Last summer, for the Summer of Math Exposition 3 contest, I created a video called “is 69 unique?!? the search for nice numbers (mathematically).”
I love the content, exactly what it says on the tin: 34 minutes, 36 seconds of number theory exploration punctuated with wry irreverent humor. It’s material I’d been developing for years — see my old blog posts “Is 69 Unique?” and “Progress Update on the Search for Nice Numbers” — and I thought math YouTube would love it.
I researched the content for months, on and off, together with collaborative communities online. But I storyboarded, recorded, and edited the video (if you can call QuickTime Player editing software) in a frenetic few days before the contest deadline, in the most frenetic week ever of my internet presence.
I didn’t even have enough time to listen to my own video before uploading it to the contest. So something in the export got messed up! Audio clipping. Noise spiking. Weird cuts.
I did know one thing:
content is king.
If you’re trying to get your YouTube channel off the ground, DO NOT start by buying fancy microphones and editing software! If you make a video with great production value on a topic no one cares about, no one will care. But if you do the reverse, and you’re sitting on a goldmine like 69 being the only "nice number" — one with a pandigital square-cube concatenation like 4761328509 — in any base, out of a likely infinitude…
you can get 28K views, 200 new subscribers, and a top comment of “The video is hard to watch because of the audio clipping and noise. Other than that, nice presentation :).”
The YouTube algorithm is capricious
and there is an alternate universe where my video has almost no views. In fact, that universe is now. I feel like it gets 10 views per month.
I was expecting to promote my video on release. I'd do a blog post, message people I knew. In reality, I couldn't bring myself to. I was too humiliated.
Reviewers had to watch my video, and the algorithm helped: the view count was in the hundreds. But then, suddenly, the typhoon came. 1K, 2K, 5K, 10K. I surpassed my friend’s SoME2 video. Comments flooded in. Compliments on content, complaints on audio quality, jokes, mathematical engagement.
Then, just as suddenly, the typhoon stopped. The video went from doing thousands of views a day to tens, or even less. It did not win the contest. I did not parlay my 200 mathematically-inclined subscribers into a YouTube career.
Now the video lies on a precipice. Had it been better, <whispers> maybe MIT would have said yes </whispers> I would've attained edutube glory and real pride.
Had it been worse, I wouldn't have gotten a taste of the stars.
“Why don’t you re-record the audio?”
everyone would say. And I put them off, first because I was doing college applications and later because I planned a grand re-rollout of the video, where I would do a full revision and make something truly nice, which would have had the potential to win the contest and do a million views should The Algorithm smile upon it. I believed this even during WIP Week this summer, which is why I didn’t include the project there. But I didn’t make a grand improvement.
Still, I made the video listenable! A version whose sound will hopefully not remind you, as one commenter put it, of “getting flashbanged in counterstrike”.
Consider it a treat for the holidays. A Chromatic Conflux Christmas. Will the YouTube algorithm bless my “cleaned-up” version? Is the number 69 naughty or nice?
It’s in your hands. Enjoy!
THE NEW MOSTLY LISTENABLE VERSION OF A REALLY FUN AND COOL MATH VIDEO
Note: I’ve been sick this week, and I didn’t spend as much time crafting this blog post as I often do. I hope it didn’t suffer too much … let me know if you have thoughts. I might edit it later!
But you know what I said about the video itself...
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