Case Study: Mathematical YouTube videos for the standupmaths channel

Audience group: Upper secondary or High school, Sixth Form or Junior College, Young Adults, University Students, Adults, Retired

Audience interest level: Receptive, Engaged, Expert

Topics: General maths

Origins of the Project

I’ve been running my YouTube channel, standupmaths, since around 2009. It’s a collection of videos best defined by: things I either thought I would enjoy making, or I would enjoy watching if I was someone else. I have a second channel, where I mess around a lot more, but my main standupmaths channel is for things I enjoy doing which are sufficiently mathematical to justify going on a maths channel.

My goal with the channel (other than entertaining myself) is maths PR - improving the image of maths. It’s not so much an educational channel, like Khan Academy or even 3Blue1Brown. Mainly it highlights interesting aspects or components or results in mathematics, in the hope that it will encourage more people to realise they could enjoy mathematics, and be a reaffirming fun experience for people who are already in the nerdy maths-enjoying culture.

Practicalities

The content is aimed at high school level mathematics - any university-level content is not crucial for enjoying the videos. It’s a delicate balance between being inclusive of those without prior knowledge, while not boring those who have it.

Each video starts with a good idea - ideas are the fuel that runs everything else. I keep a variety of text documents on my phone; when I see something interesting I’ll put it either in the general ideas list, or the Numberphile ideas list (another channel I often make videos for) depending on what style of video I think it would work better for.

When I want to make a video, I look through the lists - or sometimes I’ll come across something that inspires me and it’ll definitely be my next video. It’s called getting nerdsniped - distracted by something that’s too interesting to ignore! So you need some way to manage ideas, and you’ve got that as a pool to draw on.

Maths is rarely topical, so for the most part video ideas are evergreen. I always double check if anyone else has done a good video on the topic in the last 5 years, because I don’t want to duplicate or waste effort.

Sometimes I work from a story board, or a list of bullet points, or sometimes just think it through as I go. Personally, I prefer not to make the kind of videos that precisely summarise a topic (not to disparage those who do) - I’d rather try to contribute something, or have a new way to look at it, or add something interesting, so I often make something, or investigate a new bit of maths - pushing the boundaries of what’s a sensible amount of effort to put in to something has become my brand.

My videos are often filmed at home with a black backdrop. I started with only kit I had lying around the house - fortunately I’ve always been into media and film, so I had a camera already, but I’ve gradually upgraded kit bit by bit. People can start filming on their phone nowadays, and upgrading audio is the next step. I try to embrace success and failures along the way!

I use Keynote for graphics because I was already fluent using it, but you can get way fancier with graphics and filming. Now I work with a couple of different camera people, who come and film me doing things.

I try to do stuff on location occasionally, especially interesting locations - I hired a helicopter one time! I’ve experimented more with filming myself walking around locations, starting with a GoPro because they’re quite cheap; it worked well but I’ve now upgraded to a DSLR with a gimble that stabilises shots.

You can throw whatever level of effort you want at the video - sometimes I have to think a month ahead with planning, to interview and work with other people. It can be scaled up to full film production, or just with you phone at home and decent quality sound capture and a good idea. There’s a low threshold of production quality, but to get above that you need good ideas.

The vast majority of YouTube creators do it as a hobby in their spare time and only have finite resources to throw at it. It does bother a lot of those people when they get negative feedback about accessibility and production quality.

The education YouTube channels, at least the successful ones, are very rarely directly made by educational institutions (though there are exceptions and some are partially funded that way (e.g. University of Nottingham and Brady Haran’s Periodic Videos and Sixty Symbols) - so creators have to piece together their own funding. For my videos, the funding is pieced together from some advertising money from Google (probably the smallest source of revenue), some sponsorship for videos and a channel sponsor.

Numberphile is great because it’s funded by MSRI for philanthropic reasons. Then there’s Crowdfunding (e.g. Patreon), which is a big one for me and it’s great because you have a lot of freedom as a creator if you are funded this way. While some YouTubers make money from merchandising, I don’t do merch in the traditional sense of mugs and t-shirts with my logo on it.

Getting more followers and views is difficult - once you hit a critical mass, it self-perpetuates, but there are things you can do if you’re either starting out or wanting to accelerate your growth. I tweet about my videos, but my YouTube subscribers are five times my Twitter followers. Sometimes it helps to collaborate with other YouTubers with equal or greater audiences.

Occasionally one video will do unusually well and go viral - you get a step function with viral videos, where you’ll gain subscribers and return to a higher baseline, so all your new subscribers see all your future videos.

If you’re starting a channel from scratch, start making videos on the regular (I started with a video per week for a year) and you find out what you want to do, get over all the early mistakes, you learn what works and what doesn’t work; you’ll have a very small audience ,and it’ll feel like you’re putting a lot of effort in for not a huge number of views, but still people will be watching them and you’ll be honing your craft.

Once you have that proof of concept, approach another YouTuber for collaboration - even if it’s just taking part in a video on their channel, that will drive traffic to your own. On the way up, you should have a trail of that behind you - continue collaborating with smaller channels so everyone gets a chance. It’s also good to involve other people in your videos for diversity - I’m a Caucasian middle-aged male face, so any variety beyond that I can get involved the better.

Accessibility

Accessibility is always in my mind, but not necessarily the focus. I did have a good community who subtitled my videos, but Google are turning off that feature and I don’t have a plan for that yet. You need to finish the videos early enough to have them subtitled formally before publishing.

The comedic side is a significant part of my videos and I have to be careful because I don’t want to exclude people while doing that. I try to put some personality in it - it has to be entertaining so that people want to watch it - but it’s important to balance that with making sure there’s nothing in there stopping certain people from watching you.

I’m aware of accessibility issues with things like talking too loud, and speed and things - it’s interesting; you learn by trial and error. I made a quick video on my second channel where I put a marching band sound in the video - I thought the loudness of it was low enough that you could still follow me talking, but a bunch of people commented saying it was too loud and distracting. I re-uploaded the video with the music loudness reduced.

Evaluation

YouTube lets you see a lot of data about your viewers. For example, 56.3% of standupmaths viewers are not subscribed to the channel (meaning they’ve found the video from a link or a YouTube recommendation). 3.6% of viewers are younger than 17, and university-age young professionals 18-24 make up 24.6% of viewers. Just over a third are in the 25-34 range. This only includes those signed into YouTube and being tracked, so it wouldn’t include, for example, a class of 30 students watching at school.

Anecdotally, a lot of people talk about having watched standupmaths at high school and have memories of that.

Seeing a normal or above-average number of views is a nice metric for either the topic being interesting or the video being shareable - the views figure is a good combination of those two things. Sometimes you put out a perfectly crafted video and it doesn’t take off - maybe because it came out at a weird time, or the algorithm didn’t recommend it, or the thumbnail wasn’t very good.

A lot of it is like reading tea leaves to try and interpret why some videos do well and why some don’t. I’m happy with a video that people enjoy watching just from a pure video experience, and they walk away feeling like they have learnt or enjoyed something about mathematics, and I feel I have contributed something unique to that topic.

A video’s budget does not necessarily correlate with its success! There’s an interesting relationship on YouTube where you don’t want to sacrifice authenticity for production values, but people still need to enjoy watching a video and look forward to the next one. My strategy is to have a mix of different types of videos at different production levels, and an overall high level of quality that helps the channel grow and appeal to a wider audience.

More information

standupmaths YouTube channel