In 2017, I made a deal with myself. I’d spent the last 10 years of my life dreaming of being a YouTuber, and it was time to actually try. So, I put the skills I had built as a video producer, motion graphics artist, and just general student of the platform to work and started Curiository.

Curiositiory was an educational YouTube channel where I told “headfake” stories - stories that answered questions about seemingly mundane things, but were really trying to inspire deep introspection and curiosity about our world. For example, I made a video called “Why instruments sound different?” after the 2016 election where I told the story behind timbre and overtones as an analogy for how listening and being of service to others is really the way we solve problems.

I had a ton of fun running that channel, but it was also a ton of work. I made a video every two weeks while I was in school, and it took almost all of my free time to keep up with that schedule. It would take me ~ 30 hours on average to write, shoot, edit, and animate these less-than 5 minute explainers. And back then, even at the end of my first year as a creator, a good video would net me around 400 views.

So, when I logged into my YouTube studio dashboard last year and saw that I had gained 200 subscribers and 19,000 views on my channel (which at that point I had rebranded to be just a personal one), I was shocked. Turns out, when you pick an educational niche with broad topics, sometimes your content can have a really crazy second-life.

From reading the comments, it seems like a lot of teachers started assigning my video for AP Physics classes to show the of resonance frequencies. Pretty cool. And what’s interesting is that the growth of that video has only continued.

It now ranks #1 on YouTube for “why do instruments sound different” and has gained another 23,000 views in the last 4 months. It currently sits at 53k total views. I never really made videos for the views, but it’s nice to see comments from people saying they liked the story I told. The human-to-human validation always feels better than the boring number.

I’ve got some plans to take my channel in some new directions and share stories about the intersection between creators and technology, and it’s nice to know I’ll at least have one video that I can say did well 😂.

Until next time.