I was thinking more about slingshots stupid stick thing he's trying to sell when I made that comment about clicks and selling crap. Contextually in your defense it was in a thread about you and entering that thread I didn't even watch your video which the thread topic was about I just assumed it was another "do this x to get y" type video, there's lots of those, many are just filler content in my opinion, and I'm not the target demographic.
Here's the thing. I don't know you, all I know is at face value you are for profit and make videos and people apparently pay you for personalized lessons which I assume they find very useful otherwise you wouldn't be selling them anymore. You still have to market yourself in the youtube flavor which I find personally irritating, it's not your fault I understand how the algorithm works.
You should stick around though we have some fun arguments.
It is fair to say that our YouTube channel is a marketing funnel for private lessons and I am definitely for profit. I have even encouraged SW22 and other coaches to charge for their lessons as I believe there are benefits on both sides of the equation.
Paid coaching:
I believe that if we want to move the sport forward coaches are imperative. People learning at an improved pace will make kids do cooler things with discs will bring in more sponsors. Not everyone wants the sport to grow in this way. I do, so I take steps toward this goal. Getting paid for lessons is not only beneficial for me but it paves the way for more coaches in disc golf.
Practically, if I wasn't getting paid I wouldn't coach. I had a choice between continuing to be Director of Tennis at a country club or going full time disc golf coach. In order for me to coach disc golf my income had to be partly replaced. This will be the same for others that are considering taking time away from their families to pour into disc golf. Imagine if
@Brychanus was faced with the decision to not coach disc golf because he ran out of free time and funds were tight. Even an extra $500/mo might be the difference maker in him continuing to contribute to this sport or walking away to pick up more hours/responsibilities at work.
This is why I'm very open about how much we make on Patreon. We could toggle that setting and hide the number but I want people considering coaching to see that they can make money coaching people.
If you suck as a coach and don't get results, students don't come back, like you said.
YouTube:
We actually don't play the YouTube game and don't care about the algorithm. For those lurking that may be interested I'll go through a sample process.
1. The video concept: Almost all of our video concepts come from things I am teaching in private lessons. I teach roughly 100 lessons a month. If I have to explain the same thing to 20 of those lessons I assume that a lot of other people need to hear it and it gets put in a video. Basically, lessons give me a good indicator of things I feel the greater disc golf populace should hear and I'm trying to put private lesson Josh out of business.
2. The video content: The tough thing about this is that I have to act like I'm talking to a singular person on YouTube that is overgeneralized. You can't coach a concept and catch everyone. You're gonna hit some and miss others completely. In deciding how to parse out a topic I have to pick 1 of the 7 explanations of it and go with that. If I do more than that I risk giving too much information. I'd rather have one person understand it in a simple way they can implement it than two people paralyzed by too much information. You can imagine with the threads in here that we have a lot of people with a disproportionate amount of knowledge to skill. That is not a coincidence. There is definitely a correlation to knowing everything and being able to implement nothing.
So, the video content is short and focuses on a tiny aspect of a vast subject most of the time and runs the risk of being overly simplistic. And Mikey edits it down really well too of course. We also enjoy making videos so sometimes we just do fun things in them for our benefit.
3. Titles and Thumbnails: We don't do clickbait. This of course depends on your definition of clickbait, but we don't create titles and thumbnails to trick people into clicking and watching something they aren't looking for. I would call this click bait and switch.
Every title and thumbnail have the goal of
informing the potential viewer of what is going to be in the video.
Take our last video for example:
How to BIG Putt | Coaching Mikey to 100ft Spin Putts
I think it is pretty obvious that if you click on this video you are going to see a couple things: instruction on how to putt big distances and me coaching Mikey to 100ft spin putts.
Between the thumbnail and title you should be fully informed of whether you want to spend your time watching it or not. Now if you click on that and in the video I only have Mikey putting at 25' the whole time and say "If you can make 25 footers, congratulations! That's a big putt in my book!" That would be misinformation and would actually be clickbait.
We could 4x our view count if we wanted to by using actual click bait. The views we get are because we have informative titles versus uninformative ones. YouTube only cares about if people watch your video and if they watch it for a long time. If you have a video that doesn't do what people expect it to do then they just leave, your average view duration tanks, and YouTube doesn't promote you. Turns out when you show people exactly what the video is going to be about and deliver on it things also go well with YouTube.