YouTube as a hobby?

[Tom Duke]

Anyone on here do YouTube as a hobby? Like I mean with your own channels and stuff?  I want to learn more about running a channel. 

[RogerDuke]

If I was on you tube it would probably go virus. 

[Hobie Hartkins]

not me. I hardly ever get on there....sorry...

Edited September 26, 2025 by Hobie Hartkins

[Skipper Duke]

On 9/25/2025 at 8:21 PM, Hobie Hartkins said:

not me. I hardly ever get on there....sorry...

I'm outta reactions so here... 😲 

[RogerDuke]

I mostly watch You Tube for motorcycle videos....mostly dirt bikes but sport bikes too. 

[Jim85IROC]

I don't do youtube as a hobby, but I have a couple channels as a way to document my other hobbies. I have one for my RC builds that I've shown here before, as well as one for my guitar related interests.  That kind of brings me to my point... I'm not sure how you'd get into Youtube as a hobby unless you're using it as a mechanism to share something else that people will be interested in watching.  Assuming that you have something that people are going to want to watch, your next steps are learning to talk to a camera in a way that is interesting and engaging, learning how to make videos look and sound as good as they can, learning video editing software, and learning photo editing software.  All of those aspects influence the outcome of a video, and to be honest, not many people find all of them interesting, so it becomes necessary to slog through some crap that you may not really enjoy in order to accomplish the things you do enjoy.

 

Here's a real high level $.02 summary of each of those areas:

1. Talking to the camera.  99% of what determines the popularity of a channel is the ability of the host to be interesting, entertaining, and charismatic. No matter what the subject is, it's how interesting the talking head is that determines how many repeat watchers you get.  A video about the joys of watching paint dry that's hosted by an interesting, well spoken person that can connect with an audience will ultimately be much more popular than the most interesting topic imaginable if it's hosted by a monotonous person with no personality and poor public speaking skills.

2. How it looks:  Your lighting and your background make or break how a video looks. Stand there with a nasty or boring background under a single ceiling light and it's going to look horrible. Find an interesting location that has some depth to it, some tasteful things in the background and some colorful accent lighting that brings color and interest to it, along with some foreground lighting for the host (a couple diffused light sources and a "hair" light to add contrast or mood) will make a huge difference.

3. Sound: talking into your cell phone's microphone sounds bad. An inexpensive lapel mic makes all the difference in adding a professional sound to your video. Background music or sound effects may be appropriate depending on the type of videos you do.

4. Video editing software: This can be a big one.  There are basic editors even the one that comes with Windows that will get the job done if your videos are very basic, but if you're going to want something more professional, you'll need a good quality video editor and you'll need to put in the time necessary to learn at least the basic functions of that editor.  I use DaVinci Resolve because it's very good and mostly because it's free.  If it ever stops being free, I'll probably be sunk because there's not much else out there that's worth a damn unless you want to get into subscription services.

5. Photo editing is more or less the same story as video editing, except that it's generally a bit easier and not something you'll spend as much time in. At minimum you'll need it for your thumbnail images, but I also use edited photos occasionally within my videos.  I use GIMP because it's a very powerful, open source video editor that does all I could ever need.

 

You can research each of those areas via other youtube videos.  There's a wealth of creator information out there, so each of those 5 topics are very well covered via youtube tutorials.  But ultimately, unless you're doing something other than the usual "talking head" style videos, 99% of the effort is in area #1.  Your personality and charm matters more than pretty much anything else.