A good Sunday to all of you! Happy Passover and Happy Easter if you celebrate!
Bottom line up front (or BLUF, as we abbreviate in the Army): I’ll be taking the week off from the channel, so new new videos this week, unless something newsworthy in menswear breaks—then I’ll probably scramble to put together a Short. Not for any particular reason other than having settled into a groove scripting the 25 Groom Guide videos as well as getting some rather important pre-launch videos and ads shot and edited. The good news is that while there won’t be a video this week, we’ll most likely be posting two the following week.
How about a little inside baseball?
(Metaphorically speaking, because don’t really want to talk about how the Red Sox have sputtered out of the gate this year…)
The curious performance of the Rolex vs. Timex video
First things first.
@Han: you were the only one who commented on the new look! I though for sure people would notice! Did you only pick up on it because I droned on and on about in last week’s issue? LOL.
I have to say that I am still a bit perplexed about this video’s performance. It still hasn’t cracked 10k views four days later. It seemed to tick some boxes that the feedback from analytics would lead me to believe would resonate loudly with our audience.
It featured a Rolex. ‘Rolex’ is one of the top five search terms people find my channel from.
It featured an affordable watch. The overwhelming success of the Casio A158W video—138k views and counting—showed me that people appreciate hearing about and seeing more budget-friendly watches on the channel.
It just didn’t catch! I changed the thumbnail. I changed the title, swapping Timex as the first term over Rolex. Maybe if I’d used a more modern GMT Master rather than the 16710? Perhaps the intro was a bit confusing to people?
Honestly, the performance of the video was more or less the performance I would expect from a “Community” video—lower view count, high engagement, and much higher than average watch time. That’s all good stuff, just quite unexpected. I’m going to continue to chew on this, but I’m not sure there are any answers.
Outfit video experiment
Speaking of analytics and data driving the decisions I make with regards to video content, those sorts of things also guide decisions about format.
One of the things that YouTube rewards channels for is viewer retention—how long are people watching your videos for? The higher the retention rate, the better. That sends a signal to YouTube that people are finding your content interesting enough to watch a lot of a single video and typically results in your videos being recommended to even more people.
We’ve got a pretty decent retention rate on the channel and some of the story-focused videos can clock in at 60-70%—which is really good.
Outfit videos, on the other hand, are typically in the 45-55% range with people tending to skip around from outfit to outfit. You can see that illustrated by the peaks in this graph:
Our outfit videos generally clock in around the five-minute mark. And looking at previous retention graphs, people seem to get bored and drop off around halfway through.
So I’m wondering if by decreasing the outfit count from five to three and thereby shortening the overall video length, if we’d be able to increase our retention rate.
Outfit videos are pretty low-hanging fruit and relatively easy to produce—aside from the prep work involved actually putting together the outfits—and depending on the topic, they can be relatively “efficient,” meaning, they convert new viewers into subscribers.
I think, generally, with this type of content, people are looking for a quick inspiration fix. Five minutes might be too long to spend for some. I’m curious to see if making this tweak will result in any type of positive outcome. I do like our the presentation style that we’ve developed and defined—it’s something I feel is quite unique to our channel—so I don’t necessarily want to shift that.
I’m really curious to hear this audience’s thoughts on this. Please chime in below!
How do you feel about three vs. five outfits? Are there any other recommendations or ideas you have?
New items in the HSS Shop
Also on the near horizon, now that spring has mostly sprung, we’ll be outfitting the shop with some new offerings. Many have been featured on the channel in the past year and we also have a lot of nice editorial photos of the pieces, but we’d like to take the time to shoot them on the seamless so the shop continues to have a cohesive look and feel.
New suits include: a khaki cotton suit, a three-piece chocolate linen suit a light grey fresco suit, a solaro suit, a navy twill suit, cream linen, cream and tan seersucker.
New sport coats: Khaki cotton, chocolate linen, white and black puppytooth silk linen, the ultra classic navy blazer with bras buttons, textured mid-brown linen, light grey fresco.
New shirts: light blue washed cotton OCBD, banker stripe with contrast collar, white linen blend, pink poplin, a pajama shirt, a classic bengal stripe, something floral for summer, and more.
New formalwear: dark navy seersucker, classic black tuxedo, and a jacquard pattern navy dinner jacket.
If you ever have some specific recommendations, please let me know. Or feel free to continue to be surprised!
It’s been two weeks since we launched our safari shirts and we’ve been really overwhelmed with the response. They’re selling exceptionally well, which I think speaks to the excellent price point they’re being offered at.
The Groom Guide update
Work continues for me preparing for the launch of The Groom Guide. I’m pretty much hitting my goal of producing one script per day and have currently completed writing nine of the course’s 25 lessons as well as six separate pitch videos and eight different ads.
(Also, if you ever find yourself shooting 12 different videos in one day, you will not regret slating each one of them. Makes sifting through clips so easy!)
Some intro animation for the course videos
In addition, over the weekend I’ve been spending time working on preparing an incredibly thorough discovery document requested by the PR company we’ve engaged. This thing is seriously going to be more than 20 pages by the time I’m done.
Finally, we got some new deck furniture!
And Coco tried to wear a hat:
Have a great week! And thanks, as always, for your continued support.
Stylishly Yours,
Brian
Happy Belated Easter/Passover Brian! I guess it's two perplexing issues for the past video, one no one else noticing the new look/lens and two the performance of the said video (still hasn't cracked 10k at the time of writing, super surprising to say the least!). I think as I've mentioned in the youtube comment I don't think the difference is something that's obvious on first glance, but very clear if you put two videos side by side. I don't know if you changed the lighting as well but overall it makes the video look more dramatic and "high definition" than your previous set up!
With regards to viewer retention, I always wondered exactly how that metric was gathered. For example I usually watch your videos beginning to end (100%) but sometimes I need to rewind or stop the video and play it again for various reasons: does this negatively affect the retention rate? I do return to some of your older videos and skip around, so I guess if multiple people do that then it also might lower the metric? Though, I suspect this would only explain maybe a very small fraction of the retention rate, as I guess there are more one-time viewers than multiple-time viewers for a single video. (I guess on the opposite spectrum, if I leave a video running in a background tab, does it positively affect retention rate?)
That being said, does the video length inversely correlate with retention rate? I have a feeling of course there would be a huge difference between a 10 minute video and a 1 minute video, but I'm wondering if the difference is significant enough when you compared a 3 minute video to a 5 minute one (3 minutes is what I assume a 3-look video would end up being). I think 3 look videos would be fine, maybe it would leave room for you to revisit certain topics at a later date? Also, if people are skipping around the video to see the next look, then I don't believe reducing the number of looks will help as these people will skip to the looks regardless of the video length IMHO.