Starting a YouTube Channel

Youtube has established itself as the go to website for just about anything; education, entertainment, news, how-tos, and so on can be found there.

Due to Youtube's immense popularity and usefulness, it also can serve as a great platform for activism.

The Content

Plan, brainstorm, consistency in content/ uploading schedule, etc.

Now it goes without saying, but the key to creating a channel that gains many views and subscribers that consistently keep up with your content is establishing the main topic or topics on the channel. It can be anything people would be interested in, ranging from educational content, gaming, vloggers, art, and of course, activism.

But before you get to work on creating content, you must establish the video format. What tools and equipment will you need? Are videos going to be scripted, edited, and well organized? Or will you talk in front of a camera, unscripted or semi-scripted, just talking about a particular topic?

Videos of all types appeal to everyone, but it's obviously important to know your audience.

If you're going for the professional style, try investing in an editing software, or use cheap or free ones if you're on a budget. Also buy a high-quality microphone; it doesn't have to be super high budget, but people need to hear what you're saying clearly. There are cheap microphones ranging from just $30-$40, so it's a pretty good investment. Also within the $30-$40 price range is some decent camera equipment. You can try using your phone (which is okay- modern phones have pretty good cameras), but if you're trying to be more professional, an actual camera with a tripod can go a long way. It's fine to stay minimalist and frugal for the time being, but if you save up, or even start generating enough money from Youtube, you can start investing in some better equipment.

Now, it's the content. Let's, for example, say we're trying to start up a Vegan Youtube channel. Okay great. Now what?

Veganism naturally covers many bases that can serve as the focal point of your channel. Are you going to try spreading the message of Veganism, offering various arguments and methods of activism? How about trying to offer nutritional advice for veganism? Will you give vegan recipes for various types of meals? Are you going to refute anti-vegan arguments, or refute bad vegan arguments? Perhaps commentary on current vegan issues? There are even more possibilities than this, so whatever type of channel you decide on, make sure you have some decent prerequisite knowledge on the subject. You don't want to look like you're talking smack, otherwise, you'll hurt your chances of gaining support (and some people might bring the smackdown on you if you know what I mean).

So, once all that is established, we need to figure out the types of videos you'll be making. It may be hard to come up with new ideas for your channel depending on what you're doing (Like, a channel that does current events would have an easier time making videos than say, a channel that makes videos about science). If you're lost, try writing down a list of topics you'd like to make a video on. If you know what the channel will be about, you'll probably have some ideas from the beginning. Write those down, and you might come up with some other things that might work. Even if an idea is bad, write it down anyway; You'll go back and remove the obviously not very good ideas, or better yet, you might be able to salvage it for something.

Promoting Conversation/Community

Livestream, talk about scriptwriting, etc.

Blocking Comments?

How far is it reasonable to go in blocking users? Is it ever reasonable to block comments entirely on some videos so that the troll storm in the comments doesn't influence how the video is interpreted on first viewing?

Letting viewers know the ways they can help you

Give an example list of ways people can help improve the service you deliver and your public reach through transcribing, reviewing, academia, and publicizing, that you might like to hear about if it happens and possible rewards you can offer.

• Write a Review. If you’re a skilled writer who likes to talk about veganism, consider reviewing our site or a favourite episode for your website. We will give you press access to our site for one month in exchange for an honest and thoughtful review.
• Transcribe. Transcribe our videos to text. Each one is approximately 10 minutes long and take 20 minutes to an hour to transcribe. In exchange, you’ll get a free month membership to work on the transcription and then enjoy the rest of the time to watch what you like!
• Translate. Do you speak a language besides English? Transcribe our text content into other languages — especially valuable for vegan vocabulary that accurately reflects our nationalities.
• Educate. Use our videos / photos / essays to illustrate your educational articles on your website or lectures. Go to colleges across the country? Share our ideas with your students.
• Peer reviewed. Get studious about effective activism, writing your own research paper or graduate thesis? Interview our content producers or quote us and bring grassroots advocacy examples into the academic arena.

Transcribing

If you’d like to help transcribe videos for YouTubers, it is best to send to them directly so they can simply paste it into the transcription box and set timing automatically.

For some reason in the community contributions feature they don't let you set timings automatically, so you have to caption manually and fiddle with the time codes directly, which just takes forever and stupidly laborious.

The easiest method is to copy the auto-transcript to the right of the YouTube video and past it into a word document. Then you can get to work cleaning up the auto-transcript errors from there, see method below:

Method for Office Word:

• If you go to underneath the video title and username there should be 3 options: Add to, Share and More. Click on ‘More’
• It should gives you a drop down list of; Report, Transcript, Statistics and Add Translation. Click ‘Transcript’
• A section will open between the video and description. Click on English (Automatic).
• Then you right click and drag to highlight over the whole transcript section. Click copy.
• Open a word document and paste.
• Furthest right on the toolbar is a ‘Replace with’ button, click that.
• In the ‘Replace’ section write ^13[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]^13
• In the ‘Replace with’ section hit the space bar once.
• In the bottom left click the button that says "More"
• Check the box in the middle which says "use wildcards"
• Then hit the button which says "Replace All"
• Repeat earlier step with ^13[0-9]:[0-9][0-9]^13 in the ‘Replace’ section and click "Replace All" again.

You should end up with a block of text minus timecodes, it sounds complicated but only takes a minute once you get the hang of it. You can then find transcription errors and replace with correct spelling, add paragraphs for sections in the talk and punctuation.

It’s also a really fast and free way of getting a good transcription of any video or audio you wish just by uploading to youtube.

Translating

1. There's two methods you can use, one is caption manually and fiddle with the time codes directly.

2. a) The other is to copy and paste the automatic English transcription into a word document and translate line for line, then send it to the YouTuber directly.

b) They then have to chose the English option and try to set timings automatically, or if looks like timings are too far off, go to the automatic English transcription and copy in the translation line for line.

c) Either way the next step is to download the srt. file and re-upload it under the correct language name.

I know that all sounds really complicated, but I prefer the second method for not having to manually set time controls which I find the most annoying part.

See the method for copying into a word document above, I suggest making a table with two columns one for the original language and one for the language you're translating it into. You can even put the original language in google translate and fix translation errors from there, if you think that would be faster than writing it out yourself.

Running the channel

Apply for every feature that becomes available like enabling ads and try to familiarize yourself with tags, thumbnails and tags that can either boost you're chances of showing up in searches, related videos and subscription home page or can doom you to being shadow age-rated, 18+ age rated or blocked from every country bar a few.

Accept Money?

Just the obvious warning of be wary of how it influences your goals and ambitions or makes you less authentic.

Include Adverts?

Definitely a good idea to do, otherwise the YouTube algorithm will never let your videos see the light of day in searches. You can still suggest good ad blocks to use to your audience.

Start a pay per month subscription?

If you spend a significant amount of time making weekly videos it's likely a good idea, to allow your fans to give you workplace solidarity when the boss is docking pay unfairly with no possibility of re-fund. You don’t want to be relying on that income alone, you should be able to expect some economic stability, and it’s great that viewers that get something out of the show can step up and help out where the boss fails. The paywall also restricts to genuinely interested participants in discussion, which can be a bonus or a curse (in the case of echo-chambers).

Patreon takes a 5% tax on donations and you're on a separate platform which some like posting to and using, others leave barren and link to a private facebook group that more people are already using. They can also kick you off or age gate you, sometimes based on an algorithm that is wholly undeserved.

Paypal takes a 2.9% tax on monthly donations and you have to go to the work of setting up user groups if you want to create pay to view posts on your website. You can set up a wordpress site, pay £3 per month to get your own domain and install the Groups plugin feature that will do this on SiteGround. Paypal banned the Anti-Fascist Network along with that of the Proud Boys in a PR move, but it's unclear whether they deploy the same algorithmic censoring reach as companies like Patreon & YouTube.

Liberapay is entirely donation run itself, but with it being a small startup, it's dependent on other third-party licenses. Third party tax on transfers between euro countries is as low as 0.6%, but they haven't been able to acquire rights to transfer with debit cards in US dollars and transfers between currencies can incur a flat $3.50 tax which just doesn't make sense outside of large donations, not building a subscription service based on small donations. And there's always the concern of licenses closing on them as has happened before, but next time them reaching a brick wall.

If you do set up user groups that can see restricted content, this also means you'll able to offer memberships for other reasons like for collaborators who do so many transcripts per month, coupon codes for affiliates who invite more than 5 people or giveaways at a charity event, etc.

Accessibility

Given the relatively sparse number of places where people can find good rational vegan discussion, you might think about opening old 5$, 20$ posts up to 1$ patrons after a certain period of time when the early bird privilege is fulfilled.

Promotion

Organic reach: Facebook Groups, Reddit, Discord, Forum Boards & Imgur.

Building up a platform: Tumblr, Instagram, Wordpress, Medium, Bandcamp & Pinterest.