Meditations: Chess on Youtube

By analyzing those who are recognized as the best Youtube content creators, we can highlight some facts related to how to become good at YT (chess-related). The main things that can help are:

- being good at coaching (Danya Naroditsky, Ben Finegold...),
- being good as an actor and/or a funny person (GothamChess),
- being good at chess (Hikaru)
- patience, humble and spontaneous personality, calm/beautiful voice (ChessNetwork, Eric Rosen...),
- speaking English fluently, easy to listen and understand.

If you don't see yourself on the list above and still want to become successful as a chess content creator, then you need to work on these things and invest some time to get better.

Among the secondary things important to become good at Youtube, I would say those are:

- knowing how to simplify things and present them in a way that is easy for a wider audience to see (agadmator),
- knowing how to edit videos and make graphics (or have money to pay other people to do it for you),
- skills of writing good content and creating a good scene,
- good equipment (expensive camera and microphone, RGB background lights, etc.).

Speaking of my own case, I can say that almost everything I do, apart from doing private lessons, is recording, plotting or editing my new YT video. It takes a lot of time and energy, and after almost 18 months of doing this... activity (it's far from a business), I have 60 published videos and 22 shorts. Only later I found out that it's a bad idea to mix short and serious videos, because the audience is different, and opening a video only to immediately close it - is actually a way for your viewers/subscribers to push the channel down and hurt its popularity. Overall I have 66.3K views and I've made about $10 (as of May 2, '23, when the channel started monetizing). It currently has 1224 subscribers.

For all of you wondering how it works and what you can expect if you start your own chess related YT channel, with something I do, the way I do it, you can probably expect similar results (which is not fun).

For example, how would you feel if your last video, posted about 3 days ago, only has 110 views and 10 likes, one of which was yours and a few more came from your friends who you asked to like? I'm talking about an example from my latest video: Ghosts on the Chessboard: Caro-Kann, Exchange variation (model game), but these stats are actually expected and usual for most of my videos.

It feels like rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, like Sisyphus.

If you stopped at a certain point, you wouldn't know if your rock might already be at the top of the mountain, maybe just this little push? Or maybe it is still in the beginning? My favorite philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, famously sad (paraphrasing): Whatever you do, you will regret it. It's a sad fact about everything we do, because the human condition is to be free to do anything, but if you do one thing, you're neglecting everything else you could do. And there is no clear answer as to what to do - no one can help.

Although in this case - if the YT algorithm isn't working for you, you're probably better off ditching it and doing Chessable content, selling entire courses instead. If the aim is to get paid, of course.