SAME PROJECT, DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

When I started Canadianimals I was envisioning the main event would be highly produced 3-minute pieces on youtube that could be hyper-focused, polished and easily digestible. Other social media accounts would exist to host flash-in-the-pan content that could funnel people to youtube.

Pre-launch, a social-media-savvy friend kept warning me that the landscape had changed and that gatekeeping on the ‘legacy’ platforms had only gotten worse. Starting from scratch without an existing following somewhere was a very tricky proposition. I didn’t listen. I forged ahead. I launched on youtube with no fanfare and no views. No surprise.

She kept telling me that Tiktok was a much better bet these days. She’d seen success there. The way she explained it, social media platforms have two phases: growth and profit. In the growth phase, it benefits them to help people on the platform find success. That encourages more use, and more people to come on board. And that lasts until some critical mass of users where you no longer have to individually incentivize, they congregate on the platform because it’s now de facto part of the culture.

Youtube and Instagram and Facebook have passed into the profit phase. It no longer benefits them to curtail for individual success. Actually, the opposite. If you ‘have’ to be on Instagram, it makes much more business sense to gatekeep success behind a paywall, openly or not. 

I don’t pretend to have insight into the algorithm or how things are weighted on these platforms. All I know is, they don’t seem interested in elevating new voices organically anymore. They have their stars, their stable of moneymakers, and they have lots of people now willing to pay to play. I tried it on Instagram. $30 instantly got me engagement and followers, in an uncomfortably mechanical way. ‘Pay us and we will increase this number on your account by X’.

Tiktok, meanwhile, still seems to be in the growth phase. They still have an incentive to keep me around by trying to get my stuff seen. And it has been. As soon as I switched to doing purpose-built videos for Tiktok, the numbers changed radically:

Instagram - launched April 10th
120 followers (including a $30 ad spend which is where most of them came from)
Most viewed video: 1131 views (which included traffic from a $30 ad spend directly to that video). The second most viewed, organically, is 554.

Youtube is even more pathetic:
Launched May 13th
6 followers
Most viewed video: 440 views.

Now spot the difference with Tiktok - launched July 14th, though I only started taking it seriously on Sept 5th.
338 followers
Most viewed video: 14,900 views (and climbing - content on the other platforms dies a swift death).

So I found myself in a pickle. Do I bull-headedly stick to the plan, produce shiny youtube videos for no one, and pretend that Tiktok, Instagram etc are funnels to that content? Or do I go where the market takes me, listen to my friend like I should have from the get-go, and make this a Tiktok channel primarily. Pretty obvious choice.

Which leaves me with all this rusting infrastructure, which is the point of this long-winded update. I’m trying to figure out how this is all going to work now, while still doing the work I love. Do I continue to use facebook, twitter etc as funnels, but just change the direction of the spout toward Tiktok? And do I keep the youtube channel around? My plan right now is:

Primarily produce for TikTok and share to other channels from there. Try to keep those other channels fresh with additional content.

Keep this site around as an easy aggregator. 

Re-edit existing youtube episodes into a portrait format for release on Tiktok during the slow season when there’s less wildlife out there.

I’m considering using the youtube channel for longer term, bigger scope documentaries rather than 3-minute ‘faux-tiktok’ kind of content, since that fits the platform much better and gives it a reason to exist.

And that, in far too many words, is an explanation for how things are very up in the air right now. And a very, very, very overwrought way of saying, if you want to keep up with this project, check me out on TikTok. Whatever happens with the rest of this nonsense, we’re having a great time over there.