So, Nate… I'm a middle aged Australian woman, so I'm probably not your target demographic.
And my personal experience is more grassroots social media campaigning than video.
But that being said…
THEY DON'T SUCK. You've got good content.
There's also room for improvement, as there always is, so my first suggestion would be to not position critiques, negative feedback, and advice about ways to improve in such a totalising and punitive way!
It's not a binary where either people like it and have no suggested improvements or they suck, okay?
Be kind to yourself.
You've gotten a lot more comfortable and relaxed in front of the camera over time, and that's fantastic. When someone's enthusiastic about their topic it's really engaging, and that's really coming through in the more recent videos.
I find a lot of the high-stimulus effects like the fancy fades and the flashing and so forth a bit distracting? And they might also be an accessibility barrier for people with sensory issues.
It's definitely a point of differentiation between yourself and other anting videos, and goes well with the name, so the brightness and music choice and a degree of high-stim post-production is probably appropriate branding, but… I guess it's a matter of degree, you don't want it overwhelming your content.
How married to the hat are you? I probably sound like your mum but do you need the hat inside?
Do you have anywhere you can film that has a more neutral background, or a way to rig up a neutral background?
Or what do others think about the background?
Is it distracting, or does it add character (no pun intended)?
You've covered a broad range of topics, which is good, something for a range of viewers — and you've also left yourself room to go back and cover aspects of those topics in more detail if that's where audience response is. That's something you could find out more about by asking questions and encouraging comments, things like "have you ever tried…?", "what do you wish you'd known about ______ when you first got into ant keeping?", that sort of thing: whatever's relevant to the topic and likely to get people talking. You can pose the question in the description as well as at the end of the video.
People with successful channels seem to have a default order of "asks" that they put at the end of their descriptions:
• Like the vid
• Subscribe to the channel
• Donate
If you put the donate link first the audience feels like you care more about getting their money than their needs, in this case their need for information, so it will be a less successful ask.
The format seems to be:
• description (to encourage watching if they're on the fence)
• question (to encourage commenting and bump your engagement rate)
• asks
