Make more people watch event videos

While I was on vacation, Chris Heilmann published an interesting post asking “How can we make more people watch conference videos?”. One point he mentions jumped into my eyes directly, as it really also makes me sad, especially for the speakers who gave the talk. He states:

[…] That’s why it is a shame to see just how low the viewing numbers of some great conference videos are. […]

This is absolutely true. I run a YouTube Channel with playlists for each event, as well as a Vimeo account where you can find every talk as well. Since last year, I also use the wonderful transcription service of Tina Pham to transcribe every published talk. Before this I only did a few, where I had the money for – now Google supports me with this and I am able to transcribe every talk. I publish these along with the videos and other coverage on the archive page of every event – the archive is created automatically after an event ended and contains everything I get and find of a talk: slides, song (if Tobi creates one), videos and more. Some of the videos get quite a good amount of viewers. Often in the beginning, but some even years after being published. Most of the time it is easy to see when a speaker has published the talk on their website and promotes the video in their social media channels as well. Then the talks get way more attention than being not mentioned by a speaker. I usually do not ask speakers to do this, but maybe that is something I kindly should ask for (in their own interest also) …

The videos are published in quite a good quality, but most importantly I am able to use the momentum right after an event as Brian, the one who records my videos, edits them on the fly and I am able to publish the first talks on the first event day already. This, to me, is very important. There is much less momentum and value if event talks are published months after the event is done and usually, if that is the case, viewer numbers are even lower as if the videos are published right at or after the show.

Chris mentions the work you’d have to do to promote the videos and he is right. In my case, I just don’t have the time, sadly, to promote the videos constantly, but I should. I also don’t add the transcriptions to the Vimeo or YouTube videos – same reason: time. If there is a quick way to do this, it would be fantastic, if someone just lets me know how that works. I have a text file from Tina and would love to add these to all videos.

I can tick off a lot of the points Chris states in his post, like videos being downloadable etc. I can also see, where I could do better. All a matter of time and manpower of course, running beyond tellerrand completely on my own. What interests me in order to do better and maybe in addition to Chris’ post is:

• Do you have a good and fast solution to get my transcriptions to added to my videos?
• Is there anything that you miss in the videos or the way they are done?

Thanks for help and thanks for the post, Chris ;)