It’s getting increasingly difficult on YouTube to reach the audience. Even high-quality content disappears under the weight of videos being published and YouTube is really only interested in keeping viewers on the platform - it’s not interested in showing people what they actually want to see.

Even subscribers to channels who have turned on notifications don’t receive the videos they want - notifications are only sent to a subset of subscribers that YouTube has decided should receive them.

We’re getting increasingly disconnected from our audiences.

Now you could argue that YouTube keeping people on the platform is strongly aligned with YouTube showing people what they want to watch - but the anecdotal evidence doesn’t support this.

See questions such as this on hacker news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32328207

I’m in a small collective of Makers from around the world and we’ve been discussing this for a while - In parallel I’ve also been thinking about launching a mailing list for my channel so that I can directly interact with my audience.

But a channel-specific list would quickly get boring - so we’re going to do it as a group effort. You can check out the first edition here: https://makernews.substack.com/p/july-update

The format will change over time as we learn what people want to see and work out how to best deliver it.

Our current thinking is that we’ll do a monthly round-up of interesting videos (this will be our own videos that we think are newsletter worthy along with videos we’ve watched ourselves) along with a bunch of interesting news and links that we’ve found.

A couple of people have asked if they can do long-form posts and I think we’ll include a section for that as well.

I’m also quite keen to occasionally include an in-depth interview with a Maker - there are a ton of really interesting people out there who don’t get the exposure they deserve.

Current format:

• Things to Watch
• Things to Read
• The Long Read
• Focus on a Maker

Have a look at the first edition and see what you think. If you have any suggestions then leave a comment and we’ll take them on board. But most importantly, subscribe and share it with your friends.

You can view the first edition here: https://makernews.substack.com/p/july-update

Or if you’re feeling crazy, just subscribe here without even reading it!:

Thanks!