Our YouTube Channel
Statistics don’t lie they say and I guess this depends on where they come from, especially on the internet. As a film studio that is small and independent, we were an early member of Youtube and Vimeo, which is far less well known. Fifteen years ago no one really looked at Youtube as a means of earning income, well we didn’t for sure. Mainly we wanted to get our movie trailers out to a wide audience and YouTube was and still is the best way to reach our audience.
To some degree that’s changed now. No one can compete with the ‘professional’ video content providers that create short videos with the single sole intention of getting views and subscribers and therefore, money from ads or sponsors. While some of these short videos are legitimate, many or not and are bait and switch with very poor content and in some cases just garbage. Much of this has been fueled by Instagram and Tik Tok which work in the mobile phone market for instant video creation and upload – certainly not a market Empty Mind Films works in, where our films usually take six to nine months to edit and release and are all widescreen format. Not vertical in other words!
If You Can’t Beat Them…
As a test, we edited some of our Arnis martial arts footage of Grandmaster Bobby Taboada into the vertical phone format and also chopped this to less than sixty seconds which is the maximum length allowed on YouTube Shorts videos. This is not an easy task when the many thousands of hours of footage you have shot over twenty years is in landscape mode of 1920 x 1080 pixels!!
So here are the results of our first shorts video… over 8 million views in 28 days! Over 6 million views for the few shorts we have published in the last 7 days! The statistics have baffled us. They have also made us uneasy because we now see the standard three minute trailer may be as dead as the once popular DVD disc! Does no one have the time anymore to watch something longer than 60 seconds? And video looks awful in vertical phone format – can you imagine watching a one hour movie in the vertical format ?
We are still scratching our heads and wondering where we are heading with all these vertical shorts or reels or whatever name you call them. Until then we have joined them – that is, except TiK Tok who we do not trust with our information. For now we keep figuring out ways to squeeze our movies into a narrow vertical phone format so we can reach our audience – which happens to be increasing at a mind-boggling speed… up from 45,000 subscribers one month ago to 110,000 subscribers today. If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them… on YouTube!
