Tom Scott Answers Content Creator Questions

If you're watching this

because you actually wanna make stuff, go make stuff,

that's the only way to get better.

I'm Tom Scott, I've been making stuff for the internet

for more than 25 years.

[Tom gasps]

I'm here today to answer questions from the internet.

This is Creator Support.

[upbeat music]

Colin asks, Any tips on how to go viral

so I can exit the workforce with everyone else?

Firstly, you will not be exiting the workforce.

Make stuff.

Every single project that you make

is a new roll of the dice, is a new chance to go viral.

What you want is to steadily grow, to build up your skills

over time to make stuff and make stuff and make stuff.

And then when you're in a position to make good stuff,

then you want the number one,

you want the viral hit

because then people could come and go,

Oh, there's more stuff here.

You can do that, and it's all good.

That's what you actually wanna do.

You don't wanna go viral yet.

Make stuff.

AngelOfLord asks, Is upgrading your gear worth it?

Upgrading your microphone is worth it.

That's the very first thing you should do

when you've got some money coming in.

Bad audio is really difficult.

I know that everyone's got subtitles on now anyway,

if you don't have subtitles on your videos,

you absolutely should.

I think it's 30% of my viewers on YouTube

watch with subtitles.

On mobile, it's gonna be way higher.

But if you have bad audio, immediately people are like,

Ah, I can't understand. I'm gonna move on.

And if you're on short-form, you're gone in a second.

Clear audio is vital.

And the first thing you should do

is get the microphone closer to your face.

And the cheapest way to do that

is to buy an off-the-shelf one

that plugs in and just hold it in front of your face.

Maybe you wanna get a fancy wireless one later.

Maybe you wanna get a proper boom mic later

or something like that.

But the first thing you should do

is upgrade your microphone.

Any-Lingonberry asks, Do you think thumbnails matter

as much as people say?

100%. Thumbnails on YouTube matter so much.

The packaging of a video for whichever platform you are on

matters so much.

I hate that the packaging is important.

I would much, much rather be doing

a '90s television magazine show

with a half-hour running length

and four or five sections in there,

and maybe the third section

isn't something people would generally choose to watch,

but they're already watching the show.

Now, And I really dislike that every single thing

has to be packaged like this.

But time after time after time,

it is proven that the thumbnail and the packaging

is really important.

That said, if your thumbnail is a lie,

think about what audience that's going to attract

and whether they actually are the audience you want.

I'm kind of old school in this

that I think the thumbnail should be true.

YouTube's AI features in their studio

will now generate new thumbnails for you.

If you are a YouTube creator

and you go to that little AI icon and you say,

Generate some thumbnails from my most recent video,

it'll do it, just as ideas,

I don't think they actually want you to use them.

As I record this, my most recent video,

I was filming in a candy factory, a sweet shop,

a rock shop for the British people watching.

And there's some elements in there,

there's some sugar being pulled out,

like molten sugar flowing out of a cauldron.

And there's me in there dressed up in factory gear.

And what it generated was this giant cauldron

with enormous amounts of bubbling candy coming out of it.

And it generated this shot of me

just kind of recoiling back from it in terror

with an uncanny valley version of my face.

And yes, it's a very good thumbnail.

It would've attracted people to the video

if I'd have, like, photographed myself for it,

took it out the uncanny valley,

but it's a lie that didn't happen.

That's okay for some audiences, I guess.

I make factual content, so I want it to be real.

The kettle wasn't that big.

I wasn't recoiling in fear, I was holding the camera.

I wasn't in that shot.

So yeah, I could have put that up

and a lot of my audience would've been angry at me,

first, for using generative AI, and second, for lying.

And a load of kids would've come along

who aren't really gonna like the video in the end.

It's not who I'm pitching my video at.

So sure, I could have got more views with it,

but it wouldn't have been the people

who the video was aimed at

and they wouldn't have stuck around.

So yes, thumbnails matter an enormous amount,

but they've got to also match your audience.

I also now hate that I have to generate three titles

and three thumbnails for each video,

and YouTube will automatically A/B/C test them.

And if none of them work,

maybe I need to change it up again.

It's constant work. I do miss just uploading a video.

Sarah Mann asks, How far in advance do you plan content?

Do you prefer to lock it down or be a bit flexible?

It's gonna be different for everyone.

For me, I used to have weeks in advance

back when I was making stuff in sort of 2018, 2019.

I was making videos that now

I really don't like all that much.

My old format, the one that ended in 2023,

I look at 'em like, Man, why did people watch these?

They're short and they're scripted,

and they're kind of stilted.

But it meant like 2018, 2019,

I had like eight weeks of videos

in the buffer already scheduled,

ready to go, it was great.

And then COVID hit and I used up all that buffer

and it never really recovered.

Like maybe I'd get up to two weeks

and that was always a bit nerve-wracking.

For the new series, for the stuff I started in 2026,

I recorded 41 videos in advance

on a single eight-week road trip.

And they're all longer and they're,

I think they're the best things I've ever done,

but they are so good because they were able

to be made as one continuous block.

And I can put references in video one

that will pay off in video 23 or 36.

The flip side of that is that I can't be flexible.

If it turns out that something I filmed months ago

actually has a disaster,

like touch wood, it's not gonna happen,

but I have to work out, how am I gonna deal with that?

How I'm gonna change a video

that already has references from months ago.

Please try and have a buffer.

Like if you wanna avoid burnout,

please, please, please try and have some buffer.

A Quora user asks, What is a good traffic source?

Okay, this is a little inside baseball.

And the answer is, first of all,

a good traffic source is gonna differ for each creator,

but generally you want a good mix.

YouTube's advice is to have three types of content:

hub, hero, and help.

Hub is your episodic, your regular content

that is just going out like this.

That's building up the audience slowly over time

so that when someone comes in and sees you,

there's also a load of regular stuff there

and they can watch that too.

That is your hub. Then you've got your hero.

That's the big splashy stuff that draws in people,

that goes viral, that makes big waves, gets shared around,

gets new audience in.

And then you have your help.

That's the stuff that people search for.

They're looking for help on this thing now,

they type in the keywords, or type in the keywords

and they find you there.

If you have all three of those,

you're gonna get a mix of traffic sources

and that is hopefully what's gonna propel you forward.

Okay, Rob asks, How important

are the first 10 to 15 seconds of a video to the algorithm?

Very important but not for the reason you'd expect.

I was lucky enough a while back to have a chat

with the guy in charge of the YouTube algorithm,

head of product for recommendations.

His name is Todd, and I cannot remember his last name.

So let's call him Todd Algorithm, and he said this publicly,

I'm not breaching any confidences or NDAs here.

In any sentence where you use the word algorithm,

replace it with the word audience.

That's what YouTube is trying to do.

And it's generally what the other platforms

are trying to do as well.

In any sentence, just replace algorithm with audience.

They want to be this transparent glass layer.

That means that every single video you are recommended

is something you'd want to watch.

How important are the first 10 to 15 seconds of a video

to the audience?

Really, really important because after 10, 15 seconds,

if they look at that and go, Ah, that's fine,

they are gonna judge a book by its cover,

and the title, the thumbnail, the first 10 to 15 seconds

are that cover and the algorithm will just reflect

what the audience is doing.

Ecstatic asks, What is a realistic amount of time to wait

to know whether a video is going to take off or not?

Depends on the platform.

If it's for YouTube, you'll know pretty quickly.

It's unusual for something to go slow for a while

and then suddenly take off.

If it's not taking off, you repackage it,

you change the title, the thumbnail,

you try again, you keep going.

After a while you go, Okay, well that was not a winner.

That happens for other platforms.

The stories I've heard from people who use Instagram

and TikTok and publish their YouTube Shorts in particular,

it's completely random.

It's the whims of some black-box algorithm

and it really feels like it's not reflecting the audience.

It's just randomly sending down lightning bolts

from god on high and going, You, you shall,

you shall now have views.

I don't know.

But for YouTube you'll probably know in a couple of hours.

Pokey asks, Should my YouTube videos have an intro

or is it just a waste of time?

Depends on the intro.

The best ever introductions were the ones from Top Gear.

Yeah, Tonight, so-and-so does this.

So if you are just setting up expectations, great, do it,

because one of the most powerful editing techniques,

and you can see people do this,

if you know what you're looking for,

is never conclude a question until the next one is set up.

So at the start of the show your intro,

you set up expectation A and B, you resolve B.

But before you do that, you set up C.

Before you resolve C, you set up D,

and then at the end you resolve D and A.

That is a really powerful technique

if you're subtle about it.

You can see so many YouTube videos that really go,

Oh, but you won't believe what happened when we did that.

Like, be subtle, be subtle.

On the other hand, if your introduction

is 10 seconds of 3D animation with dubstep over it

and your channel name, drop it.

You are not prestige television,

and even prestige television has a skip intro button

for a reason.

A Reddit user asks, Is clickbait in your title

and thumbnail worth it?

I would direct you to Veritasium's excellent video on this

where he describes it not as clickbait,

but as curiosity bait.

If you are lying in the title and thumbnail, absolutely not.

It'll get you the views for a little while,

they'll realize that you are a liar,

and they won't come back.

But part of the game,

part of getting your stuff out to the world is packaging it

in the way that the medium requires.

Back when DVRs and TiVo came along in the,

I think late '90s, that feels about right,

the titles of shows got shorter and simpler.

You ended up with things like Storage Wars

and Ancient Aliens.

In part those titles, those short titles

rather than the more abstract titles that came before,

because they needed to fit in the slot on a DVR guide.

They need to fit when you're clicking through

on your television, on your channels to just see two words

'cause that's all the room you've got.

This is exactly the same thing.

You have to package your content to fit the medium.

Just don't lie about it.

ThenAdvice asks, Is it true

that the more content you put out,

the better for audience growth and retention?

The more good content you put out, the better.

If you are just sending out stuff

and you don't care about it and no one cares about it,

the audience isn't gonna care about it either.

What you want is something summed up by the word ikigai,

a concept from Japanese, which is what you love,

what you are good at, what the world needs

and what you can be paid for.

The stuff that took off for me had all those four things.

The format that I finally found, it was something

that I was interested in and that I really did enjoy doing.

It was something I'd like to think I was good at

that I could do.

It was something that the world was interested in and watch.

And it was something I could get paid for.

Like how many people are lucky enough

to have all those four things?

If you can find that, when you find that,

put out as much of it as you can.

If you are not interested in what you're putting out,

if you're just doing it to tick a box,

then I think the audience will notice.

A Quora user asks, I want to change my YouTube niche

without losing my old audience.

How could I do it?

You can't. That's the bad news.

Even for me, like the new stuff that I'm making,

that is a continuation of my old content,

but longer, slightly different formats

like viewing numbers are down a bit.

Intellectually, rationally, I am fine with that

'cause I know from the statistics,

people are watching for much longer,

they're sticking around and the feedback I'm getting is

these are really good but I am going to lose

some of the old audience who don't like this.

Now if you can make it like this where it's a combination

of novelty and familiarity,

that's what you want in a new series.

If you are changing niche,

try and make it have a connection to the other,

so you can bring more people over.

But ultimately, if you are changing niche,

even if you're just changing a bit of the format,

some people are not gonna stick around.

That sucks.

It is still a stab in the heart

every single time I open up YouTube Studio

and the new thing is getting lower view count.

Don't think of it as losing the old audience.

Think of it as starting from scratch

with extra bonuses and new stuff coming in.

You have such a start compared to everyone

who really is starting from zero.

Subscribers are a useless metric.

They were great when YouTube started.

Controversial opinion, YouTube should take away

the subscriber count.

Like they're never gonna do it,

like there's too much cultural cachet in it,

but it's a useless figure.

They should replace it with watch-time hours,

which is a number that only ever goes up.

It's fair to both short-form and long-form,

but they'll never do it.

But subscribers is meaningless because it just means

someone clicked a button at one time

and now they're not interested anymore.

Like don't worry about those numbers.

If you are starting in a completely new niche,

maybe start a new channel.

Puzzleheaded asks, What have you learned from brand deals?

A brand deal these days for YouTube

is one of those ads that is incorporated into the video.

It's called a host-read or a host-read advert.

For Instagram, it may be an entire short-form video

that is dedicated to a product,

but what I've learned is that everyone draws the line

of what is an acceptable brand deal,

of what is selling out just below what they're doing.

So for me, I take some brand deals.

I will never take one from a gambling company.

I will never take one from some mobile app

that uses loot boxes and gacha mechanics

that just kind of grab huge amounts of money

through addiction mechanics.

I won't do that. I don't think those are acceptable.

But there are loads of folks who do and they will all go,

Oh yeah, sure, I take those, but I don't take

whatever the next thing down is.

And equally, there are people

who are gonna be looking down on me

because they are very proud to never take

or have to take those brand deals.

The reason why everyone takes them is the money,

obviously, but a brand deal on YouTube will get you,

as a rule of thumb, it's a very vague guideline,

about 10 times what you would get

from just the YouTube ad revenue that comes in.

And I certainly couldn't resist that.

And these days it is so accepted

that when an up-and-coming creator

gets their first brand deal, you will see comments

that are like, Oh my God, congratulations.

You got a sponsor! Like, get the bag.

Roberto Blake asks, What skills do you personally need

to practice as a content creator

in order for you to improve further?

Make stuff. Just make stuff.

This, it's as simple as: every skill,

every single thing is improved by actually making things.

There are so many people who spend so much time

just worrying about every detail, worrying,

Oh, I can't make this now 'cause this is just...

Just make stuff, and every other skill

will follow from there.

Simplyherefornow asks, What more can I do

to push my content out to the algorithm?

Or do I just have to wait?

What more can you do to push your content

out to the audience, other than repackaging it,

trying different titles and things like that?

I mean, don't spam people.

Don't go wildly and post it

because that's a way to get people really angry at you.

But it is like many things about who you know,

not what you know.

If you can collaborate with people,

even if that's not in person,

even if that's not actually on video,

if you can make those connections to other people,

then that's more powerful than anything else.

There is the method of doing a forced collaboration

where you just take someone else's content

and make a video like the number of people

who make a video about MrBeast,

because that will get MrBeast's fans

to click on their video.

Cool.

Are they gonna be interested in your video

or are they gonna be interested in just something

about the person they like?

They're not gonna come back.

All you've done is taken

a little bit of someone else's audience

who are then not going to like what you do next.

A Quora user asks, How do you find your niche online?

You try as many as possible and you see what you like

and you enjoy and you see what the audience responds to.

But that question feels like it comes from someone

who wants to be an influencer, a creator,

a YouTuber, a TikToker, and isn't sure

why or what they want to do to get there.

Like they, yeah, absolutely.

I want to, I wanna have a million subscribers. Cool.

What about it feels like someone who's like,

Yeah, I wanna be a rockstar.

Okay, great. Which instrument?

What genre of music?

Like if you don't have that passion for it,

are you gonna stick around and do that?

So try a lot of niches, try a lot of different things.

Try a lot of different instruments

and see which one works for you.

Beneficial_List asks, 'how do you deal with burnout

when your heart is tired, but you don't want to give up?

[exhales] I'm not a therapist.

I wish I knew.

If you are just starting out

or if you don't have many subscribers,

you've been trying this for a long time

and you're burned out and it's not working,

maybe you stop, maybe you do try something else.

If it is your job and you have this schedule,

and that's something I'll talk about later,

like if you have this schedule that you have to hit

for a certain amount of time,

you suck it up and you do it because it's your job

and you figure out a way to make it more sustainable

as you go.

I will note that this is from a subreddit

that is not advice for YouTube,

it's advice for Fansly, which is an adult platform.

I know folks who make content for platforms like that,

and burnout is so difficult

there because it is, by necessity, intimate.

But even if you're making stuff for YouTube

and for Instagram or for anything

that involves you as a person,

the more you tear off pieces of your soul,

the more you throw memories and personal stuff

into the fire of the engine, the more you do that often,

the better the audience responds.

And there are only so many pieces of your soul

and so many memories that you can fuel the engine with.

And if you can avoid becoming personal,

if you can do this and still maintain a wall

between you and the audience,

even if it's a glass wall, even if it's,

there's just something there, that's gonna help a lot.

Dr. Mosman asks, How do I be a creator

without being a people pleaser?

Bad news: you have to be. Sorry.

I met someone the other day

who kind of plays the heel online like lovely in person,

but is kind of abrasive and aggressive with a personality

like actively seems to dislike the audience,

but the audience like that and he plays this character

like a wrestling heel.

He's just the bad guy,

but that's still pleasing the audience.

Now, how close you bring the audience is a choice.

I've always said I want viewers, not fans.

I don't want people to be attached to me.

I want people to be attached to the things I'm making

and to come back and enjoy that.

So you can put a bit of a wall in there,

but ultimately part of the job is pleasing the audience

and there's no way around that.

Lonelylupine asks, Are attention spans shortening

or have short attention spans been hidden before?

I think we are getting used to taking in more data

and more information faster.

I'm now at the point where I'm watching most stuff

that isn't like comedy or drama or something

like that at two times speed.

If it's scripted, I'm up to three times speed.

If it's scripted and they talk slow,

I might even get up to four times speed.

If it's just someone reading a monologue

and that is the speed at which I take in information,

because if you're reading and you're a fast reader,

you can take in information that fast.

I think that people are taking in more information now

because there is so much of it,

and we are adapting to do that.

Is that a bad thing? Ask us in 100 years.

Ask the descendants

of this year's social scientists and neurologists,

they'll be able to tell you, but I couldn't tell you now.

Noele asks, How has your content evolved

since you first started

and what lessons have you learned along the way?

I first started throwing stuff at the internet

technically in the 20th century,

I think, in that I was writing HTML for a GeoCities page.

So the answer is I just kept throwing ideas out there

until one worked, and then once it did that kept evolving.

It's evolved beyond all recognition.

I generally hate anything I've done in the past.

There are only maybe a dozen videos from my, like,

10-year series that I'm really proud of and would say,

Oh yeah, I do that.

Like, there's so many.

I'm like, I could have done that better.

Like, yes. Do I need to see a therapist about that?

Absolutely.

A Quora user asks, How do you know

what content your audience likes?

They'll tell you, they will tell you so much in comments,

in messages, on whatever platform you're on, in emails,

if you're old school like me,

like you will get so many messages,

but whether you pay attention to them is up to you,

because, yes, the audience likes one thing,

but maybe that's not what you want to do anymore.

I've always made the analogy to being in a band.

The audience would like four albums

which are really identical

to the one album they really like of yours,

but are also new and novel and exciting at the same time.

You have to manage those expectations and accept

that sometimes the audience is only gonna sort of like

what you put out and maybe that's okay.

Maybe that gets rid of the people who like the stuff

you used to be doing in the past and brings in some people

who are doing the stuff you want to do in the future.

Trustnobody asks, Is the idea

of being a full-time content creator overglamorized

and financially reckless?

For some people? Yes.

I met someone a few weeks ago, and apologies

if you're watching this,

who has just got 5,000 TikTok followers

and they were thinking of quitting their job

and doing it full time.

I tried to suggest politely, because it was just someone

I just met that maybe that wasn't a good idea.

I will say that explicitly now in the hope

that they're not watching this.

It doesn't sound quite so rude.

Don't do that. That's a really bad idea.

Ideally, you have a jumping-off point.

I was very, very lucky when I started that.

When my channel finally, after 15 years,

15 years of throwing stuff at the internet,

something finally worked out,

I had kind of, Oh, okay, this might be working,

this might be going up the hill.

That happened at about the time

when I had a bit of savings and the place I was working at,

there was some red flags.

It was time to leave.

So I was lucky enough and that was luck.

To be in a position where I could jump ship when I needed.

But bear in mind that I had that,

'cause I had a bit of savings, I had a bit of time.

There are so many people out there who don't have that luck

or who are holding down three jobs and they have two kids.

If you have spare time, you are in such a better position.

If you have spare time and spare money, congratulations,

you've already won the jackpot.

It is financially reckless to jump out of a job

that you need

because there might be something coming in in future.

That is massively unfair. But unfortunately, capitalism.

Bellinilli asks, How much time do you spend now

on content creation?

[chuckles] Too much.

Everyone's answer to that is too much.

Never have a hobby that turns into a job,

you know, find a job you love

and you'll spend your entire life doing it.

It's infuriating.

I'm still working full-time on this because, of course,

because I can do, because I'm passionate about it

and I want to make it work.

If you can get work-life balance,

please do tell me how to do it.

Bbll asks, What happens to influencers and content creators

once they are no longer at their peak

or become less relevant,

which I will note is from the subreddit,

LA Influencer Snark.

So I get the feeling there's a bit of cynicism

behind this question.

The answer is the same as for a TV presenter

or a band or anything like that.

If they had a couple of hits and then nothing else,

they'll get a nice little trail of royalties in,

maybe money from old views and things like that,

but probably not much else.

They'll go and find a job somewhere else,

and maybe if they're lucky,

they'll have an audience that remember them.

Michael Underwood is a kids' TV presenter

who I was slightly too late for him.

I think he was presenting shows

when I was sort of in college.

He's had some shows.

Kids remember him, but he's a teacher now and he's on TikTok

recently just answering questions from folks

who are now like in their 20s and 30s going,

Oh yeah, I remember you off the TV.

How's it going?

And he's really happy. He's teaching kids.

He's reaching an audience,

and occasionally, he'll pop on TikTok and someone go,

Oh yeah, I remember you.

And occasionally in real life people go,

Oh yeah, I remember you. I've got good memories of you.

Thanks for making my childhood better.

What a wonderful thing to have.

Again, like starting from zero, don't frame it as a loss.

No, you have this gift, this bonus,

you have this chapter in your life

that was wonderful and you still, hopefully,

have good memories of and get good things from.

Pop culture is ephemeral. Relevancy is ephemeral.

There is always a peak and there is always a comedown after,

and the comedown sucks.

But what a joy to be able to say, I did that.

And there are still some good ripple effects

that come from it.

That is all the questions for today.

Hope you learned something.

Please go watch my videos as well.

That's why I'm here.

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