Daily Uploading to YouTube as a College Student
This was undoubtedly my most spontaneous and time-consuming experiment…it was rough.
This piece is designed to accompany a video I posted to my YouTube channel (linked down below for anyone who has 9 minutes to spare), but here I’ll focus on some of the key aspects of this experiment as well as some things that I didn’t bring up during the video.
Finding Things To Talk About
One of the most challenging aspects of daily uploading is being able to consistently think of ideas. Fortunately, I was only committing to daily uploading for a week, so I only needed to think of seven video concepts, and this is the only real planning I did prior to starting the experiment. Part of the reason I did this experiment (and why I was able to come up with enough ideas) was because I’ve been looking for an opportunity to introduce different types of content to my channel. I’ll be graduating from Georgia Tech in May, and I’m in the process of shifting my content away from focusing so heavily on college and life at Tech. Going into the challenge, I recognized that some of my videos likely wouldn’t perform well; YouTube’s algorithm typically suggests my content to prospective/current college students, and there naturally isn’t as much interest in other topics. I won’t dive into the analytics here (if you’re curious, I break them down in the video), but my top two performing videos were both about Georgia Tech. Realistically, I don’t have enough material to produce meaningful content on a daily basis, and I won’t be continuing to daily upload in the future. However, if you’re a content creator and you’re looking for a challenge, this actually might be something worth exploring.
Time Management
Another challenge that I faced during this experiment was ensuring that I had enough time to film, edit, and publish a video every day without falling behind on my classwork. I quickly fell into a routine that ended up working well:
8:00 — Start filming
9:00 — Transfer footage and tear down set-up
9:30 to 2:00—Edit the video during the gaps between classes
2:00 to 2:30 — Upload to YouTube; work on title, tags, thumbnail, etc.
8:00—Release the video on YouTube
8:30 to 9:30 — Script the next day’s video
This routine allowed me to film early in the morning (before my apartment gets too loud), and it left me with most of the day to find time to finish my edit. There were two videos in the experiment that I struggled to finish in a day: How To Make Better Videos and the West Campus GT vlog. How To Make Better Videos was an issue because it was a long video; coming in at over 10 minutes, this meant it took longer to film and edit than all of my other videos. Additionally, that video used a lot of animations and b-roll, making the editing process even more intensive. Working on the edit for that video was very stressful, and I barely finished it in time. I decided that I wouldn’t make any other long videos for the remainder of the experiment; however, the Georgia Tech vlog proved to be challenging because of the amount of material I filmed. I spent several hours filming around campus, and I took the entirety of the afternoon to stitch 90+ clips together into something that felt cohesive.
Despite the experiment taking up huge chunks of time every day, I never missed an 8 PM upload and I didn’t fall behind on my classwork. That being said, the experiment was exhausting, and it was also more stressful than either of the past two experiments. By the end, I was suffering from burn-out, and I waited a week and a half before releasing my next video (this one). The experiment undoubtedly pushed my time management skills; however, I have a feeling that I would be miserable if I attempted to consistently daily upload as a college student.
What Did I Get Out Of It?
First and foremost, I learned that daily uploading (for me) isn’t sustainable. I had previously toyed with the idea of daily uploading for a month, and in hindsight I’m glad I never committed to doing it. Ultimately, as a college student, my top priority is my coursework. As much as I enjoy making videos, it gets pushed to the side when I’m busy so I can focus all of my time on studying and getting work done. I do want to reiterate that I’m glad I did the experiment. Yes, it was unsustainable, and yes, I was stressed, but I learned a lot from it. It pushed me to make videos at a pace I’ve never experienced, and this helped me to improve my time management and forced me to speed up my filming and editing processes. I got to experiment with different types of content (which, as expected, didn’t perform as well as I would have hoped), and I reinvigorated my creativity and love for making videos. I won’t be daily uploading in the future, but I do intend to start posting more frequently in the coming months. I wasn’t happy publishing videos every other week, and though daily uploads aren’t the long-term solution, it was exciting to always be making something new. I’ll be settling into a publishing schedule in the coming weeks that’ll likely involving posting 1–2 times a week, and I’ll be trying to find a good mix of video concepts that work for me and my audience.
If you’ve made it this far, you might as well watch the full video. There’ll be another experiment coming soon…
