Lists rule, apparently

So yesterday, I threw together a quick little video. The whole process — conception, writing, filming, editing and uploading — took me less than a day. At its core, it’s just me reeling off a list of ten fairly random things I just throught of off the top of my head. And twelve hours after I published it, it had twice as many hits as a video I published a week ago. In fact, even while it was still “sending to subscribers’ feeds”, it clocked up at least two dozen views. Here it is:

I still don’t know why people instinctively flocked to this one, but the response so far has been generally positive. It could possibly simply be that YouTube has just tweaked something and now subscription videos are more reliably appearing in feeds, but that’s pure speculation on my part. Or maybe the “list” format is more attractive, because it presents little bite-size nuggets of goodness that are more easily digested. Or I’ve misjudged my audience over the last few months.

It wasn’t something I thought was particularly good. I was proud of the “dubbing” gag, but the rest didn’t seem to me to be more than solidly mediocre. I wanted it to be funnier than it turned out, but it was just something that, as I said, I threw together in an afternoon. It does invite further discussion, of course: lists like this are subjective, and people can always add their own ideas or dispute yours.

One thing I did learn, though, is that the term “cold calling” for a particular type of telemarketing is not generally known in America. The term exists, but apparently as business jargon. So, Americans: for “cold calling” read “telemarketing”.