Holy Shark

It is likely jumping the shark (hah) to be sharing this anecdote as my first proper post on Ask Me About My Podcast, but I want to tell you about the most inexplicable yet amusing thing that’s happened in my podcasting journey so far.

To set some expectations, most of the content that will come after this will not have the same amusement value unless I am once again blessed/cursed by the content creator gods. But I live in hope.

So, at the time, I was 7 months in on STEAM Powered. My views on YouTube were what I deemed reasonable for an hour-long interview show format¹ (a few hundred on average) when I noticed ‘1.4K views’ on my interview with Blake Chapman about sharks and science communication.

“What’s that funny-looking number?” I wondered. Aware that ‘K’ means thousand, but not recognising why it would be showing up on my analytics page, of all places.

Well, Holy Shark. I broke 1K on a video.

“This is wonderful!” I thought. But why so many views?

I speculated wildly about what prompted this blessing to be bestowed upon me.

Perhaps people really love sharks. Perhaps this is the power of CSIRO’s publishing arm signal-boosting the interview. They did after all refer me to Blake, who is one of their authors. Perhaps KISS fans found it because we spoke about how they performed a concert for sharks (link to the YouTube interview at timestamp). Perhaps people really love science communication?

Curious about whether I could use this data to make improvements on future interviews, I had a rummage around YouTube’s stats. What I found was interesting, but not exactly what one would consider helpful²

What you see in the figure above are search terms that lead to YouTube surfacing the video. Don’t get too excited, this is only attributed to 1.2% of the total views.

The term ‘wetsuit’ I understand. We spoke about the shark camo wetsuits that are available (and were first developed in Australia).³ ‘NDE’ I can possibly attribute to the discussion of shark attacks and speaking to the survivors of shark attack. As for ‘mobile software training’, this is a little tenuous, but we did speak about using AI and image recognition in drone software for identifying sharks in the water, and I suppose drones are mobile? I have nothing for the ‘huge boobs’ and ‘vaginal examination’ terms. These are a mystery.

Then I had a look at the ‘Suggested Videos’ stats that 83% of the hits are attributed to. According to Google, Suggested Videos shows “which videos viewers watched from suggestions”.

Things I have learned:

1. YouTube offered up this video to a lot of people who like naked yoga videos.
2. People who like naked yoga also like to click through to learn about sharks for a few minutes at a time.
3. People who watch safety, training, and orientation videos also like learning about sharks.
4. One person watching a few UAE Ministry of Infrastructure training videos in sign language appeared to watch the interview all the way through (go person! I hope you learned about sharks!)

On the one hand, I would like the YouTube algorithm to keep being weird because increasing my watched minutes could lead to more views and subscribers. This is great.

On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure being associated with naked yoga is really on topic.

Was there a method to the madness or was the algorithm having a playful jaunt? If it was as the algorithm intended, I would love to know what about the interview pulled it into the microsegment for this intersection of interests. For all I know, naked yoga plus sharks is actually a really popular microtargeting bucket.

However, given nothing like this has happened since, I can only conclude that the YouTube algorithm god giveth, and the YouTube algorithm god taketh away.

Have any insights into naked yoga sharks? Wild theories? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Stay curious,

— Michele