2019-08-03

This is the second weekly report. The purpose is to give my subscribers, followers, and supporters a picture into what I am doing and where I plan to be next week.

This last week I did some investigation to what time of day I should release my videos. I found that I get a slightly better response if I release them outside of the normal working hours for my timezone, Pacific Daylight Time. This can be for a number of reasons, not the least of which is my international audience. Likely it is also because many of my subscribers have jobs and don’t watch YouTube videos while they are on the clock.

The Discord server is becoming more and more active. We have about 13 participants now. I was asked and answered a few questions from last week. I remain hopeful that Discord will be an effective means of communicating with my followers and subscribers.

I know that email is also an essential component of building a community owing to its ubiquity and effectiveness. I don’t have plans at this time but I will likely create a mailing list both to make announcements and to allow the community to communicate with each other, perhaps via mailing list software.

Website

Over the last week, I have experimented with different technologies to serve the website. The website has two purposes:

  • To inform the community or recent or current events.

  • To build up a knowledge base of related material.

The websites also drive traffic from search results to the YouTube videos and increase their visibility.

I have decided, for now, to use Sphinx. You’ll note that this website is running Sphinx. Sphinx builds static pages which can potentially be served for free through Amazon’s AWS.

Basic Mathematics

The most noteworthy news from the Basic Mathematics series is that I am now finished with all of the videos. The last video should be premiered on Friday 2018-08-09.

Last week, the videos released were:

Next week, the videos will be:

  • 17.2 Determinants of Order 2

  • 17.3 Properties of 2x2 Determinants

  • 17.4 Determinants of Order 3

  • 17.5 Properties of 3x3 Determinants

  • 17.6 Cramer’s Rule

  • Review

Theory of Python

Last week, the videos for the Theory of Python series included:

Next week, I will explore the following topics:

  • For Statements

  • Comprehensions and Generator Expressions

  • Lists and Bytearrays

  • List methods and operators

  • Crash course on git

  • Big O Notation

  • Dictionaries

Thermal Physics

Planning and studies for Thermal Physics are already well underway. I am already listing out chapter and section titles for the major textbooks I plan on covering. You can see the beginning of my structure at Thermal Physics.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to start making videos next week, but I will likely have at least introductory materials ready in the week following.

Statistics and Metrics

Last week:

  • 11.9k Views with 4.4k unique viewers

  • 182.4k Impressions

  • 3.0% click-through rate

  • 12.3k minutes of watch time from impressions

  • 28.0k minutes of total watch time

  • 2:21 Average View Time

  • 98 new subscribers

  • $10.66 in revenue

Our click-through rate went up from 2.9% to 3.0%, which isn’t significant.

The view time, however, has significantly increased, however, our average view time has remained the same, representing more views.

35% of our traffic came from playlists, 19% from YouTube search, 18% from external sources, 9% from the playlist page, and 8% from suggested videos. 12% are classified as “Other”.

I believe my videos will reach more people if I can increase the click-through rate and the average watch time.

However, these numbers suggest a small group of dedicated viewers who are slowly working their way through the material I have provided. My primary goal remains educating people who are intent on learning, and so I will not make many adjustments either to increase the CTR or average view time.