It’s been nearly 3 months since I last posted a photo slideshow on YouTube. The last time was when I came back from holiday in Vietnam. YouTube was still my last link with social networks. After leaving Facebook and Instagram in quick succession over 5 years ago, I’m slamming the door on YouTube this time. OMG shake YouTube! Jeff’s leaving!
Just kidding! It’s a non-event, but it allows me to write a Blog to tell you about it. Non-event in the sense that I’m a nobody in the YouTube sphere. I must have had less than 400 subscribers, barely a dozen of whom actually came to see what I was doing. Social networking syndrome… There were two reasons why I decided to share my photos via YouTube:
1 – I wasn’t writing enough blog posts any more and I couldn’t share my work.
2 – I thought I’d be able to show my work to other people via this medium
Yes, I may have given up Facebook and Instagram, but I’d found a way to keep my foot in the social networking door… I have to say that I wasn’t very active and I only posted slideshows once every 3 or 4 months. Maybe that’s why it never worked. Like all social networks, you have to make a ton of content to gain visibility. In any case, I don’t really understand YouTube’s algorithms. No matter how many hashtags I put in my videos that were directly related to what I was doing, I just noticed that month after month the number of visitors was falling.
To understand, I tried searching with the key words #Ricoh GR3 #Street Photography #35mm Crop mode … In short, try it and you’ll see the disaster. There are practically only Gear Vlogs that explain how to use the cameras, why the GR is so good, how to set the best settings, how to take amazing photos (that aren’t really amazing…) with the GR3, why I swapped from Leica to Ricoh… In fact, people don’t give a damn about photography per se. What they care about is intellectual wanking about GEAR!
I think you also have to interact a lot with your audience. Talking to those who are watching the video. All I wanted was to find a medium to share my photos, but now I’m drowning in all this and my shared videos have been viewed 20 times in all … All that for this? Well, I’d rather stop sharing on YouTube. 2 years ago, I’d already been thinking about leaving YouTube, but this time, I think I’ve had more than enough of providing YouTube with content. I’m sick of feeding the social beast. There are a lot of photos that I haven’t shared here that I used to put in my slideshows, so it’s time to put my Blog and site back in the spotlight. This is where my photos will be shared from now on.
Ever since I started Street Photography and began sharing my work, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with social networks. To this day, I don’t have a Facebook account, an Instagram account or a Tik Tok account, and I’ve just deleted all my YouTube videos. And yet I consume YouTube content! I watch a lot of cooking videos, music videos and even tennis videos. What I almost never watch are videos about street photography or photography in general. All the content looks the same and is mostly GEAR-oriented. The only photography video I’ve watched on several occasions is ‘how to take apart the Ricoh GR3’ …
I don’t know if it’s a generational thing or just me being unsuited to social networking. Either way, no more YouTube for me. Well, no more sharing on that platform… I’ll try to write more often to share my work. And if I don’t manage to share everything, that’s no big deal!
All the photos were made with the Ricoh GR3 | Crop 35mm
It’s all futile. Just feeding the machine. If you were on Instagram or Facebook you won’t see any photography from people you follow. Just endless ads you have no interest in and suggested content that you’ll never follow in a million years. Post something and no one is going to see it. YouTube is the same. Quality work like yours just drowns in a sea of mediocrity. But, as a photographer you want people to see your work. That’s partly the point of being creative, not to get applause, but to create something that others might appreciate or have some meaning to them. Social media isn’t the answer. Producing a book that no one will buy? Pointless. A website is the only realistic answer.
I know all of that John. That all this f**** social media is just crap and that I shouldn’t care about the numbers of views of my videos. But still it hurts. I ‘m not saying that what I do is pure gold but what annoys me is not to be able to find the audience. And the algorithms are helpless… I still belive that they are a lot of street photographers who share the same vision of us and still I’ m not able to reach them.
As I gave up on the other platforms, time for me to leave YouTube as well. There’s no point of feeding the beast.
It’s been more than a week that I erased everything. I ‘m more at peace now. I’ m only focus on my website. The only place to share my work with others and I’m grateful to the people who take the time to visit my website and read my blogs. People who understand my work.
That last sentence. This the problem.
There are people who understand your work out there and even they don’t get to see it and appreciate what you’re doing. Then there’s the people who don’t understand what you’re doing that it really, really, really needs to reach, so they can learn.
Well I wish to these people a lot of luck to reach my blog and website.!
I ‘m surprised to see some photographers who ended here. That’s what I was aiming when I first started in 2016. But it’s still rare but it’s enough to keep me moving forward.