A creator argues that scripted, edited commentaries beat uncut single-takes on YouTube. He shows how cutting removes dead air and repetition, making videos tighter and faster. With thousands of commentary channels competing, he says unscripted creators can't stand out.
Do you want to know what the most annoying thing on YouTube is? To me, it's people who don't use cut commentaries, or whatever I'm doing right now, whatever this is called. People who don't say one thing and then say something else in a different take. I really despise people who try to do commentaries all in one take. I just can't watch them anymore. Like, I literally cannot watch a commentary unless it's a cut commentary, kind of similar to what I do. Hey guys, my cat just died and my funeral is going to be tomorrow. It was a gray cat. It was kind of like a tiger, tigerish type of cat, and I really liked the cat. It was pretty cool, and it got ran over by a car as I was walking it from PetSmart. We just got a haircut. Or not we, the cat just got a haircut. And, uh, yeah, a car hit it and it died. Hey guys, my cat just died. The funeral is going to be tomorrow. It looked kind of like a tiger, as weird as that sounds. And as me and my cat were walking out of PetSmart, it got hit by a car, and now I'm kind of sad because my cat's dead. As you see, the cut commentary is a lot shorter and a lot more on topic. People on YouTube have the attention span of a monkey, and it's really cliché when I say this, but you have to be short and to the point. Another thing I wanted to throw in is more recently I've been kind of scripting some of my commentaries, and I feel like that just makes them flow so much better because you you already have everything laid out kind of in an outline, you already know what you're gonna say. 'Cause the biggest change I've noticed is when I script a commentary, I talk a lot faster like this instead of having to talk really slow because I have to think about what I'm gonna say next and I have to give myself time to think of what I'm gonna say. But when you script a commentary, generally you talk a lot faster because you already know what you're gonna say and you don't have to think about it in your head. I mean, if you seriously think about it, there's hundreds of thousands of people who do exactly what I do, make commentaries and upload them to YouTube. If you're not doing scripted cutcoms with multiple takes, or editing your vocals in Audacity, if you're not doing any of this, then what's gonna separate you from everyone else uploading to YouTube? Why would anyone subscribe to you over the other 10,000 channels that are doing exactly what you're doing? I mean, if you seriously think about it, you realize how unrealistic it is to get big on YouTube off of commentaries because it's just oversaturated. But anyways, guys, I gotta go. I gotta go to my cat's funeral. Like I said, he looked like a tiger, and his funeral's in a couple minutes, so I gotta go.
