Yahtzee vs. Battleship

Overanalyzing YouTube from a sample size of one video

My second video, on Yahtzee, comes out this Sunday. You can find my Battleship video here.

This post was originally just going to be the end of my Yahtzee post, but it ended up being involved enough that I decided to make it into a separate post. It’s also a quick preview of my next video for the small group of people who read this Substack.

When I first made this channel, I decided that I would do one non-video project alongside each of my videos as I build up the channel. My first project was creating this Substack. My third will probably be a Discord server or a Patreon, so be on the lookout for those.

My project for this video is vibe-coding an hourly job that pulls my channel’s analytics from the YouTube API, as well as potentially some basic information about viewership numbers from other similar channels. I don’t really have great plans on how I’m going to use this data - a lot of it won’t mean much until I have a second video worth of data to make comparisons, but I know I’ll be glad that I have it eventually. I’ll almost certainly make a video about YouTube analytics at some point down the line.

It also got me thinking again about the inner workings of YouTube. I’ve had a lot of thoughts as I’ve created my first two videos, and I figured I’d write them down, partially for my own benefit, and partially for anyone who might be interested in this sort of thing.

On Battleship

My first video, on Battleship, did far better than I possibly could have expected. As I write this, the video has over 470 thousand views, and the channel has almost 9000 subscribers. I thought a really successful outcome would be 100k-200k views, so the actual outcome was something I didn’t even really consider. I was aware that it would be possible for the video to have some success - I chose Battleship as a topic partially because there was a track record of other videos about it doing pretty well - but it’s one thing to know that a lot of people could watch your video and another to see it happen. I am truly grateful to everyone who watched the video, gave insightful comments, and subscribed to Ballpark Figures.

A weird thing about YouTube is that it’s much easier to find successful channels than unsuccessful ones. If I search for Battleship strategy on YouTube, I can find several videos with hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. There are plenty of other videos about Battleship, but it’s much harder to find them. YouTube gives a great answer to the question “are there successful videos about this topic?” but the question I wanted answered before releasing the Battleship video was “does my video look more like the successful videos, or more like the unsuccessful ones?” That second question is much harder to answer, which likely tricks a lot of YouTubers into thinking success is easier than it is. Unfortunately, YouTube would probably consider this a feature rather than a bug, since it encourages more content on the platform.

Projecting Battleship Success

I did have a few things that did convince me that my video could work. One was looking at existing videos on the topic. I was eventually able to search hard enough to find some less successful videos, and there was a pretty clear dropoff in quality between the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones. My beliefs on the quality of the videos didn’t always align perfectly with the number of views, but I couldn’t find any videos that seemed genuinely good and weren’t at least somewhat successful.

I didn’t quite have any great comparisons for my video - if there was another Battleship video with a similar level of depth, I probably wouldn’t have made mine. But the successful ones had a few things in common. They were all by established channels with hundreds of thousands to millions of subscribers (the largest was VSauce2), and all were between 4 and 9 minutes. One of the best was a Keith Galli video that was literally just a PowerPoint presentation. I knew that my video would be more comprehensive than anything out there, and the production quality would at least be comparable to a lot of these videos. However, it left a lot of questions. The YouTube algorithm favors longer videos, but would people actually want to watch 19 minutes of Battleship content? Would people even see it if it came from a new channel?

One Hit Wonders

The next place I looked was for “one-hit wonder” channels: channels with a single video that turned out to be very successful. It’s hard to take too much stock in these, because of the same availability bias issue I mentioned earlier, but they provided some reassurance that success for a video like mine was at least possible.

I found two of these videos: this one on the Elo rating system in chess, and this one mathematically analyzing the New York Times Connections game, which happened to come out while I was working on the Battleship video. Both are similar length, comparable production quality, and similar topics. Since I assumed that there were similar videos out there that were less successful than these, I sort of considered these two videos, which each have about 200k views, as an upper bound for what my first video could do.

I suspect that my video outperforming these is because of the relevance of the topic as well as the title and thumbnail (and maybe some amount of production quality in the case of the Connections video). I didn’t put a ton of time into the title and thumbnail, but I think I got a bit lucky with them turning out pretty decent anyway. YouTube allows you to A/B test titles and thumbnails. My current title (I Analyzed All 30,093,975,536 Battleship Boards So You Don’t Have To) beat out two slight variations: one which used “30 Billion” instead of the full number and the original title, which just said “…Every Battleship Board…”

Yahtzee vs. Battleship

Success on YouTube is a weird thing. My original plan was to start with three videos about boardgames: Battleship, Yahtzee, and Mastermind, and then to evaluate afterward to figure out what direction I want to take things after that. Somehow, one successful video switched my approach from “what would be a fun topic to cover?” to “would half a million people watch this?” Yahtzee meets that threshold (and the video was well underway by the time the Battleship video came out). Mastermind does not. It’s a really fun game to analyze, and I want to make a video about it at some point, but I want to wait until I learn how to properly package videos that can’t be carried by the topic itself.

Changes for this video

My original intention with the Battleship video was to make the most comprehensive strategy guide on YouTube. People probably wouldn’t watch it right away, but maybe in a few years, people would search for Battleship strategy and come across my video, and I could know that I put something useful into the world. Battleship already had a few pretty good videos out there, although I thought that I could be more thorough than anything out there even if I couldn’t match the production value.

The first major difference in the new video is just the topic - Yahtzee didn’t really have any really successful strategy videos, although I think this is mostly for lack of trying. It’s probably just a less popular game: I think it has a similar following in the US, but Battleship is much more popular globally. This was a bit of a double-edged sword: I got a lot of comments saying that I got the rules wrong (I used the American rules. Most of western Europe uses the same rules, except ships can’t be adjacent, and you can keep guessing after a hit. Most of eastern Europe uses the European rules, but with different ships: 4 of length 1, 3 of length 2, 2 of length 3, and 1 of length 4). Granted, the YouTube algorithm likes comments, so maybe this was actually for the best.

Audio/Video

Speaking of comments, the other primary criticism for the video was the audio quality, especially during the talking head segments. I got a new microphone (and made sure to actually switch my settings to use it), so that should hopefully be a quick win. I’m honestly looking forward to getting a wider range of things to improve after the next video, since I get the feeling that the audio quality sort of overrode any other criticism that people might have had.

I also think the animation quality improved quite a bit in this video, although Yahtzee is inherently just a less visual game. I put a lot of thought into how to visually represent the various rerolls, the different boxes, and the scorecard itself. Ultimately, though, the game is just a bunch of dice and a scorecard, and I have several scenes that are just those two things. We’ll see what people think of that.

Video Content

After Battleship did a lot better than I expected, I was reluctant to change much. I ultimately decided, though, that it was still more useful to get a better sense of what worked rather than just trying to replicate the first video. Chances are that most of the things in the Battleship video must have gone right, but as far as I know, it’s possible that there were actually a bunch of things holding it back from being an even better, more successful video. I ultimately just decided to do what seemed natural for Yahtzee and then just log the changes so that I can get a better sense of what works.

The first major change is that this video is much longer. I haven’t finished editing, but it’s going to be over half an hour. This wasn’t a conscious choice. The script was only a few pages longer than Battleship (although Battleship had an entire scene cut at the last minute). I think the text was just a lot more dense, and the time from talking about every box on the scorecard added up. I didn’t put anything in the video that I didn’t think was genuinely helpful, and I know that the YouTube algorithm favors longer videos, but we’ll see what people’s tolerance is for a video this long about a topic like Yahtzee. I made a joke in the video about people watching a 40-minute video about Yahtzee, but I had to amend the original joke up from 30 minutes once I realized I was going to go over that.

The Math

One thing adding to this run time is that I made the video a bit more math-heavy. The actual discussion of Yahtzee strategy doesn’t start until about 10 minutes into the video. I tried to stick to my approach of mostly glossing over the math, and seriously considered cutting the dynamic programming section altogether, but decided to stick to the approach of seeing what works rather than assuming. I had originally intended for my channel to appeal to both math people and people interested in the topic itself, but it seems like the Battleship video mostly hit the math crowd. I’ll keep evaluating, and try to see if I can figure out better ways to appeal to a broader audience without making the videos less enjoyable for my fellow nerds.

Timing and Ordering

I also sort of violated the YouTube rule that you should front-load your most interesting content toward the beginning of the video. I think the intro was one of the best scenes in the Battleship video, and while I think I put together a solid first few scenes for Yahtzee, a lot of the animations I’m most proud of are toward the end. Bigger channels like Veritasium are also known for pushing the more complicated math toward the end of their videos, so that they can provide something for people who are really invested in the topic without pushing away their more general audience before getting to the part everyone would enjoy.

The Battleship video lent itself very well to this - the ship placement section naturally belonged at the end. In Yahtzee, the multiplayer sections would have played this role, but I decided to keep these short to avoid the massive delays that slowed down the Battleship video. Instead, we got a mathy section at the beginning, followed by a slightly technical endgame discussion. We’ll see what people think.

In the other direction, though, I’m curious to see what people think about the relative lack of depth in the Yahtzee video. The ship placement strategy in Battleship took up a ton of my time and probably made the video more confusing, but the people who were most invested in the video seemed to get a lot out of that (and make some insightful comments on the video). In Yahtzee, I sort of stuck to the things that worked, avoiding a lot of the multiplayer strategy that would have added complexity to the video.

Overall, I’m really excited to be releasing the Yahtzee video. In some ways, a lot of the pressure is off from not having to worry about how long it will take before people start seeing my videos. On the other hand, I’m worried that I’ve set my expectations unrealistically high after one anomalous video. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.