Level 1 YouTube Milestone Reached, Next Up: 500k Views

My definition of a successful YouTuber: Other people's time consumed > Personal time invested.Yesterday I just reached my first self-set YouTube milestone: a quarter of a million views. It's a mark I'd hoped to reach by the end of grad school, but given how my schedule was thrown into complete disarray and I couldn't get any new content out, I had to push back my timetables a bit. I then set my sights on hitting 250k by the end of the summer, but luckily Tony Stark sped things up a bit. Next up: 500k.It's probably not a surprise that I enjoy projects. After all, I've spent the past 2 weeks at home tinkering with my P50 nut shooter. But the process of sharing and telling a story is just as interesting to me. Well, I actually consider it another project. And to that end, I've been trying to improve on the elusive metric of video-making knows as production value.YouTube success boils down to 3 things:1. Can you get someone's attention (without resorting to putting cleavage in your video thumbnail)?2. Can you hold their attention by telling an interesting story?3. Don't give them the following reasons to facepalm and close out the window:a) Shitty video quality. i.e. Shaky camera, low-res, PORTRAIT UGH, etc.b) Shitty audio. i.e. Not checking your audio levelsc1) Person sounds like a zombie, or lacks authoratative, interesting tone. Will put you to sleep.c2) Person sounds like an idiot. Stutters, stumbles over words, clearly has no script, repeats things they said to take up time.d) Clearly failed editing 101e) Uses cheesy transitions, 90's graphics.f) 20+ seconds of intro graphics.Since I'm generally not an expressive person, I'm focusing on <2> and <3.c1>. Item <3.d> is also somewhat on the list, but for now I'm comfortable enough with crossfades and jump cuts that I don't think I completely fail at making videos...Anyhow, that's it for now. I need to get back to the P50. All the major components are done, except for the rubber. It should be operational within a day... but not today. Today I'm going to be playing Civ V until I pass out.