two dollars per hour.? Hardly an incentive to produce hard core tech videos. I'm not rich enough to do it for the sheer love of the subject.

Very occasionally, there's a vendor prepared to pay a reasonable sponsorship fee to make an in-depth technical video about their product, but the chance of finding those few opportunities is very low.?

Paying for educational content is probably the only way to get reasonable quality material, and the cost is likely to be very high.? Some folks in adjacent fields are using their Youtube channel to sell training courses at between $400 and $1000, providing a lot of interaction to a small group of folks.? A few university lecturers put their material on Youtube, but there isn't much incentive for them to do it.

One of my videos for a sponsor was aimed at getting a marketing message out to a group of perhaps 1000 potential customers in the advance RF materials market.? I managed to persuade an extra 950,000 other viewers to watch it, but as there were no adverts, I didn't receive anything other than the very generous fee from the vendor.?

Finding a way to make serious technical content provide a reasonable return is always up against the problem that nobody wants to pay enough to make a reasonable return, which leads to the dearth of RF design content.? It has to have some other hook (like a Spying or Cold War connection)? to get any reasonable number of views.? If there are folks out there who are wealthy enough to make RF design content almost for free, it's easy enough to obtain suitable kit and software and learn to use it (or pay an editor).? I rather doubt there will be a stampede of willing volunteers, but if someone wants to be the Youtube RF Design version of Veritasium, Mathologer, 3Blue1Brown, Signal Path, Marco Reps, DiodeGoneWild or Alpha Phoenix, I'd be very happy to provide advice on how to go about it. If you want to be the next Styropyro, you need good genes and some nice vests.

I'm planning on doing some videos in 2024 where I interview specialists about technical matters.? Now I just need sponsorship from R&S or Keysight.? I could REALLY use a PNA-X, hint hint.

--
Neil G4DBN

On 25/12/2023 00:57, Trevor Gale via groups.io wrote: