SoMis Podcast - Month 7
Getting a copyright strike, 30% increase in YouTube subs
Highlights
Revamped the episode production process to better leverage LLMs
Doubling down on long format content: making Youtube & SubStack improvements
Goal Grades
Before each sprint, I write down what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:
#1 Revamp the ERP (edit, release & promote) process for producing podcast episodes
Result: Started using LLMs to draft segments and show-notes, but there’s still quite a few components that are done manually - not ideal but I’ve made peace with as it’s pretty hard to fully automate and maintain the quality. I’m gonna stick to the current processes for the next few episodes and re-evaluate what needs to be improved
Grade: B
#2 Build MVP for Podcast Research Assistant tool
Result: Got a very basic version working locally and was able to use it to produce reports for Ronak and I to prepare for upcoming guests
Grade: B
#3 Book enough guests to switch to a weekly recording routine
Result: Coming back from the vacation I thought this would take a lot of effort but we’ve actually had a good response rate and got 4 guests scheduled in a week
Grade: A
Effort grade (# of hours put in): A
SoMis Podcast Stat
Evolution of the thumbnails of our YouTube videos, aka making our YouTube videos look more like.. YouTube videos
After giving up on using short videos to promote our video podcast almost 2 months ago, I decided to instead double down on YouTube as a distribution channel. Since then, we’ve seen a 30% increase in subs last month, thanks to our efforts to improve video quality, particularly out thumbnails.
As the YouTube guru Ali Abdaal points out, the 3 most important parts of a video that noobs like myself often overlook are:
thumbnail
title
the first 30 seconds of the video
Let me walk you through the four stages of our video evolution and what I’ve learned along the way
The V0
We’ve actually been on YouTube since our podcast’s inception three years ago. We used our publishing platform's auto-repurposing feature, as you can imagine, it’s pretty basic - just an audio track with a static image of our logo.
The V1
After a hiatus, about a year ago we started recording the podcast in video mode instead of audio-only. At this point, we started using custom thumbnails based on the guest’s picture - still looks like a potato but moving in the right direction.
Around this time we needed to use a background remover - after trying a few different options, I’ve found this site to have the best value - free, no size limit and good enough results: https://img-cut.aishoot.co/cut)
The prettier V1
After our podcast's rebrand, we introduced a new color palette that's easier on the eyes. We also stole an idea from our friends at r/metacastapp, adding headshots from our recording sessions to make the thumbnail more lively. However, as my co-host Ronak pointed out, our videos still looked like a presentation deck from college. 😂😂🤡
At this stage, Canva was a nice tool to get comfortable with for quickly iterating on these
Today
After deciding to take YouTube more seriously, we researched what fancy podcasters in our niche (software engineering/tech) do. Surprisingly, many well-known podcasts with hundreds of episodes haven't made a serious effort on YouTube, resulting in meager view counts.
After broadening my search, I discovered two channels that excel at adapting podcasts to YouTube:
Their styles differ, but it was clear what we needed to change.
Guests' faces need to be much larger
Text should have much bigger fonts and be aligned to one side
Font style should be readable, not just fun (while we didn’t have comic sans 🤡, it was tough to read)
Quotes in thumbnails shouldn't repeat the title (a lost opportunity for a second hook)
For SEO in the description, instead of spammy hashtags, use very fine grained chapters to both help viewers jump around and improve SEO (DOAC videos have up to 40 chapters for a 2 hour video 😱 but I think this is very smart)
I ended up building two small tools to speed up this process:
“interesting frame picker”: now that we use image of the guest from the actual recording, I needed to find frames of the video that had interesting facial expressions but not blurry. This sometimes took up to 15 mins to create, traversing the video a few frames at a time. So I created a small tool that loops through frames of the video while applying an open source facial-emotion-detector and a blurriness threshold to extract good candidates
segment generator: to generate the fine grained chapters, I made a LLM prompt to extract the starting timestamp, chapter title and an interesting quote for context as a draft for me to edit.
Getting a YouTube Copyright Strike 😱
Two weeks ago, as I was getting ready for bed, I received an unsettling email from YouTube: 'Your video has been taken down.' My heart sank as I read the contents. After logging back into my YouTube account, I was greeted with a yellow card and a mandatory 'copyright school' notification.
I was baffled - all our videos feature original content, and we deliberately choose royalty-free music for our intro and outro.
After some digging, I discovered that the entity behind the takedown was the music provider. It dawned on me that we had inadvertently stopped crediting the music in our video descriptions after switching from Libsyn's auto-publish feature to uploading videos directly to YouTube. Womp Womp.
Luckily, the takedown only affected one video. I quickly added the necessary credits, but it struck me as heavy-handed to threaten account suspension (which occurs after three strikes) when a simple warning email would have sufficed.
Reading about the horror stories of people who've had their videos copyright-claimed after a royalty-free song changed ownership, I've learned my lesson. If I were to choose new music for the podcast, I'd opt for public domain tracks to avoid any future headaches. Some Bach sounds quite nice right about now.
Wrap up
Lessons learned
When starting/learning something new, always first copy the experts - I wish we’d done the research on how prominent podcast YouTubers create their videos way sooner.
Goals for next month
Ship MVP for the podcast research assistant tool
Reach out to potential users of the tool for feedback
Shift to weekly releases for the podcast