I made my first YouTube short, and I learned a lot about the format.
You can watch it here. I'm not going to embed it because the YouTube embedding payload is like a megabyte, which is bigger than the entire rest of my blog. So click the link and go watch it.
As usual, my level of respect for Gen Z has only increased. My lessons are below, but first... why did I do this?
Why am I making YouTube shorts?
I'm getting with the times.
I've blogged on and off in some form since college. Since I've had my kid I've done it less. But I enjoy writing, and I always want to write more.
My posts used to be really high effort. I've swung for the fences in the hopes of getting on the Hacker News or Reddit homepages. And this sometimes works, because sometimes I do end up on the homepages. But this sets the bar really high. Too high to usually justify writing. And so, I rarely write.
So I want to stop letting perfect be the enemy of good. I want to become good at rapidly producing content. And I want to meet the internet where it is. A lot of people want to read long-form posts. A lot of people want to watch long-form videos. And a lot of people want to watch shorts. And so, I want to practice working in each format, so that I can communicate to a broader audience.
What did I learn?
I found that making a short from scratch is much harder than making a full YouTube video. Every frame needs to provide value. I needed to cut over half of my video to make a 73-second video. And I was aiming for sub-60. I just couldn't pull it off with what I recorded.
The subject was pretty simple: Claude Code has had several performance regressions over the past few months, and three of them were fixed today. So I would basically interleave my "confessional" shot with stills from the tweet and blog post. When the blog post stills were up, I would explain them. When the confessional shot was up, I would explain my experience with them.
Well, I had to cut almost all of my confessionals entirely. I had to edit pauses out. I had to cut within sentences to economize. I basically had to throw all of the fluff and padding out. The next time, I need to plan from the beginning to have concise sentences.
I'm going to film a longer video (paired with a blog post) tomorrow, and I also hope to cut that up into shorts. But that means that I need to go over my shot list and script, and figure out what I want to be a short. And I need to make those sections punchy!
The reach is crazy
Within 30 minutes of publishing the short, it already has 90 views. I'm sure their attention was much shallower and they are much less attached than someone who made it through my YouTube video. So I'm ultimately not sure how "good" the traffic quality is. But I also don't want to discount it entirely; would I get a lot of value from publishing these over and over again? What if I added common branding between my blog, longer-form YouTube videos, and my shorts? God, now I need to pay someone on Fiverr to make me a logo.