Creating a History YouTube Channel/Podcast?

July 3, 2021 3:36 PM

Hi. I am quite keen on starting a History YouTube Channel or Podcast elsewhere, but I am not sure which medium would be best or how to present the dialogue and conversation.

Would it be better to listen to a History topic on a podcast through audio, or would it be more interesting and worthy to do a video podcast where I would be talking in front of the camera about History topics? I cannot afford eye-catching animation for History topics, so I would have to use an audio podcast or video podcast. Yet, I am not sure if people would get bored staring at me talking on YouTube, or if it would be better to do an audio podcast on YouTube or elsewhere. I quite enjoy the AskHistorians YouTube podcast, but it doesn't seem to reel in many views, perhaps because it is audio-only, but it is still an excellent podcast.

posted by RearWindow to Technology (3 answers total)

Porque no los dos? You can do an audio podcast that you also upload to YouTube. I listen to a couple who do this.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:17 PM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'd take a look/listen at what other people are doing in this space to figure out what you want to emulate, and how you want to differentiate yourself. You should look at, at least, The History Guy (general history topics), The Futility Closet (a history podcast that also uploads to Youtube, as per Kevinbelt), Drachinifel (Naval military history, age of sail through WW2). They have relatively successful channels doing something like what you're after. The History Guy and Drachinifel use the "talk over historical photographs" approach. As a rule, the History Guy's content seems to be a bit more tightly coupled to the photographs, whereas Drach's are mostly topical, but not tightly sync'ed to the audio). I think the longform Drachinifel stuff is also available as audio-only podcasts.
posted by Alterscape at 4:20 PM on July 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

IMHO, a podcast is much easier, unless you have a LOT of video to show, or have time to create them out of pictures of book passages and illustrations as well as finding related free footage.

A lot of video channels have this problem. The "Dark" series of channels often have the wrong planes or the wrong ship and such when talking about a certain ship or plane just because they look "about right". A lot of those "Reddit read aloud" channels (Reddit Krown, etc.) who don't want to put their mug on screen also have this problem as they search for free footage by keyword and often the keyword brought up something irrelevant or wrong context.
posted by kschang at 4:44 PM on July 3, 2021 [1 favorite]