Creating Videos

I started my Explaining Science blog nearly 11 years ago in April 2014. Back then I wasn’t sure how long I’d want to keep it  going. But now in 2025 I still find  that I enjoy blogging very much.

In July 2020, the year of the first covid-19 lockdowns in the UK, I started the Explaining Science  YouTube channel (YouTube.com/ExplainingScience). It has similar content to my blog. But there are certain things which are a lot easier to explain by a  video than in a blog post.  In addition, there are a small number  of videos on topics which are more technical than I write about in my blog.  It is also fun to create videos and adds variety.

The YouTube channel has slowly grown over the last 5 years and now has about 1900 subscribers. I have created 28 videos  and in total there’s been around 200,000 views summed up over all the videos.

Don’t get hung up on the Number of Views

So I guess I am,  to some modest degree,  a content creator or I could even call myself a YouTuber -although this is stretching it a bit 😊. For me, the fun is in creating videos. Realistically, I don’t  expect any of my videos to get a  million views. That just won’t happen. On YouTube there are 1.5 billion educational videos (source https://www.clrn.org/how-many-videos-are-in-youtube/)  and within that number, I would expect that there must be at least 100 million science videos.

If  you pick for example my video about  the Twin Paradox

This is where  one twin remains on Earth and the other travels to a nearby star at near the speed of light and then returns back to Earth. When the two twins are reunited the travelling twin is younger.

Since its upload in 2021,  this video has had 2600 views, an average of only 1.8 views per day.  The reason for this (in my humble opinion) isn’t that it is a poor video, it is because there are many videos about the twin paradox and  the YouTube search algorithm doesn’t rank my video as highly as others on this topic. If you enter “Twin Paradox” into the YouTube search box, it will return a large number of results and you have to scroll a long long way through them to find my video. Many of these search results are sponsored (i.e. advertising) where the video has nothing to do with the Twin Paradox

From the data below which is for the 28-day period up to 2 January 2025, the video had only 34 views.

• Impressions is the number of times the video thumbnail was shown in a YouTube search or as a suggested video.
• Impression click through rate is the  percentage of those impressions which  resulted in a click, i.e. someone watched the video

Looking at this data,28 (300 x 0.07) of this video’s views came from someone clicking a YouTube thumbnail and the remaining 6 came by some other means. At 7.0% the impressions click through rate is pretty good. It is just that the number of impressions is relatively low. The YouTube algorithm doesn’t present the video to users very often.

There are a vast number of videos on YouTube

Many new YouTubers with big ambitions get frustrated that their videos don’t get more views and there are a vast number of articles and videos which claim that if you do xyz then more people will watch your videos. I think these claims are highly dubious. For example, the article below suggested that if you give your thumbnail garish colours,  you could improve the click through rate. The idea is that when YouTube shows a selection of videos, then the viewer will choose to watch a video having garish colours because it stands out.

Source https://backlinko.com/get-youtube-views

Out of curiosity, I tried this on one of my videos and as I expected the click through rate actually  dropped. The garish colours must have put people off clicking on my video.

YouTube does not publish the algorithm it uses to recommend videos. This has given rise to other odd claims to boost views including:

• changing the filename of your thumbnail
• putting lots of tags on the video (YouTube says it ignores tags when recommending videos)
• using the YouTube editor to chop “unpopular pieces” out of a video after it has been uploaded.
• And many many more

According to an article in The Atlantic, there were more than 14 billion videos on YouTube. With so many videos out there to choose from on every imagineable topic, the reality is that the vast number of videos will rarely be suggested to a user and will therefore get a small number of views.

Using Machine Generated Voices

In my latest video as an experiment I decided to use some freely available Text to Speech (TTS) software  to read a script I’d written rather than doing my own narration.

It was an interesting exercise. There are some advantages of using TTS compared to my own voice. One is that, as a small-scale creator, I decided not to invest in an expensive microphone and I use my laptop’s built in microphone to record my voice. As a result, the sound isn’t always of the best possible quality. A point a few people have made to me 😊. Sometimes the microphone will pick up background noise and sometimes the levels will fluctuate up and down. The TTS software bypasses the laptop’s microphone and always produces good quality mp3 files.  You can create and apply the soundtrack anywhere: e.g. a coffee shop with a large amount of background noise.

There are a number of disadvantages. Although they’re a lot better than they used to be, artificial voices don’t have the same emphasis as a human. They don’t pause, change volume or pitch to highlight a point or underline a key concept like a human would, and clearly still sound artificial. There are a few places in the soundtrack where I have had to edit the sound files to put extra pauses in to aid the flow.

 The other thing of course is that you must write out exactly what you want to say word for word. If you put an extra ‘the’, ‘or’ or ‘and’ in or omit them, then the software will of course read exactly what you’ve written. Occasionally it will struggle with difficult words or unfamiliar abbreviations.  On my first attempt it pronounced AU (meaning astronomical unit) as Australian dollar.  To get it to pronounce it correctly I had to write “Ay You” in the script. Despite many attempts, I never got it to pronounce R-magnitude correctly. It insisted on saying “arm agnitude”

In the end, writing and re-writing the script and editing the mp3 files took up much longer than I expected and was quite frustrating. Therefore, I will go back to using my own voice on my next video and accept the lower quality sound. After all, creating videos is a hobby and should be fun.

And finally…

I wish you a happy and successful 2025. If any bloggers out there are thinking of making videos. I would recommend giving it a try. You are unlikely to get millions of views, but it is great fun!