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It does what it says on the tin – with a surprise or two.
Digital Foundry today launches a new channel on YouTube – DF Clips – which aims to bring more of our work to a wider audience. Looking at the way our content is ‘consumed’ on YouTube via analytics, it’s clear that while we’ve built up a large audience and an excellent supporter community, YT itself isn’t really a platform best suited to longer form, in-depth material. DF Clips aims to shine a light on more of what we do by producing smaller, standalone ‘chunks’ based primarily on our existing work.
Here’s how that works. Similar to Linus Tech Tips’ LMG Clips, the major news topics and discussion points in DF Direct Weekly are split up and uploaded as standalone videos. In addition to that formula, we’ll also be isolating smaller parts of our larger videos, like making a smaller edit of our AMD 4800S Xbox Series X CPU video that gets straight to the gameplay.
The clips channel is also an interesting vehicle for us to explore shorter form content. So, for example, in the wake of our massive DLSS 3 coverage from earlier this year, I spent some time combing through the 4K 120fps captures we spent literal days getting together, then isolated which frames were generated with DLSS 3 and which were traditionally rendered, producing an intriguing comparison. It’s a pretty cool video! However, there’s no real DF video potential here on the standard channel, but it did end up as bonus material for supporters. Today, we have a new channel where we don’t need to worry too much about crucial things for the main channel like average view duration – we can just share some very cool stuff.
We’re also really proud of our interactions with supporters, particularly in DF Direct Weekly, where we answer a bunch of often very interesting questions. Typically arriving at the hour point in our weekly show, it’s likely the case that a lot of great discussion is missed by the audience, so we’re also breaking out the questions where the answers may prove interesting and, um, might possibly attract some kind of SEO result. So, are teraflops actually meaningful anymore? Which is best – retro emulators or original hardware? Should all console games offer an option to unlock frame-rate? All of this stuff is highlighted in our new Big Questions playlist.
From a more strategic standpoint, what are we hoping to achieve with this, beyond getting our stuff watched by more people? Of course, there’s a business case for doing this. The truth is, Digital Foundry is successful but we don’t flood the channel with sponsored inserts. We produce around 220 videos a year and typically, less than 10 of them are sponsored (four last year!). We try to keep clickbait headlines away from our videos and don’t do outrageous thumbnails – but I did have a go at it, as you’ll see below. The point is, to do more of the work we want to do and invest more into doing even more new and exciting things, we’re going to need more revenue to work with – and getting a better return from what we’re doing already seems like a good idea.
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So that’s the pitch and I’m very interested – and a touch anxious, I’ll admit – to see how this one pans out. If you’d like to support this new venture, please visit the DF Clips channel and consider adding it your no doubt voluminous range of subscriptions. The channel should be updated several times every week and we’ll also be highlighting any exclusive videos that won’t be derived from main channel content on our main Twitter feed.
And yes, in hindsight, I’m fully aware that in a world where a single tweetvid about running Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart PC on a PS4 hard drive got 6.8m views, perhaps we should have launched this last week. Thanks for your support!
