Hours as a friendship tested in time, over thousands of years. From the legends of Mahabharata to the shared sensibilities of Gandhara civilization. From being the primary trading hub and transit route to connect Central Asia with the Indian subcontinent to the humble, peace-loving, rustic traders that continue to come down to the Indian mainland even today. The people of Afghanistan and India have undoubtedly been friends across forever. Our companionship has turned into a commitment of growing together. Cricket became one such surging metaphor of hope for the Afghan youth. The game embodies the expression of freedom and their modes to reach out to the wider world. I was very proud of the game. I was very happy with it. The dream of all the Afghans is to play in IPL. It was a dream of the whole of Afghanistan. The home ground in India has played a major role in shaping their game. The state-of-the-art ground provides the Afghan national cricket team with not just the best of infrastructure in coaching but also gives the players an innate sense of security and homely warmth. It has opened a gate to play at the world's best place for cricket. I would like to thank the BCCI, the Indian government and also the Britain Oil Authority for allowing us to use their territory to use their facility. Deep-rooted cultural ties between the two nations have sustained through the ages. Mainstream Hindi cinema and songs are popular in Afghanistan. The experience is not limited to cricket alone. It is cross-culture within the country. It is cross-culture within countries. It has helped and cultivated a spirit of the game. Cultures in India, North India and Afghanistan are not very different. They speak even the language in India most of the part. So for them it's not a big change and I think this relationship is going from ancient times because Afghanistan is a neighbour country. The extensive Afghan community settled in India would agree to that. They too look forward to India for support. That would help them shape their destiny. The people of Afghanistan are very happy to see this match. And this friendship is even stronger with these players. When I came to Afghanistan, I was very proud of the people of India. I was very proud of the people of India. I was proud of the sport and the education of the sport. And I must thank India for showcasing the talent of the Afghan cricket to the world. We would have not been able to show the talent that we had in Afghanistan without the support of India. What we have observed that whenever they get an opportunity, Afghan players, they do wonders. Which really impressed not only BCCI, but also to the ICC. India and Indians inspire these cricketers in many ways. I was a big fan of Ms. Dhoni. And I wanted to meet her and take pictures with her. I really liked Sachin Tendulkar. And I was very happy to meet him. Playing with some of the biggest legends of cricket, chiseled their game to an even better shape. India has a lot of talent. Both strong characters have shown that with their performances. I didn't feel that they were the first to come to India or that they had put something different from there. They are enjoying it a lot. I think it's a great opportunity. There are a lot of opportunities to augment the relationship between the two countries. Cricket can play a huge role socially and both people to people contribution also. It can enhance and boost the relationship between the two countries. Even the most dedicated talents need a favorable ecosystem to flourish. A stream of support that's committed to continue flowing. Bringing people closer to people. Celebrating the journey called life and remaining friends across forever.


Hello everyone, how are you all doing on this fine day? It's gonna be a bit of a different stream today than usual. I'm gonna try and stay on topic and be a little bit more organized, take it at least out of Doc's book, but of course I do have to just say hello. Hey Jeff, great to see you. Great work on the emojis, Keely. Great to see you as well. And hi Gretchen, how are you doing? Great to see you here as well. So this is gonna be a little bit different than my usual total wondering, rambling livestreams I feel like I've been doing. I mean, some people say that they've got a value out of them, but I've felt like I've not been on track. And so that's the point of this stream is to try and get a little bit more organized and I've come with slides. So today we are talking about my channel tweets. So things that I've done differently on my channel and it's not just about what I'm doing with the livestream, it's just about the channel in general really and trying to be a little bit more intentional with what I'm doing, not that I wasn't. I mean, I've always had my goal of my 365 videos in a year. And by the way, I'll be giving my usual update which I usually do at the beginning. I'll do that at the end because maybe some people don't wanna sit through all that. So I'll stick that at the end and update you with where I'm up to with the channel. But for the past, I suppose a couple of months really, I've felt like, although I'm still creating content, I've been a little bit static in what I'm doing in terms of I'm not really innovating as such and I'm still just doing the same things, albeit new videos, new content, new things to learn and all that sort of stuff. But in terms of the channel, I haven't actually been doing anything differently from more or less the way that I started. I did do a slight refresh of things at around about video 100, I think, or sometime just after that. But I still didn't really do much in terms of tweaking videos and things like that. So that is what I've been sort of consciously thinking about having had a good long chat about it with my coach, the wonderful Mr. Doc Rock. So that is what I'm gonna be covering in this. And I'm just gonna go through and talk about the different things that I've done. I'm not an expert. I don't know if these things are gonna work. I'm just letting you all know so that I'm doing it in public and you can judge for yourself. And I will obviously report back with my findings once I've got some. So the first thing that I have done is actually updated my thumbnails. Now you may or may not have noticed this because it's not like I've just had some sort of massive departure. But there are a few things that I've done slightly differently to the way that I used to do them in the past. So the easiest way to do this is I'll show you in TubeBuddy because what I've been doing is running some split tests. So I am just running all of my new videos. I've obviously got this sort of slightly new style. I wanna say new style. It's not really, but let me just show you if I zoom in on this perhaps. It might make it a little bit easier for you to see. So these are some split tests that I've got running. So that's actually one of my first style of thumbnails with that sort of like teal color in the background and that yellow. White on a yellow background was never a great idea, but I just ran with it because recovering perfectionists and all that. I didn't spend as much time as I normally would in actually trying to get all of this perfect. If I was doing this before starting the channel, I would have been tweaking endlessly over it. So I've deliberately just tried to get something up and then run with it. And so that's what I did. And I've never really got round to refreshing it, but I've never really felt that the white on a yellow background was a great idea. And I'm thinking that that actually just does pop out a little bit better. And then I've still got the yellow, but just to sort of add a little accent to some particular words or phrases in the thumbnail.  Same more or less style. I've moved over this line slightly over to the right to give more space for the words. But yeah, and then somebody, in fact Caleb, oh hey, Caleb, I've just noticed you were just in the chat. Caleb mentioned that when I've got things down in this bottom right hand corner, it's always actually covered by the timestamp. So although this one is like that, because that's how I'd done it before that comment, I've since sort of moved everything over to be more on the other side. So in fact, if I just, I'll show you another video, another video thumbnail, what I've started doing if I just come into this other view down here. So this is, these are some videos that are either up or going up. So the time you can see covers that area. It's actually not quite as big on the, when it's in the YouTube player. But nevertheless, it does cover that corner. So I've kind of moved that stuff over to the other side. Now one thing that I always used to have on my thumbnails is I always had this little logo down here, my logo actually on the thumbnail, which it seems a little bit stupid really considering that my logo is on the channel name, which appears next to the thumbnail. The reason why I put that on from the beginning was I put my name on there because I've always had this feeling that like when I'm scrolling through YouTube, something with somebody's name on it, I actually relate more to, even if I don't know them. If something's got somebody's name like as the YouTube channel name, then I always relate more to it, like a nickname in, de-naming, things like that. Whereas somebody like Think Media, I can't remember the guy's name. Sean is it, I can't remember. But I always just had this sense inside that I related more to things that have got somebody's name in the channel name. Now, I didn't wanna have my name in the channel name because I wanted it to be, the take one tech sort of brand if you like. And because obviously I wanted it to be relatable to the fact that I do it all in one take and also that it's tech related as opposed to just saying Alec Johnson or whatever. So that's why I had that little logo in the bottom corner with my name in it afterwards. Well, now what I've done is I'll actually change the name of my channel, you may or may not have noticed but it now just says take one tech with Alec so it's still got my name in it. But that's meant I can just remove this logo which was always just taking up space unnecessarily. So that's the other little tweak that I've done. What you're gonna notice, by the way, as we go through all of these different things is that none of these are major groundbreaking changes. They're just sort of evolutions of what I'm doing and things that I'm trying to tweak a little bit. The other thing on the thumbnails that I've tried to be, and by the way, these aren't my ideas. These are me just realizing I was doing it wrong having learned from other people like Doc, like Nick Nimmin, Dean Nimmin, all these sorts of people. Daniel Batal as well, I've been watching some of his stuff getting some great ideas from there as well. So what I'm trying to do with these thumbnails, and I still might not be doing it right, is I'm trying to be a little bit more. I mean, actually these are pretty bad examples that I've got up here, but being, I mean that one's just literally a short MV7 review, but I'm trying to do more sort of like teaser style titles. In fact, I've probably done these in a little bit more with my latest ones. So I've got a series of videos going out where with about shortcuts, which I haven't done, I haven't released them yet, but I'm doing them all as a whole series, and then I'll just dump them out so that one links into another. But I'll get onto that in a moment. But yeah, trying to have a little look at playing around with the titles so that what I used to do was, I would tend to have almost the same thing on the YouTube thumbnail as in the title. So the text that was on the thumbnail would almost be similar or the same as the title. So I'm trying to be a bit more conscious about not just replicating that and having it more of a little sort of hook. Now I am running these split tests, as you can see on these existing videos. And we'll see. The results are not totally in yet, although we have got some early results from them being running for a couple of days. So this one was changing two things really. I'm changing the title and the thumbnail itself, but you can see that this one, I got monetized and this is how much I made, is doing better than YouTube money. I was trying to reduce the text there, but actually I suppose that's got that little hook of people who want to know how much you've made. So this one, I mean it's not looking good for my title so far.  This was a play on words of the fact that the keyboard is called the eye clever folding keyboard. So my thing was who clever?  So yeah, that's no surprise to me that that one's doing it a bit better. Studio build and complete studio build, not much difference there really. I don't know why I even stuck that extra word in, but that one's saying zero. Now I'm guessing that that just hasn't had time for the results to propagate. So we'll have to wait and see how these things do over time. Now this video here, I was wrong about profiles. This is by far like over double any other video, my best performing video. It's had about 10,000 views just on this one video and which for me is good. It's all relative at the end of the day, but I don't think I've got another one that's over 5,000 for a single video. So I wanted to play around with this to see if I could do anything to make it better. So I did actually just leave the text the same but just have it in this sort of new style. It's not looking like it's worked so far but we'll have to wait and see. As you can see, this has been running till the 14th of February. So yeah, that is the way that that is going. Now if I just, let me just have a little look at this. If I click on one of these, then it will take me through to some rather more in depth analytics. And as I say, we've got to still leave this running. I'll just zoom out a little bit because that's the original, that's the updated thumbnail. You see, I should have really only changed one thing at a time, but I've changed the picture and the text and the style, but there you go. And then you've got some details on the click-through rate and then the number of impressions from one compared to another, the watch times. So that's interesting, the watch times per variation, not a huge amount of difference in there. Number of daily impressions of each of the versions and the number of daily clicks and then the total views. So an average view duration. So yeah, it's interesting to dig into this. I'm gonna wait until all these tests have run and then do a little bit more of an analysis of it. Now that's interesting. That is a huge difference from the difference between suggested videos and browse features. So suggested videos of the original is actually double suggest of the updated thumbnail. Whereas with browse, it's almost the opposite. So that's really interesting. Suggested videos, obviously, people are already on your page. I wonder if that, just thinking aloud here, if that is anything to do with the fact that the style of it is different, maybe it doesn't look quite the same as, they don't think it's the same from me, but obviously they do, because it's got my face on it. Forget I even said that. So anyway, that is just a little bit about what I have been doing with thumbnails. Now, I've just seen Caleb, you're saying that suggested tends to be with more recent videos. It does. However, this is both for the same video. So it's saying that the suggested video with the original thumbnail, as of the 14th of February, or the 12th whenever I started at 14th, this one has done better as a suggested video. So I do get that they tend to be more recent videos, but in this case, it won't make a difference because it is actually just a like for like split test. So yeah, let's have a little look at what else. So that is about all actually for the thumbnails though, in terms of the little tweaks. I'd be interested to know what you think. Do you think they look better the way they were or the way they are now? Again, not a huge difference, but I personally think that the text pops out a little better on them. Like I say, white on a yellow background was never the best choice, but anyway. I've also changed the color of blue that I'm using. So I was using this sort of teal color, but now I've just gone for a much deeper darker blue color. So yeah, that is another thing that I've done to just try and help the text pop out of the screen a little bit when people are scrolling down. Because obviously the point of all of this is to try and get more clicks on the thumbnails from people who are whizzing down their YouTube page, looking for what to stop on. So I'm gonna play around with this. Once I've got this sort of nailed, I'm gonna go back and sort of update thumbnails. In fact, I've already started doing it obviously with these split tests, but just updating some of my previous ones. But I will get onto that in a moment as well. So the next thing that I've tried to do is look at the way that I'm making my titles. So I always before used to use TubeBuddy as my guide for this, because TubeBuddy recommends the 70 characters as the sort of target to go for. And so if you're less than 70 characters in TubeBuddy, you'll be missing out on one of the little check marks that tells you you've done everything right. And by the way, if you're not familiar with TubeBuddy, I've got to say TubeBuddy is kind of like my content upload coach, if you like, because it allows me to check all the details that I'm putting in, like my descriptions, titles, tags, things like that. You can also use the keyword explorer to look for keywords to use in your titles to sort of craft those a little better, which is something I've been doing a bit more intentionally as well. And then obviously the split testing that I was just talking about, that's all with TubeBuddy as well. So if you haven't tried it, definitely head over to takeonetech.io slash TubeBuddy to get your free trial. If you're under a thousand subscribers, by the way, on the regular package, which I think is around about $5 a month, then you actually get 50% off with the, in fact, no, I think it's around about $8. Don't quote me on that. But you get 50% off if you've got less than a thousand subscribers. So it's actually a really low-cost way to start with it. And it's, yeah, it really just helps me, sort of coaches me through the whole process of uploading my videos. And again, all these are the tools that I'm using. Oh, by the way, the find and replace, which is only available on the higher tiers, but that's really great if you wanna go and update content within your descriptions and things like that. So yeah, got a lot of respect for TubeBuddy and the link is down there as well. But yeah, the titles. So I've been using TubeBuddy to the keyword Explorer to have a look at different titles, but I've also not actually been going for the 70-character limits. I forget who it was. One of those fine guys that I mentioned earlier was talking about the titles. And so I've actually tended to go for slightly shorter titles, but trying to be a little bit more, again, have like a bit of a hook in them. So whereas before I would tend to write like a long sort of descriptive title of what is in the video, now I'm trying to have these things that are more like little hooks to get people enticed and intrigued as to what they're gonna find out, although there's probably not a huge amount of surprise with the sort of stuff I cover. But nevertheless, that is what I have been trying to do. So that's just another little tweak that I've sort of added in terms of my workflow to try and do something a little bit different. I will obviously be still digging into the analytics to try and figure out what effect all of this sort of stuff is having. And the next thing that I've been doing though is my video intros.  So this little thing here I'm talking about. Because at the end of the day, nobody is coming to YouTube to watch title sequences. So the only thing that it is there for is, it's kind of like, I suppose when I did it, I thought it made it look a little bit more professional or something like that, or made it give it a sense of branding or whatever. But at the end of the day, if somebody is coming to a video to watch, to learn something, then that is just totally 10 seconds out of their day that they didn't need to lose. And if somebody is a real glutton for punishment and watches all of my videos, then over the life of the channel, that's quite a lot of time that I'm costing people by that. So, and there is definitely a sort of drop-off rate when people are watching and then they get to that. It's just giving them time to switch off basically and think like not interested. So I've just dropped it because there are people who say that it's great and they liked it. And there are people who say that it wasn't necessary. And by removing it, I'm not really upsetting anybody because the people who thought it was good aren't gonna be like really up in arms about it and saying, oh, I'm not watching this guy. He's taking his title out. So that's why it's gone. I have left it in my live stream just because it's a sort of ending to the countdown music. So it's got like a distinct sort of end to it then. So that if there is anybody who happens to be just listening in the background, waiting for the thing to start, then it does sort of punctuate that starting point. And in any case with the live stream, I have now taken Caleb's advice and I've added in the timestamp for the end of that particular intro. And I've just added that into my default upload for my live streams so that the timestamp, even if I don't have any other timestamps in the video, in the live stream video, then there is always that timestamp for like, this is the end of the intro. So if somebody can't be bothered to sort of skip forward or scrub forward, then they can just click on that. So I didn't think there was any need to sort of particularly remove it from here. So yeah, that is what I've been doing with my title intros. I've also been trying to, yeah, so with removing that particular part of it, I've been trying to just sort of flow more directly into the content then. So I've removed a little bit of music that I had at the beginning. I always had a little bit of music going on in the background then that would cut out when the titles went on. So I've just scrapped that all together. So it's basically, this is what I'm gonna be covering. Right, let's get into it. So we'll see how that affects the drop-off rate at the beginning. And what do I mean by the drop-off rate? Well, let's have a little look, shall we? So if I just get that off the bottom of the screen, then if I come down to one of these videos that I have done that on, so there's a couple of shortcuts once or sneak peek, they're not uploaded yet or not live yet. But this one, for example, so this is the video that I did about the beta features. And then if you come down here into, where's it gone? Analytics for a video like this, I might just have to move this up a bit because it's sort of cropping off all the wrong parts for you. There we go. So with this one, if you come into the reach section and I've just cropped off exactly the bit that I need to show you, there we go, that's better. If you come into a particular video and click on the reach and then maybe I'll just zoom out this a little bit and then you can come down here and I beg your pardon, it's not reach, it is engagement, click on the right thing Alec. So if I come down to engagement and then this one here, audience retention. So here you can actually watch the video and you'll see this chart moving across and you'll see where people dropped out. And this is like obviously starting from 100% of people who started watching at this point. Well, here there were only 71% of people watching, then at this point 49% and then by the end 23. And you can see this tail off here. This is where people figure out that the video is ending. There is no more useful content to be gleaned.   So I'm gonna be looking at this in more detail and looking at the ones that I've got with the titles and the ones without, but I'm pretty much sure that early information suggests that it's having a positive impact removing those titles. By the way, where you see it sort of jump up, that's where somebody's actually skipped to the chapter mark. So you can see that these little peaks are at a chapter marker. So somebody's obviously been watching and then just thought, right, let's skip to the next part, skip to the next part and so on. So yeah, I will be doing a lot more analysis on that. In fact, you can see here, and just already that this, I wish this thing would not come in the way of it, but that little gray shaded area underneath, that is what is typical for my videos. And so what you can see already is typical for my videos is that they drop off to around about here, just down at this little gray patch, whereas this one hasn't dropped down as much. And that's because this one's taking the average of all those ones with those intros in. And so this is already performing better than that at the intro. Now it did tail off a little bit over here, but again, I'll have to look at this on a larger sample size than just one video. But certainly for me, it seems to be logical and make sense. So that is what I've done with my intro. So what else have I been tinkering with? I've been trying out being a little bit faster paced. Now I have lots of feedback that says that they like the pace that I do my videos at. And I've watched a couple of my early ones back and I definitely did have a much sort of slower speaking pace then. And I think that that was down to me trying not to, like almond and all that sort of stuff. But I do feel like I've got a little bit better at just doing these things now to the point where I am actually speaking faster in the later videos than in the earlier ones.  Let's see, I'll fluff it if I do that. But what I mean by faster pace is I still want to make sure I'm giving all of the salient information related to what is I'm talking about. But sometimes I do have a habit of just waffling about things and probably adding in information that isn't really relevant. Like a case in point would be sometimes I'm talking about something that is related to, I don't know, stream deck or something like that. And I'll give like a little bit of a story before it. Like, oh, and I found out this the other week because I was doing this and that and this and that. It's just totally irrelevant to actually the content and the facts and the information that I need to deliver. So that thing about being faster paced is really about trying to be more concise with what I'm talking about, but without then just cutting out the nonsense that sometimes slips its way in. The problem with doing these is with no editing is that sometimes that just happens. So I'm just trying to be a bit more intentional about it. So yeah, slightly faster paced is something that I'm looking at. Now the end screens is something else. And we saw it there with that sort of drop-off. So if we have a look at the drop-off that we got there at the end of that video, that's basically approaching the end screens. Now one of the things that lots of people have said, and I've just picked up on it recently from a few different videos from the sorts of people that I mentioned. So the Nick Nimmins, the Daniel Battolls, and of course my one and only coach, Doc. But it's all about how at the end of the video really the best thing to do is, or what the intention that we want is to get people to click on another video and actually go and watch that other video. Now I don't tend to put all of my, oh, don't forget to like and subscribe, although now that I've mentioned it, it would be rude not to mention. If you haven't already, don't forget to go and like the video. And if you're not already a subscriber, then go ahead and subscribe, turn on notifications, all the notifications have alarms go off every time I make a video. But I don't normally do that sort of stuff within the middle of my videos. I tend to leave that all at the end because my thought was, right, well, let's get all of the content out of the way. And then at the end, I'll just do the little thing of don't forget to like and subscribe. If you really enjoying it, you can head over to my Buy Me A Coffee page, buymeacoffee.com slash take one tech to support the channel on a one-off or ongoing basis. So that sort of stuff, I always just sort of put right at the end. But obviously that is right at the time when people are switching off because they figured out, right, it's done now. I would even announce that it's over, I would say at the end, right, well, that's about all for this video, but before you go kind of thing. So I'll do all of that stuff about the, like and subscribe, buy me a coffee, that sort of stuff. And then finally, we would get onto the end screen where I'm wanting people to go and watch another video. The thing is, as we can see, whoops, I was already on it. As we can see, most people had already switched off by the time. In fact, let's just scrub this forward because we'll be able to see exactly where the end screen was. I even have a marker to say outro in my video. So people do know that it's actually ending. So I want to find out, I wanna see if I can, can I just click on there, hang on. So that is what's the time stamp on that particular part. So here, people are already, even before I've got to my end screen, people have already switched off. So there we go. There is like 6% of people are watching my video when I go into my end screen. So if I'm trying to get people to click through to the next video, and there's only 6% of people watching, well, I would much rather be getting sort of, what's the percentage here? That's around about 23%. I'd rather get a percentage of 23% clicking through to the next video than this. So what I'm trying to do now is basically stop with the long drawn out, long goodbye. And actually just sort of go straight in as almost part of the content without announcing that all the content's over. So really just going straight into, you know, on so XYZ and then also you wanna watch this video here. I'm also playing around with trying to actually mention a specific video. And so I'd mentioned earlier that I've got a series of videos about shortcuts for example. So they are currently sort of queued up, well some of them are, I've still got a couple to make actually, but those are queued up. So I've got intro to shortcuts, how to build shortcuts, variables and shortcuts and all these sorts of things. So these videos here with the end screen, what I always used to do with the end screens or what I still do is I'd have two videos to choose from. One of them would be a playlist that is related to the video that the people have just watched. And then the top video of the two would always be just YouTube's recommendation. So let YouTube choose one, a video that's best for that person. So what I'm gonna be doing now, where possible if there is a next video that's logical like in this series, I will be sort of having a link so that they go and watch the video one, introduction to shortcuts. And then at the end of that I'm saying and in the next video, we're gonna be covering how to build a shortcut and that video is right here. So that sort of thing. And so I'm gonna do, it'll be a series of about seven or maybe 10 videos. And so one will just lead into the other because I'm trying to experiment with that a little bit. I quite like the way that I've just happened to watch a Nick Nimmin video the other day. And I do this thing where I've got this full end screen so that again, it's a cue for people that right, it's over. Nick has done this thing recently where he just totally flows straight into it without taking a breath almost from like the thing that he's talking about. And then now you definitely wanna go and watch this video. And there's no sort of end screen to it as such. It's just there's one video that comes up on the screen. So I'm probably gonna play around with that as well. So rather than having two choices because I build sales funnels and things like that. And I know that you need to give people basically one choice and do they want it or not is the best way to sort of guide people through. So on the end screen and something somebody mentioned as well was I do have a subscribe button that comes up. So I have the two videos that come up where I say check out these videos. And then there's a little thing that comes down over where I am on the screen and then there's the subscribe button comes up. And so that's something that I may well just remove because try and get people to subscribe through the video and then not have this confusion of there's three options which one do they click on when they get to the end. So I'll be playing around with that a little bit more as well. So that is what I'm doing differently or gonna try and do differently with my end screens. And I'll report back on how that goes in terms of click throughs to other videos and let's see if we can improve that a little bit. The next thing I've changed is my e-cam style only ever so slightly. All of these things are just tweaks. They're not like massive redesigns or something like that but I had my original overlays which were graphic overlays stuck over the top of the scenes with like a border. Obviously before the e-cam 3.9 came out where we could do borders on camera overlays and all that sort of stuff. And when that came out I sort of updated my style a little bit and it's one of those things where it looked good at the time but I've just felt like I don't like it. So I've just changed it up a little bit. It's not massively different but I've just have changed it up ever so slightly and tried to bring everything all in line with each other so that the thumbnails are cohesive with just the little silly things like the background in the back of here and all that sort of stuff. Not a revolution and not a award-winning design by any stretch but still just a little tweak that I've done so I thought I'd mention it. So the next thing is old videos. So I've obviously got over 200 videos now and they've just been sitting there and so I figured well I should really try and see if there's anything I can do to sort of refresh them or update them and so there's two things I mean by that. The first is actually going back and obviously what I've been doing with the split testing is very much about that. It's taking an old video and then going back and updating the thumbnail to see if I can improve things in terms of click through rate and stuff like that because as I say some of these old videos do actually sort of quietly in the background without me realizing it creep up and get quite a lot of views. In fact, let's just have a look shall we if you wanna know what my sort of best performing videos are if I come over to this one, where is it? There we go, I'll come over to this view. Now if I go to views over here and then I sort by views, there you go. So there is that one, that's 9,500, not quite 10,000, I lied earlier. 9,500 for that one about Stream Deck profiles. And then this one as well, so this is for Downey. So that is my next highest performing. So you can see that basically that one about Stream Deck profiles and why I think they were better than folders, having used folders for so long on Stream Deck. That one has got significantly more views than these ones down here. So 3,000 or 3,400 is my next highest. That is about Downey, downloading videos from YouTube or from anywhere in fact, Stream Deck, Stream Deck. And that one is a bit of a funny one as well that I would not have expected, troubleshooting on a little Logitech presenter because I had somebody, I made a video about the Logitech presenter and how you can use it for e-cam to switch scenes and stuff like that and then also use it for triggering keyboard maestro and the like. And then I had somebody that went out and bought one and then they contacted me and said, oh, I've got a bit of a problem and I can't figure out how to get it to work. It doesn't seem to work on a Mac. So I made a video about that and that is up there. That's what, top five, something like that in video number six. So it's amazing that the videos that you think are just kind of like that was literally just answering someone's question and then there it is up at the top. So yeah, so what I'm thinking is, well, if I can go back and improve on some of these then that would be a great thing to do to try and boost the views and things like that on those existing videos. Oh, by the way, the other thing that I did was in TubeBuddy, once again, link just down at the bottom, that's another thing I'm trying to be more intentional about is actually promoting affiliate links and things like that. So they've got this thing down here called the click magnet and what this does is there's a few things here you can study with the coming back to thumbnails but it is relevant to this thing about updating old videos as well. It does take a little moment to load up but there's a few different things you can do through in here. There's one which is Element Inspector and this shows you the performance of your thumbnails based on whether they have faces or not. Now all of mine have got my face in, whether that's a good thing. I need to really test some without it to get a good comparison here. This one is really interesting. This is the emotions on your face. Here you can see that that surprised YouTube face does actually have a higher click-through rate than happy and calm. I haven't got any ones with sad faces in and I need to try that. I need to be really upset about something. Or just really angry. So we'll see if there's anything that angers me. The thing is not many things really truly anger me so I'll have to work on that one. But yeah, you can see that basically these different expressions, it is definitely the good old YouTube surprise face that has the highest click-through rate. So that's a great little tool. There is here, you can see the difference between close-up mixture of multiple faces or just one close-up medium shot or long shot. So people prefer to look at me from a distance and I don't blame them. So that's something to play around with as well. Try some like ultra zoomed in pictures as well. Although I don't want to inflict that on my viewers. Text versus no text, well all of mine have got text. This one's interesting, words in titles. So anything that's got new in performs best. So this is to actually, Keeley mentioned it about when I'd got a video which was new beta features and the comment was well, aren't all beta features new? And that is totally true. But I'll leave the word new in just because, yeah, there's a much higher percentage click-through with things with the word new in them. The other one is free. I haven't actually got one in the most recent video. So this is looking at all of them. But if you got something with the word free in as well, that did well on some of them when I had that in. I think this takes, is it all of my videos or just the last a few? I can't just remember. But in any case, so that is the element inspector. However, I digress because what I really wanted to show you was this one here, the click-through rate opportunities. So this one is gonna show you, I have covered this on my live stream before, but it is relevant to the sort of way that I've gone about things with my split testing. This is gonna show you basically where there is an opportunity to improve upon your click-through rate, where you've got something where say, the video has got good engagement once people actually get onto the video, but the click-through rate is low. So here, the opportunity it's saying for this one is very high. So once people actually got to watch it, they seemed like they stayed and watched it till the end. However, the click-through rate is really poor on it. So this one was the recording of when I was a guest on Alison Sheridan's podcast. Really delighted to be on that podcast, by the way. Long time fan of Alison. But the thumbnail isn't performing and it says chatting with Alison Sheridan on the thumbnail. And then the title is guesting on Alison Sheridan's Chit Chat Across the Pond podcast. So I could probably give that a much more enticing title because basically what I covered on that was my kind of workflow and how I create all of my videos. So it was somebody interviewing me about my sort of workflow. So I'll go through and just have a little think about a better title for that because as you can see, as click-through rates, this is all relative obviously. I'm sure there's some people who have massive click-through rates and some people who average a lower rate. But for me, 1.8 is abysmal, has a click-through rate on a thumbnail. So I could probably really tweak that and give it a bit more of a constructive title and then that would benefit the video and also benefit, hopefully, Alison's podcast as well. So that's what this CTR Opportunities tool on TubeBuddy does. It allows you to see where there is a high opportunity for improving on the video because it's got a good engagement once people get there but people just aren't getting there like they probably should. So now this one, I've actually changed my thumbnail and the title as well. So YouTube Studio Build with Acoustic Panels. That was a TubeBuddy Keyword Explorer result that I got. So previously I had something else. It was like, it was just a long waffly title in true Alex style. But if you come down into TubeBuddy and then click on Keyword Explorer, then you can basically just type it in. So what was that? I just said, YouTube Studio Build with Acoustic Panels. And I wanted the Acoustic Panels thing in there because that was really one of the key features of this and I sort of spent a lot of time talking about what I had done with building those and how I sort of built them. I should probably do a completely separate video. But here you can see you've got this sort of score for that as a title. So the score was excellent. The search volume was good. The competition was middling. But compared to the old title, I can't remember what it was, but my old title was down here in the orange. So that's something else I've been doing is just going back and tweaking the existing videos. So when I talk about like my old videos, it's just sort of not forgetting them and just carrying on with this march towards my 365 videos and kind of like forgetting the old videos once they're done. It's trying to be a little bit more proactive about keeping those things alive and up to date. Now there's another point which Doc mentioned to me the other day which was about obviously there are some of my videos that are just simply out of date now because there have been updates to software and things like that that can just be totally remade. So I will be sort of having a look at which ones are candidates for that and remaking those videos. Case in point is ECAM because obviously ECAM is just continually updating. One of my best performing videos is also that four hour ECAM Live start to finish tutorial that I did. But that was in 3.8. So that could probably be cut down to like two hours now to cover exactly the same thing to start from zero and build it all up. And it included making the icons for Stream Deck and all this sort of stuff and linking that all together. But yeah, that could be considerably shorter now with just all of the advances that there are in ECAM. So I had intended to remake that with 3.9 but then the end of last year was very busy and so has been the beginning of this year. So I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna wait for the 3.10 to drop because obviously there's loads of great features that are in the beta. So I will be doing a video all about the new features in 3.10 but then I will also do that complete sort of start to finish of ECAM as well. Also gonna do that in basically as one long video because there are people who really appreciated having a four and a half hour video, believe it or not, that they could watch from start to finish and know that they've got everything. Whereas when stuff's cut down into smaller little chunks then sometimes they're not really sure if they've seen everything in the video or not. So what I'll probably do is make like one long one but then I'll always also just make sort of shorter videos as well as a series with one leading into another. So having those end screens where it just clearly goes from one to the other. So that I think is more or less what I've done with my channel and sort of the way I've been thinking about it. So I will just give you a quick update because it's around about that time. I'll give you a quick update on my channel analytics but this is basically just my update on my 365 videos in a year which I always used to do this little update at the beginning of my video because it was part of the live stream for me really it was just to give my update towards my goal. But yeah, now I'm just gonna stick it at the end of this make content and just go over it a little bit. So week 40, day three, we're not day 365, we are on day 281 and it is, and I've done 204 videos. So some catching up to do but I have got these like the series of shortcuts videos that are gonna be going out in sort of one bulk and then my ECAM video. So I'm quite confident actually that I'm going to hit my goal. I did just hit another milestone today actually. I don't put my views and watch hours and stuff like that up on here anymore but I did just hit 100,000 views which on my videos in total which does kind of boggle my mind. Any of these numbers do really still amaze me because it isn't something that necessarily I took for granted when I was starting. Obviously you've got hopes and dreams but yeah, it is still quite mind boggling to think of that number of times that my videos have been watched. Although probably 50,000 of those might be my parents, who knows, my parents and my daughter. But that is all I got to cover today actually. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna actually dig into the comments. So that is essentially the content over. Feel free to leave. He said trying to get people to stay on for that little bit longer but that is basically where I'm up to. So let me have a look at the comments because I've been neglecting you somewhat and it was all to try and stop my little squirrel mind going off. So hey Caleb, I did see you sneak in and I mentioned you a couple of times as well. Hey Rich, great to see you as well. Naughty Naughty, Michael, late to class. I'm still so excited to see your live stream whenever you are ready to launch with Tommy. That's gonna be such a great thing to watch and you've done such a great job with the graphics as well and the animations you've done as well are pretty spectacular. So they should go up on the channel as well. Hey Dina, great to see you. Let's have a little look. Facts feels more personal. See, this is a trouble we're doing going on through all these afterwards. You sort of forget where you're at. His name is Sean. So that is from, I think media. Yes, it's Sean, something or other. All the wrenches are in today. Yes, my humor, that's the way to look at it. My humor is too sophisticated.  It's just goes over everyone's heads, I'm sure. So like the new look, thank you very much, Rich. Not a huge departure and still on brand. Well, that's it really. It was just about sort of evolving a little bit and tweaking and to be honest, these sorts of tweaks that I've done are all the sorts of things that the old perfectionist of me would have tried to nail before I got right and I still haven't got them right. The old me would have still been tweaking over all of these things and not actually having made any videos. So that was the point of the channel really. It was liberating myself from perfectionism and just sort of going with it. So I was never really happy with anything that I'd been doing on YouTube or with the look of it or anything. Never happy about it, but I was happy not being happy about it. And that was the difference between the old me. Let's have a look at it. Eileen, always lovely to see you. That is I'm guessing about the little title thing and that is something I've thought about as well. So I have seen people do that and yeah, where they actually still have the little title thing to, I'm guessing stroke there you go a little bit. But then yeah, just have it running in the corner or something like that. So I think I'll probably just skip it all together because it's unnecessary, but it is and I've seen people do that as well. Hey, Sammy, great to see you as well. You can also check in your wording it before the end of your video, you are giving them early cue that you are wrapping up. Yeah, so that is what I always do at the end of my videos. Like the last, I mean, the actual outro of YouTube is that 20 seconds. So that's where I have that sort of end screen up. But I'm wrapping up like two minutes before telling everyone, right, well, that's it. Party's over, show's over guys, nothing to see here.  And then I get to that 20 seconds at the end and telling people, hey, watch this guys. It's all of it backwards really, isn't it? So yeah, I definitely need to work on that. Well, so yeah, there is the, that obviously you can go at two speed. And I tend to watch a lot of things on two speed to be honest. It's just, I prefer to just get things in that way, obviously depending on who it is. If it's, if I'm listening to a Jim Rohn audio book, it's triple speed, he does speak that slow. But yeah, so I do do that. But it's, the pace is about setting the general pace of the video for people who are just coming in because although people can technically speed it up, they're only gonna speed it up if they've come in and they feel like they're gonna get that information further on down the line. And so there's people that I will listen to or watch and I know that they're gonna have great information in their videos. So I'll watch it on double speed because I know that I am going to get value from it and I just wanna get in all of that information. But if people are new to me and my channel, they're not gonna think like, oh, this guy's taking too long. Let me see what it's like on double speed. They'll be, I'm guessing for the most part, just not, not interested.  So the story time in Rants, yeah, it's, I'm not gonna totally give up on that because as you say, it is a part of my personality and it just, whatever I do on these videos just come out. So it's just been a bit more intentional about that in my videos. Like if I'm talking about a stream deck video on why people should use profiles instead of folders, I don't need to spend a whole section at the beginning giving some whole background to me and what I've done and all these sorts of things. So there's just certain videos where I have been, I've been waffling a bit too much but it's not like I'm gonna be just totally, I've certainly won't be scripted but you know what I mean? I'm not gonna be just totally on rails with it but because it will just slip out. That is the nature of doing these things in just without editing.  So I had to just stop it and then I recorded a new ending to it and stuck them together. But I don't think people noticed. Hey, James, great to see you. Thank you very much as well. Let's have a little look. Hey, James. Hey, Doc, great to see you. I hope everything goes well and you'll have to update your avatar to remove the glasses. Although you could just do a Bradley. What's that? I'm forgetting his name, though. Bradley teaches. I'm forgetting his surname. Oh, that's terrible. I've remember seeing him though on somebody else's live stream. Was it on, I can't remember whose show he was on. He was on somebody's show and they opened it up for questions and somebody said to Bradley, how do you avoid getting glare on your glasses? And he took his glasses off and put his fingers through them because there was no frames in them. So it was just part of his branding and he didn't actually have lenses in his glasses. So that was quite amusing. And I think that he had the same. I think he had glasses. Then he went and had surgery and so he just kept the frames. But yeah, hope everything goes all right. So you always get surprised by the videos that got the most views in the past 24 hours and 28 days. That is funny how some of them and some of them ones that I've done that have got a lot of views seem like they've just sat there doing nothing and then there's just been this point where they've just had an inflection where obviously there's just somebody's grabbed onto them and or the YouTube algorithm has just started serving them out a bit more and yeah, they've just gone up. It's funny. It is funny how the gems come from the videos you don't expect to make. It's also like with these live streams, sometimes in the past I've come on and said like, oh, I'm not really got much. I'm gonna be, it's gonna be a short one today and then it just goes on for ages and ages. So yeah, it is definitely the ones you don't expect. And it is those videos where I've done ones before where I thought this was terrible. I don't really feel comfortable about even putting it out and I have. I think there's only about, there's two videos before that I've made where I just haven't put them out because I don't know, it's just, I just didn't. But yeah, it is funny those ones, the ones that you're not so comfortable about the ones that, the ones that work. Yeah, the affiliate links. Yeah, well, I've updated my little lower third as well so that I've actually got my, I'll do it in my next live stream. I'm gonna go through and talk about what I did in terms of setting up those affiliate links because I've now got my, I've still got to work on this by the way. I've only got as far as setting it up really. I haven't gone and curated it but I've got my gear list. So kit.co, takeonetech.io slash kit and that'll take you to my kit.co page where the thing about that is good because I did always have a gear page on my website takeonetech.io slash gear where I was going and basically manually adding in things that I was using and then it was just a bit of a pain to update as well so it hasn't really been updated and those would be my Amazon affiliate links. The thing about kit.co is you can, I don't know, a number of you in the chat have gotten it already and obviously Doc was the one that told me about it but you can create individual sets of gear and things like that. So you might have your live streaming gear but then the example I used was Deena. She might have cooking gear but then she might also have a cooking kit list as well. I'm sorry, a cocktail kit list. So you could have like multiple different kits of all the stuff you use but it's sort of curated into those different lists. I've only got one up there at the moment and I need to add in a few more but the other thing about that is you can also use your genius link for links so that when people click on an affiliate link instead of going through to Amazon they actually get the choice of do they want to get it from Amazon? Do they want to get it from B&H? Or though I was rejected from a B&H affiliate or whatever it is and so you can add in multiple different affiliates through one link and then the viewer, the user, the whoever it is is clicking the link. They get to choose where they're buying it from rather than just forcing them down the Amazon route if that's not something that is interesting to them. So yeah, definitely working on my affiliate links and yeah, I'm definitely teachable because I've got a hell of a lot to learn so I would be pretty hopeless without a bit of guidance so thanks for all that you do, Doc. And let's have a little look. Your video descriptions are stuffed with them maybe too many. So yeah, the affiliate links that was something that I added in using TubeBuddy's find and replace feature because I didn't have them in there. I used to only use affiliate links when I mentioned a specific product in the video. So I'd say, you know, I was talking about whatever it was this little presenter, I'd say all the links in the description and now that I know actually it is because I've got links to all of my stuff in the bottom but yeah, so that I only would have like one or two links but now what I did was I used the find and replace function in TubeBuddy to go and do a find and replace and basically replace the last little bit of text that I used to have in my sort of stock description text and then added in all of those affiliate links for all those Amazon links for the gear that I use and I did see a massive uptake in the, or uptake I should say in the number of people clicking on those links it was like tenfold from just having those in because I guess in people come and watch a video they read the description and then it's like, hey, here's the gear that I'm using to make these videos or whatever it is and so there's a bit of interest there and they go and look, click on a link and go and have a look at whatever it happens to be on Amazon and obviously the way that that works is you get credit even if they don't actually buy the product you've linked to I'm not sure what the timeframe for that is whether it's within 24 hours whether it's within that session on Amazon I can't just remember offhand somebody did tell me once but I can't remember but it shows because the majority of things that I've had people buy through my Amazon links have not actually been the things that I'd given them links to so they are basically going into Amazon and buying something else but I'm still getting the credit for it so I think that having the links in the description is it certainly seems to have paid off for me in that respect and like within the first month the revenue from Amazon was equal to the amount that it costs for TubeBuddy Legend which is around about $45 or $50 a month I can't remember exactly but that was in TubeBuddy Legend you've got that find and replace feature so for me it kind of like it literally paid for the feature itself so that was interesting so you know what Eileen this is a really good point why don't I put Alison's thumbnail on the picture instead of mine and this was something that Doc was talking about with an interview that he was doing and it was a case of well don't need our picture on it have the interview guessed and that is exactly what I will do with that thumbnail for Alison because yeah my thinking with these in my old thinking was I just wanted to be consistent and so that the people couldn't recognise it's me but they recognise it's me because it's the channel name and the style of the thumbnail so yes I'll do that when I update the title and everything you are just stating a possible good title in revamping I'm not sure, I'm missing the context that's the problem with going up and catching up on these YouTube Studio is the name of an app I would try using YouTube Recording Studio I always see what you mean so yeah I did think about that because of it being the name of the app so where that video title was YouTube Studio Build I did think about the potential confusion there that's a great point Eileen I ended up leaving it so it is something I considered but I ended up leaving it just because I thought well if it says YouTube Studio Build it sort of implied and then it's just keeping it short but I'll definitely split test that because yeah that would make more sense to people so that you won't get people who are searching for YouTube Studio in fact we could go and actually just have a look at it on keyword search so I'll check that out thank you very much hey Dale, great to see you I never forget your name by the way because that's the name of my son so I appreciate you putting it in the comment but I'll always remember your name loved the tutorial watched it a few times oh the e-cam tutorial was that the four and a half hour marathon yeah I'm guessing it's close by the way if anyone fancies coming on chatting about any of this you're more than welcome yeah the I'm guessing 3.1 is pretty close I can't wait to see I mean we haven't even got 3.1 3.10 I can't wait to see what's in four because you'd think like a major release as opposed to these dot releases because each one of these dot releases to be honest could have been a full new version they've just got so many great new features that's right, beta full walkthrough requires a long video yeah so I know that from when I was trying to learn e-cam and I couldn't find somewhere where there was just like one whole thing I didn't obviously go down the academy route which would have probably given me that but just looking around on YouTube there was like little bits all over the place but it was a case of where's the one place that I can go to get a start to finish overview of everything I mean I did usually obviously I did do my thing of just trying it first and going through all the menus and stuff like that but yeah oh thank you for yes 100,000 views thank you very much it's quite phenomenal in seven months is it I can't remember now started in mid-May so seven, eight months thank you very much Rich thank you very much Eileen as well perhaps the drop-off is because the fans have already seen them so I'm guessing that that means at the end of the video yeah so if that's the bit at the end of the video so the point about that is that I'm basically winding up the video long before I'm even telling people about the next video that I want them to watch so what I need to be just more intentional about is just sort of going from the content into hey watch this one next and in my shortcuts series you'll notice that that there's no sort of pause between we're doing this this is how to do this part this is how to do this part and the next part you want to watch is coming up right now so it's that kind of that's kind of flow to it as opposed to this whole kind of right guys we're done now nothing to see here and then just tail it off until I say oh wait wait wait before you go watch this video so yeah I didn't talk about that here actually Keely no but yeah I have added these links in at the bottom so yeah that was part of the things that I changed with Ecamm so I sort of mentioned that briefly but yeah it was just a case of being a bit more intentional with those the other thing that I did is when I was doing my little setup videos that I did the last couple of videos have been about setup so I always mention setup and how they can get you know use my affiliate link in fact you know now would be a good time to say setup is a great application it's actually a subscription service that allows you to get access to over 200 great utility style apps for the Mac and you just pay one monthly fee of 9.99 and then you can basically just have this extra standalone app store on your Mac where you can just choose any of these apps download them if you try them you don't like them you can always offload them and the great thing about it is you get to try all of these apps that you perhaps otherwise wouldn't have tried and you maybe wouldn't have downloaded but the fact that you can just download stuff as you need it is great and I use so many of these and so that's why I've got a whole series of videos on setup on my channel so setup is definitely a great thing to try and you can try it at takeonetech.io slash setup you'll get the same seven day free trial as everyone else however if you do sign up afterwards having used my affiliate link then when you sign up you'll get a free month and I'll get a free month so everybody is happy so in my videos about setup which I've done the last couple of videos as well as having that little pitch thing that I do in the middle of it then I also have just had my affiliate link on the screen as well so I am trying to be a bit more intentional about having my affiliate links over on the just during the videos as well as the live stream but yeah, updated this I felt like the one that I had at the bottom before was just a bit cluttered and it probably still is but at least it's cluttered with affiliate links so, yeah let's have a little look so Caleb, I'm losing context for this I think it's complicated but finding the right balance beats in being with those live and thinking of those that will watch the replay but then again, it's a live stream yeah, so yeah, it's definitely this is about the changes that I'm making to this stream with just actually delivering content is obviously I'm taking a leaf out of Doc's book and trying to just be a bit more intentional because I always feel with my live streams that they are just like totally rambling and I'll start with an idea in mind my early ones weren't but that's because nobody was watching so they had to just have a structure to them and I'd go through and I'd have like something that I covered on it but yeah, the early ones no one was watching so I just did them pretty much like a longer form video so I'm trying to get back to that but yeah, it is a balance so we'll have to see how it goes hello Timothy I don't think I've had the pleasure before but great to see you here hello and welcome let's have a little look just did that for you example a few minutes ago saying that's what you're going to say how you're going to answer those live so that will give the replay squad a possible cue to leave yeah yeah, I'm being as well with my timestamps my timestamps will have obviously the little sections that I've done in this so I will go back and put those in but then also when actually it is ended and the sort of end of wrap up if you like C3PO having a stroke on two times will be mind blowing it would actually probably be much the same still quite motionless and by the way, that was something that kind of spurred this whole kick up the arse if you like of me doing this was because I don't really I never take my comments to heart and the comments that I got on my videos are generally almost always really nice, positive and it's a really great part of making videos but occasionally there is one there's I've had one that some guy said geez, this guy just rambles on and on and on so it's fair point I do and then there was another guy that said which is what Rich is referring to skip to four minutes in if you don't want to watch four minutes of C3PO having a stroke which made my day as a comment and then Doc said, yeah, but he's got a point because I do tend to ramble at times and not get into the the content so that was what was really I've been wanting to get rid of those that little title sequence for ages now it was just such a muscle memory that I just pressed this button on stream deck it starts recording I press this button and it goes through to my titles and then goes into my next scene it was just too comfortable really so I just needed to shake it up a little bit and yeah, I sort myself out but that was it was that comment that kind of spurred it intent and purpose yes, I believe a great man once had that on a t-shirt that's it Bradley Vincent I was just blanking on his name there but yeah oh everyone's saying it now I can say I'm just catching up this is how far back I am in the comments Bradley Vincent, Bradley Vincent yeah, he's great hey Greg, great to see you good morning, what did I miss? I tell you what, I'll go back to the beginning what I was talking about was tweaks that I've been doing on my channel and I've been trying to be a little bit more intentional about the way that I'm doing things and from when I say intentional I mean intentional about growing the channel that's the thing is intentional about growing the channel because I felt like I was just sort of I mean the channel is growing by the nature of the fact that I'm making content but yeah, I did feel like I was just sort of cruising a little bit and not really doing anything different so it was just a case of make a video, put it out, make a video, put it out no real sort of changes or innovation so I'm just trying to just tweak things a little bit and change it up but I'm also changing the live streams because I'm being a bit more intentional about doing that block of content at the beginning like Doc and then having the catch up at the end hey Anna, great to see you thank you very much let's have a little look you love the soft music in the background of the set up mid-roll I've got a few of those at my sleeve of course, where did I get that music from? Is that with the question you're asking where on earth did I get that music from? Well, I use Epidemic for my music look at that, I haven't even got music on the back of my Epidemic one oh hang on, no I have, there it is I use Epidemic sound for my music so I know that I'm never gonna get copyright strikes and if you want to get access to thousands and thousands of tracks and sound effects then head over to takeonetech.io slash Epidemic and get your free trial there and you never have to worry about copyright strikes again so yeah, I need to up the volume of the music in the back of that ground but thank you very much, Keely thank you very much, very good point yes, don't forget to like and subscribe if you haven't already so what am I gonna be doing this week? Well, I still have got a couple of more videos to be doing for my Shortcuts app series so there's gonna be, I've got a seven at the moment it might stretch out to 10, something like that but yeah, because we've now got shortcuts as part of the beta on Ecamm Live so that you can now trigger shortcuts from like when you start Ecamm and things like that I thought it'd be good to just give people sort of an intro to it and I'll be honest, I've been sleeping on shortcuts for well, however long it's been on Monterey and so not really that long but I just haven't dug into it because I have got keyboard maestro is just such a part of my you know, automation workflow so I tend to just always revert to that but we have also got shortcuts obviously on iOS and I have got shortcuts on there so yeah, I do really need to just get more use out of it on the Mac and so this has been the opportunity with the Ecamm integration to really just sort of dig into it there is also a stream deck plugin for shortcuts it's not made by Apple, it is a third party one but it works seamlessly so you just press the button and it will just trigger whatever shortcut you want in fact, let me just tell you about that Ron, just tease you with it I can show you what it's called because it has been pretty good if I just come over to my stream deck window for a moment, there we go, there's my stream deck and in the stream deck store and that's obviously opened somewhere completely different if you come into plugins and then where is it here? Shortcuts, that one there so by Centineleet is the name of the developer and they've got a Discord server as well by the way so I went in there because I saw this shortcut action and all it does by the way is it just sits down here in let's have a look, there it is launch shortcut and so all you do is you just drag it on and then you just choose the shortcut that you want to activate so it just got your list of shortcuts but when you open it up it has actually got a link to their Discord so I went in and joined their Discord so that's nice, I'm all in on the Discord now since Keely has converted me and by the way, that is Keely as in Discord for Creators in the chat so if you are a creator and wanting to use Discord or haven't considered it but want to know why you absolutely should then definitely check out Discord for Creators I'll leave a link to that in the description as well but yeah, that's a great little plug-in so yeah, just going through the process obviously I've been building shortcuts in iOS and so on Mac it's the same process the only thing that's different on the Mac is that you can actually do Apple Script and things like that and the other thing is if you've got Automator Actions already built and Automator Scripts and things like that then you can also actually import those so if you've got stuff built in Automator you can import it and I don't know about the total compatibility I can't say that everything's absolutely going to work depending on what you've sort of built in there but as far as I can make out it is quite just does work to just sort of import them because Automator is obviously what we had on the Mac for a number of years for doing automation tasks and so I've built stuff in Automator as well at some point, I don't know whether that's gonna get sort of like end of life or they're gonna sort of integrate it totally with shortcuts but shortcuts is basically doing exactly the sorts of things that Automator was doing so they're just bringing that sort of parity I guess between the Mac and the iOS devices so yeah, if you've got stuff in Automator then having a look at how that might be able to translate into shortcuts might be an interesting idea and obviously you may have stuff built in Automator that could technically work on iOS as well so that would be another great reason to move it over to shortcuts because then it would just sort of sink across. Let's have a little look what Caleb is saying plug in card, what will the video be called for the in-depth explanation? I'm lost with that one. Let me have a little think. Plug in card, what will the video be called for the in-depth explanation? I'm lost on that one I'm afraid. Yes, you need an affiliate program. I need take one tech slash discord for creators. Oh dear. No, we don't. I'm not gonna say anything. We know somebody mentioned that the other day so I'm not gonna bring that up. I said I was gonna make a video explaining it on Shorts. So Shortcuts app is the thing that I'm talking about. I think, I don't know for it, Shortcuts. Yeah, so the Shortcuts app.  These ones because they are a series if I just come over to here, look at the date. This one. So I've got a couple of them I'm putting the descriptions but this one is because it's a series I'm actually just doing it as my, I suppose it's slightly more traditional style titles. So it is basically, Shortcuts beginner's guide, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 that sort of thing. And so these ones haven't gone out yet but it's a introduction to Shortcuts, how to build Shortcuts. Next one isn't actually up there yet but it's made is setting variables, working with variables, working with images in Shortcuts, working with notes in Shortcuts, integrating Stream Deck with Shortcuts, all of those sorts of things. So the titles will be just beginner's guide, one to 10 or one to, I've actually got seven at the moment but I might be able to squeeze another three out of it because there's a few things that have cropped up recently. So that is what those will be called and they're going to be just regular long-form videos. That's funny, they're both exactly, well more or less 17 minutes, 28 and 17 minutes, 32. So that seems to be about the length of them. Let's have a little look. Hey, Aubrey, great to see you. Always great to see you, Aubrey. Let me have a look, have I still not got this right? After making a video, you can add cards into your YouTube video, linking the video, that's what I was referring to, you can after. I'm still a little bit lost on that. After making a video, you can add cards into your YouTube video, linking the, I'm a bit slow on the uptake, quite regularly. When I make these videos, I'm talking about something I know, but often I'm like a little bit slow, so don't mind me. I don't know if you or me, Kayla, it might very well be me, stranger things have happened. Yep, still not getting to that. So you're talking about, okay, we're out, we're done. Good night, chief. No problem. So next week I'm gonna be trying to finish that list of shortcuts. I think what I might do for my live stream next week, because I am being a bit more intentional about planning these out as well. Obviously this one, I did make a few little slides, little pop-up titles, because I was thinking about this from over the weekend, thinking about what I was gonna say. That's the other thing that I've been a bit lax and a little bit disrespectful to all of you lovely people turning up, because I'd find that like, this is obviously my Saturday morning. And so Friday evening at five o'clock I think, crap, I've got a live stream tomorrow. What am I gonna talk about?  So definitely being more intentional about it. I'm thinking that I might cover the affiliate stuff next week. And the things that I've done to monetize the channel from the beginning, and the things that I've done differently now, because I have done a couple of videos about this, but things have changed slightly, so I might do that. I also had somebody that commented on one of my videos, and it was a video that I did. In fact, it was my, the live stream after week one I've been on YouTube. So my first video on YouTube was a live stream, live to nobody, and then I had like a week of videos, and then I did my live stream at the end of week one. And that live stream was all about my sort of one take video production workflow. And so people are still watching that, even though it was a live stream, and it was from May last year. So people do still watch the replays of these. So that just goes to show that. But the chap, I forget his name now, but the chap asked it would be interesting to revisit this subject of the one take video production. So I might concentrate on that on one of the live streams as well, maybe not the one next week, but maybe the one the week after or something like that. And the reason for me doing it, how I do it, and things that I've learned from doing it for however many videos I've done. So that will perhaps be another little topic there. Hey, Carly, great to see you. And yeah, so that's pretty much what I am going to be thinking about next week. And I think with that, I'm going to keep this nice and concise. And hour and 20 minutes, I'm going to wrap it up. So what have I just done? I have just totally done the thing that I said that I wasn't going to do. Nevermind. I should be just going straight into my little outro scene, shouldn't I? Well, anyway, thank you all for coming along. I'm not going to do that around for any longer. And I'm going to say, if you are watching on the replay, of course, there will be some great videos coming up right now over on the right hand side. But for me, that is it over and out. See you soon, somewhere on the internet.


It was over. No one in the Foundation, from the lowliest security guard to the O5 Council, could quite explain exactly what was over. If they were to hazard a guess, a likely answer would have been, everything. It was generally agreed that the first one to notice this was Dr. Victor Balakarev. Dr. Balakarev, though a veteran of many a dangerous experiment, and not one to be easily surprised, couldn't believe what his eyes, or rather his high-powered telescope, were telling him. What Dr. Balakarev couldn't quite believe was that a routine scan of the Crab Nebula revealed nothing but empty space where a rather conspicuous and rather hateful star was supposed to be. The alarm was raised. A dozen more telescopes were commandeered from various facilities and agencies, and there was no small amount of shouting and running around. The star, however, stubbornly refused to reappear.  The next one to experience this strange lack of all things strange was D682-1356, though he couldn't quite appreciate the magnitude of the occasion. He didn't know he was supposed to be the bait in what most assumed would be just another futile attempt in an endless series of failures. D682-1356 also didn't quite know what to feel when he entered the armored vault to discover nothing more than a badly mangled skeleton when the acid bath was stopped. Asking quote, so what do you guys want me to do with that? Do you have a bone to pick with me or something? End quote. The joke was lost on the assembled researchers, who now had more important things to worry about than D682-1356's poor sense of humor. So began the end. When SCP-294 was prompted to produce a cup of Joe, it made a serviceable cup of cappuccino, which utterly failed to contain any D-class flavoring. In SCP-1981, Ronald Reagan spoke only of evil empires and managed to keep a perfect complexion throughout his speech. SCP-902 was opened and discovered to be empty, and no one could quite remember why they feared it so much in the first place. SCP-076 was found to be similarly empty, though no one forgot what scared them about it. When SCP-1867 was asked if it realized it was a slug, it didn't think for a second to object, since it very clearly was. Besides, it didn't understand the question. SCP-085 was gone from its canvas, and its inky plains and fields felt bare and empty without the presence of the young woman who once inhabited them. They found the clothes which once belonged to SCP-1440 near the top of Mount Everest. Next to them, a single word was written in the snow. Free. Around the world, the echoes of the end became seismic shocks, and no one was spared from their influence. The church of the Broken God was wiped from the face of the Earth. It isn't easy to maintain a working religious organization when all of your artifacts crumbled to dust, and it's even more difficult to do so when half of those artifacts are inside your head. Marshall, Carter, and Dark Limited, having lost most of their stock and shortly after most of their members, soon faded into obscurity. Their once busy clubhouse, a hub for all things mysterious and expensive, became a place for elderly gentlemen to read the Sunday paper in peace, and doze in comfortable leather chairs. The global occult coalition, after it became clear that the threats it was created to thwart were gone, was soon disbanded. The budget once dedicated to fighting the forces of the unknown was allocated to some of humanity's more mundane needs, such as the prevention of global warming and the development of more advanced nuclear weapons. No word was heard from Dr. Wondertainment for a long time. A year after the end, a new line of Dr. Wondertainment toys was released. While Dr. Wondertainment's shooty man's vengeance was a perfectly decent game, it was clear his or her heart wasn't in it. When the Foundation agents arrived at the current supposed location of the factory, they found nothing more than an ordinary canned vegetable factory. The capital F was clearly no longer needed. The serpent's hand lost a considerable number of its members, and with no cause to rally behind, was destroyed by the chaos insurgency. The insurgency itself soon tore itself asunder like a mad dog biting at its own innards. Very few were left to be caught and executed by the Foundation. The members of Are We Cool Yet Never Did Become Cool. Nobody was never heard from again. The unusual incident unit continued chasing flying saucers in reports of Bigfoot, this time entirely unrelated to SCP-1000. Its agents didn't really notice. The Foundation, as resilient as ever, was the last one standing. As the years passed, however, the reasons for its continued existence grew fewer and fewer. With all things anomalous gone, the Foundation had lost its purpose. Site after site was closed down, personnel were let go, or in the case of the few remaining D-class, terminated. Soon, only one part of the organization remained. It was the last meeting of the O5 Council. There were no heartfelt speeches or commemorative plaques, because even at its end, the O5 Council was a serious body of men and women who didn't muck about with nonsense. Instead, there were a few handshakes, a few quiet words, and mostly a whole lot of silence. Finally, one at a time, the former members began to leave until only two were left. So, that's that, I suppose, said O5-4, rolling a cigarette. Smoking wasn't allowed in the boardroom, but there was no one left to object. Is this it? Everything we worked for, all of our sacrifices, just worthless? Asked O5-11, staring glumly at the floor. Now, I wouldn't say that. We kept the piece while we were needed, and we did so as best we could. We're simply not needed anymore. Shouldn't I be happy? All of those terrible things we kept locked in are gone after all. Humanity is finally safe. From everything but itself, yes. Then why do I feel like some toy, used and abused and then discarded when it is no longer useful? It's just the way things are. We were jailers, the wardens holding back the storm. Now all of our prisoners are gone. There's no need for wardens in quiet days.  Yeah, a drink would be nice, or ten. Hey, I'm not made of money, you know. The two left and closed the door behind them.