Lightspeed Issue 46

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Dave: We were mentioning that there was Sword and Laser, it’s a similar podcast to this one, they discuss fantasy and science fiction books. They had a video show that Felicia [Day] hosted on [the] Geek and Sundry [channel]. If you ever watched it, the production values are amazing. I would watch it, and I’m like, “Oh my god, I’m so jealous. They have a smoking dragon head.” They have a whole set. They also had little animations. It must cost thousands of dollars to produce one of these episodes. It’s really hard for me to see how a book show is going to recoup that kind of investment, although I wish I could figure out some way to do it, because it was pretty cool.

  John: I’d just be happy if we could record in a studio together, as opposed to doing everything via Skype. I don’t need a whole dragon studio like they’ve got. If we could just be sitting in the same place with mics, that would be nice. They have the whole production team and everything. It’s kind of ridiculous.

  Matt: John, you have a little bit of experience with Lightspeed of having people be willing to pay different amounts of money for the content that you’re providing. Some people want to lurk on the site and read all the stories you publish, but other people, I know that you’ve told me stories in the past about people who are totally willing and say, “I’m going to throw a bunch of money at this because I think it’s awesome, and I want to support it.”

  John: At Lightspeed, we have lifetime subscriptions, and we have a couple of lifetime subscribers, so it’s like five hundred dollars to buy a lifetime subscription, but of course, like Matt says, most of the content is online for free. We started adding some exclusive content to the ebook editions, but the majority of the content is online for free, so nobody really has to pay for it, but you’re paying for the exclusivity of the content that’s in the ebook and the convenience of the ebook format, and that kind of thing. Even though people might not be doing the big-ticket lifetime subscription, they might just buy regular subscriptions, whereas they could totally read it for free, I think a lot of people are willing to do that kind of thing. I recently did a reader survey—if you’re a Lightspeed reader, you can still fill out the reader survey, and you have a chance to win a free subscription; go to lightspeedmagazine.com/survey if you want to—in the survey I was asking some questions, sort of asking people, “Hey, do you know who the publisher of Lightspeed is?” I had a couple different options, and it became very clear, very quickly, that most people don’t know who the publisher is, and they don’t realize it’s me. Just some dude, me. It’s not like a major company or anything, so one of my follow-up questions was, “Now knowing that I’m the publisher, does that change your thoughts about whether or not to support the magazine financially?” A lot of them said yes. That they didn’t realize it was just me publishing it. They thought it was a company that was publishing the magazine or something. Obviously, if it’s just me publishing it, they feel like, “Oh, well, that’s more worthy of my financial support than just feeding the beast of some major company.”

  Dave: That’s funny, because sometimes people will post bad reviews for this show and say, “These hosts suck. Just replace the hosts and it will be so much better.” We’re like, “Umm, if you replace the hosts, there’s no one else working on this. I don’t know who else you think is involved.” Maybe there is a profit model that would make doing a video book show viable. I think that leads into the issue of, does video benefit a book show, really? Do you need to see the people’s faces when they’re talking about an inherently non-visual kind of media?

  John: I wonder that with a lot of the things I was watching for this. I watched a lot of the stuff on Geek and Sundry, and there were a lot of things that, if you took away the video and it was just an audio show, basically the same as an audio podcast like this, I don’t know that there was going to be much of a difference. On Geek and Sundry, they have The Story Board, which was like a Google Hangout discussion. Felicia [Day] has Vaginal Fantasy, which is also a Google Hangout recorded session like that. Both of those you don’t really need to see the people to enjoy that content. You can just have it as a podcast instead. I wonder if it’s worth doing all that video stuff as well.

  Dave: It seems like video is a lot harder to edit, maybe Matt and Cate can speak to this, but how much latitude do you have to edit the audio when the video is included?

  Matt: You can fake audio much easier than you can fake video. There are some things, just in the language of the moving image, that it’s incredibly difficult to break those rules and not have your audience feel like something is wrong with it, even if they don’t know what it is that’s wrong with it. I learned this term for the first time this week that’s amazing, it’s called the Frankenbite—anyone who’s ever edited audio or watches a reality television show will be familiar with this phenomenon even if they don’t know the term itself. It’s when a testimonial interview with a reality show contestant is hacked to pieces to the point where the original statement is completely indecipherable, but the editor has sculpted a new statement to better fit the narrative of the show. You’ll hear something, it’ll sound like this, “I think (pause) Dave (pause) is a (pause) jerk.” Right? Now “jerk” is from one sentence, and I think is from a sentence three episodes ago, and it all just gets mashed together to create the story that they want to. If you’ve worked in post-production before, you can hear those cuts, even though for the uninitiated viewer, sometimes it’ll sort of flow naturally. In pure audio, it’s so much easier to cut those things up; if you were just doing that with a face on camera shot, it would be very difficult. You need to add in other images to mask some of those audio cuts.

  Dave: I’ve really been struck, having done so much audio editing for this show now, how when I watch TV, I can tell where it’s been edited, and I never would have noticed that before. Cate, why don’t you tell us how much editing you do on your videos. What’s been your experience with that?

  Cate: I do quite a bit of editing on my videos, and that’s just because there’s so much of it that you don’t want to include for the final product, like you were talking about. It’s mostly simple. I think as long as it looks like a good quality product with decent lighting and a straight-on camera shot that’s above four hundred and eighty pixels, I don’t think it would be that difficult to make it seem super professional, even though you guys are mostly experienced with audio.

  Dave: I’ve actually noticed with vlogs that it’s almost sort of a convention of the form that you have these very obvious cuts. They’re not even trying to mask the fact that there’s a cut, that’s almost part of the appeal, or something.

  Cate: It’s supposed to be. There’s two things that have really risen because of talking vlogging. You’re supposed to speak faster because it’s supposed to sound more interesting and more exciting, and obviously you get more words in for your three-or four-minute video. It’s a little bit more frenetic than a podcast. Also, you’ve got these jump cuts, and you just cut from sentence to sentence because on YouTube there’s no time for breath or a sneeze.

  Dave: I was actually wondering, Cate, you’re kicking our ass as far as YouTube views and subscribers, do you have any theories on why your videos have been as popular as they have been?

  Cate: I really lucked out, and I was lucky enough that people found my videos, and they shared them. There’s no secret trick. It’s just sort of sharing good content, and good content rises, in theory.

  John: For YouTube, I think one of the issues for us is that our show is obviously an audio product. It’s not a video product. You’re putting it on YouTube and you have the image there, but when people go to YouTube, I think most of the time people want the video experience because it is a different experience. I can’t really explain it, like why I might watch a video of someone talking, but then I wouldn’t listen to that same podcast necessarily. Specifically, when I go to YouTube, I’m not necessarily going there because I want to sit and listen to something, I’m going there because I want to watch something. If there�
�s nothing to watch, it’s just listening, then I think that we’re not going to get a lot of “viewers” for the podcast there. We’d be more likely to get people to say, “Oh, I’ve discovered that, now I’m going to go subscribe to the podcast, and I’ll listen to it while I’m on my commute or whatever.”

  Dave: I think we should explain that we take all of our podcasts and post them on YouTube just as one more place that people could find the podcast, and most of our subscribers are not through YouTube. There’s just sort of a slideshow, which has our logo and photos. I didn’t expect those to set the world on fire or anything. A couple of them have gotten a couple thousand views, but it’s just really striking that someone will post a picture of them falling down the stairs and that gets like five billion views. You sort of get the impression that anything that gets posted on YouTube will at least get ten thousand views and that’s not true. You can post really good stuff on it, and nobody will watch it at all.

  Cate: The other thing is for every falling down the stairs video that goes viral, there’s a couple hundred thousand that are just someone banging their knee.

  John: I emailed you about this, Dave, after I watched a bunch of those Geek and Sundry things, including the ones that I mentioned were Google Hangouts, and I wondered, should we try recording the show using a Google Hangout? Not necessarily so that we could record the video of it, just because it felt to me, especially when we’re doing a larger panel like this, it would actually be really useful to be able to see everybody else. Not just because it’s easier to talk to someone when you can see them, but because we can give hand signals and stuff, like if I want to jump in, but if we did do that, we could conceivably experiment with recording a show and putting it on YouTube. It would be hard, because you couldn’t edit it like you’re used to being able to edit it, so I don’t know if it will actually be viable at all, but it could be something we could try as an experiment. Maybe if we pick the right show, and we set up very firm rules for what we could talk about, and everybody only had two minutes, and we had a timer, or something like that. It would be very challenging, but it might be something worth experimenting with.

  Dave: I was thinking if we did a show on our favorite book covers, for example, it would make sense to have that be video, because then we could actually show the book covers we’re talking about. If it had some visual component, it might be worth experimenting with a video format.

  What do people just think about YouTube generally? I used to be a huge fan of YouTube, I’d spend all day on it, but ever since the ads came on, and you can put these stupid text bars over the video, they just drive me crazy. Especially when, say I want to see the trailer for a new movie, and I type that in, and then I start watching it, and ten seconds in I realize it’s actually a fan-made trailer and it sucks. I’m like, “No, that’s not the right video.” So then I’ll type in the title again, and then it’ll start playing a thirty-second ad, and I’m like, “Ugh, this is just insane that it plays an ad when I just watched a video that turned out to be the wrong video.” I just wonder, do people feel like YouTube is just going down the drain? Are there alternatives?

  John: I’m surprised how much I enjoy doing the prep for this. When you first suggested the idea, I didn’t think that I was that big of a YouTube fan, but then when I was looking back through my viewing history, I was like, “Oh, actually there was a lot of stuff on here that I really loved watching.” It’s mostly viral stuff that somebody linked to somewhere. Not necessarily hugely viral, but some geek that I know linked to it. There’s a lot of stuff that I really enjoyed. As I was doing research, and I was checking out Geek and Sundry and some related stuff to things that I watched, I found a lot of stuff that was really, really funny that I like now, and I’m going to definitely try to look for more. I know what you’re saying, though, the ad stuff is kind of annoying. There’s multiple ads on each one sometimes. There will be the banner along the bottom that you have to click to kill, and then there’s another little box in the right or left hand corner, and it’s like, “I don’t even understand. Go away.” It’s confusing because it looks like it’s part of the same channel, but it’s not, it’s just some random ad. It is a little frustrating. I have seen a couple YouTube alternatives, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve really caught on. There’s things like Vimeo and other services that are basically the same thing, but they don’t seem to have the same community feel that YouTube does.

  Matt: Each one has a different kind of community. Vimeo is gigantic, it’s a huge institution. There’s a style difference between the two of them. YouTube deliberately looks unprofessional. They do that specifically to encourage non-professionals to produce content for the site. Vimeo, on the other hand, is trying to be the slicker, more corporate, more professional video aggregation site. Where if you are an artist, an editor, or a designer, if you want to present something in a very professional manner, Vimeo may be more for you.

  Cate: I think that YouTube has definitely taken a turn for the less than user friendly. Actually, when I started vlogging, they weren’t totally profitable. I think they were actually losing venture, the company itself, when it was bought by Google. Now it’s suddenly very focused on profit, and we can see that because of the ads, the influx of them all of a sudden. The partnership program was a wonderful thing when it allowed independent creators to place ads on their videos. Now ads are put on almost every video. Also, the subscription model where you could subscribe to one channel, like Geek and Sundry, like Matt’s, has changed dramatically, and it has actually caused several of my friends who use YouTube and making videos on it is their primary source of income, it has caused their view counts to fall dramatically. That’s because instead of immediately presenting users with their subscription list and the videos they’ve said they wanted to see, YouTube instead presents a mix of viral videos and related videos, and it’s not the same.

  John: One of my favorite things about YouTube, regardless of its problems with ads and stuff, is that almost any clip that you want to find, that you want to reference to someone, you can find it on YouTube. They’re not always legit, but when we did our sword fighting postgame, and we were trying to find the best sword fighting scenes in film, that was amazing. I created like a seventy item playlist that you can go watch. Anybody who watches that episode can then go back and watch all of the sword fighting scenes that we talked about in the episode. I think that’s cool. It’s allowing people to share stuff and talk about stuff in a way that wouldn’t be possible without something like YouTube. For instance, when I was doing the prep for this show, I created a playlist called YouTube for Geeks, and we can share the link for that on geeksguideshow.com. I created this playlist, and I was just adding the first episode of the different series so you can check those out, and a bunch of it is from Geek and Sundry, a bunch of it is some other stuff I discovered as I was going along. Then I also created one that’s just my favorites, and we’re not going to get to talk about all of my favorites, but I made a list of some of my favorites as well. I think that’s cool that we can do that kind of thing and just share it. It’s almost like curating an anthology, but like a short film anthology.

  Dave: The other big drawback to YouTube that strikes me, as someone who uses it fairly casually, is that it seems to have the dumbest, most vicious comments of anywhere I go on the internet. It was funny actually, Felicia Day, in one of the other interviews I listened to, said that her experience on YouTube taught her that the worst super power that you could possibly have would be telepathy, because it would just be like reading YouTube comments twenty-four hours a day. Is that just my imagination or are YouTube comments literally the worst comments?

  John: They are.

  Matt: Yes, YouTube video comments are the worst comments in the world. One of my all-time favorite YouTube videos is “Charlie Bit My Finger,” which for the one of six billion of you listening who have never heard of this video, it’s basically two British toddler brothers sitting in a chair, hangi
ng out, and the little one bites the big ones finger, and over the course of five to ten seconds the older brother goes through like six emotional states, from amusement to surprise to pain to shrieking agony to defensive hurt and then finally bemusement. It’s an amazing video and it deserves the hundred and eighty million views that it has. But, if you go to YouTube right this second as you’re listening to this, and type in “Charlie Bit My Finger,” and look at the first five comments, they will all be profanity-laden, pornographic, advertisements, super critical, disgusting, filthy, horrendous stuff. I know that because the top five comments on that video are always that. If you’re on the page right now and you’re looking, you’ll see that the most recent one will have been less than an hour ago, and it’s just because people are always on it being offensive, selling their own stuff, and trying to draw attention to themselves.

  John: It just occurred to me that the comments are definitely the worst ever, but I figured it’s probably especially bad for women just because there are so many misogynist assholes that seem to leave comments there. Felicia with her shows, I imagine she must have to put up with a lot of b.s., and Annalee Newitz and Esther Inglis-Arkell from io9, they did this video show on YouTube for a while, and as soon as I saw them doing that—I know Dave and I talked about it at some point—and I was like, “Oh, I bet the comments on that are terrible. Just the worst, vilest shit.” Because there’s two women doing a show, and I can predict what the comments are going to be because it’s like, “Oh, they’re not super models,” or whatever, so everyone’s going to comment on their appearance. It’s repugnant.

  Dave: Cate, what has been your experience with YouTube commenters?

  Cate: I’ve been lucky enough that since I’m not “Charlie Bit My Finger,” I’m not anywhere near anything like that. I’ve been lucky that the community that I’m a part of is a small, supportive community that would never leave a comment like that, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t generally men who haven’t found my videos. One in particular that got a little scary. Currently, this weekend, Vidcon is going on, and yesterday there was a discussion at the “Becoming YouTube” and the “Women on YouTube” panels about why there aren’t more women creators in the top one hundred most subscribed. There are many reasons for this, and they’re all unfortunate, but one of them is because there’s quite a lot of harassment that occurs when you start getting up there.