Just a few random thoughts.... 13,000 views of a video on YouTube is nothing to be sniffed at. Many of my favorite YouTubers get a lot less per video and it doesn't seem to put them off. Embrace the possibility that hardly anyone will watch your stuff and you'll probably have more fun.
Yes, there is a lot of "rude" behavior, but it's like saying, "I'd never want to live in New York, because I've heard the people are rude." There are plenty of little neighborhoods where people get along just fine.... Think of it as a rite of passage! Take advantage of the ability to leave response videos. Personally, I found it easier to set up a second account for that (so that my main channel has some degree of consistency....) but if you don't already have a ton of content up there, or don't really mind mixing and matching, that's probably the single best way to engage in a dialogue (more so than just posting stuff to YouTube in addition to your usual haunts) Here's my tip - hit the "videos" tab (top left of the page) and on the left hand navigation of the video page there's a tab for "most responded". Click that and you can see what people are responding to. Now, some of the "most responded" might be videos that have just decided to accept all response videos (and people do often post unrelated videos against high traffic videos in the hope of grabbing some views). But if you scroll down a little, or check the second and third page of "most responded" you can see what people are really talking about. You want to know what I like on YT? People doing slightly absurd comedy in character... it may not be citizen journalism, but it's every bit the potential for people creating their own media and having fun with it.... If you might enjoy a man in a pretend beard doing one-man Monty Pythonesque nonsense, check out Doc Rusty Wigwam. http://www.youtube.com/user/DocRusty I'm also a big fan of WebPundit http://www.youtube.com/user/WebPundit and sort of enjoy ranting, angry english kid in Canada, Warren25Smash http://www.youtube.com/user/warren25smash Doc Rusty & WebPundit get, probably, a few hundred views per video. Warren (I must admit, a bit of an aquired taste...) is clearly not making the movie to MTV any time soon. Pixelodeon did put the spotlight on some of YouTube's more, ahem, marketable personalities. But it's often the people doing their own weird thing for a few hundred viewers that make my YouTube experience fun. I'm sure you'll find something/someone to like, Cheers Mark Day http://www.youtube.com/markdaycomedy http://markdaycomedy.blip.tv [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
