So, there’s this basic tactic of the pitch man: promise to tell the customer something interesting, but then go off and talk about other stuff. Periodically, the other stuff gets interrupted with a reminder that if the customer keeps listening, they’re about to get the really great thing, but first, there’s this other stuff to be talked about…
This goes on, essentially, forever. You never get to the payoff. The point of the tactic is to draw a crowd. One person stands there waiting for the promised tidbit, and passers by get sucked in because if there’s something interesting enough to get another human’s attention, then maybe it’s worth paying attention to.
This all works great in the context of a trade show or a boardwalk, where there’s a milling crowd and lots of competing pitches. It’s pretty easy to see that, in those contexts, there comes a time to stop pitching and start taking money. Part of the skill set of the pitch man is reading the crowd, to see when the best time for that switch would happen.
You can’t *do* that with YouTube. As I understand it, you can get reports on how many people started watching your video, but you don’t get reports on when they stopped. I guess if you have interstitial ads in the video, then this might get people to stick through the ads, but it takes a special kind of person to put up with that.
Anyway, I started watching a video series at the beginning of the year. There’s a new episode once a week. The series is announcing a new version of a library I use, and it is exploring the new API. Eight weeks in, we still don’t know what the new API looks like, nor how to use it.
Why, yes, I am pissed, actually.