For the most part, I think I’ve found a pretty good groove with video production – and this week has been off-the-chain with interactivity. I believe it’s largely due to the new nature of the Ustream player that plays automatically – certainly does help the numbers. The hardest part is coming up with new questions or semi-evergreen discussion points every day – but it’s fueled and funneled through the chat room. Thankfully, Lordkat has been pushing the recordings through HeySpread and TubeMogul, which should actually be a function of the original production point (Ustream.tv, though they seem intent on keeping the video in their own archives for the moment, which drive little to no traffic on their own).

Five short-form, targeted Q&A videos a day sounds like a lot to consume, but I assume that most of our viewers will come in through Google searches (and not necessarily YouTube or podcast subscriptions, although I’m currently on the Tech tab in the iTunes Podcast directory front and the media archives are doing quite well on their own).

Someone called HowTube added me as a YouTube subscription today, so (like always) I took a look at their membership page. Turns out, this is someone who works for YouTube – and they’re kicking off a special channel just for producers like me (or you, perhaps):

I recently switched from being a “Guru” to a “Director” because I wasn’t finding any Gurus showing up in the featured sidebar throughout the site. Not sure if that impacted my subscriptions any, but I can tell you they’re certainly up! Nobody’s vetting the Guru list, so at this point it’s pointless to label myself as such (at least, in an official capacity).

Oh, and I can tell you that these videos are helping people. One guy stopped by the chat room tonight to ask for the discount on Parallels I was promoting a few months back. I gave it to him, and he was thrilled that he searched Google for more information and stumbled upon the video I recorded months ago. ;)

Even better: when I was talking to one of the sponsors for Gnomedex, I asked him if he had seen the videos we had been producing every day. He said something along the lines of: “You mean the ones with GoDaddy, TechSmith, Dell, and AMD?” Precisely. Even as someone who wasn’t even at the level of a casual subscriber, those brands were stamped into his mental rotation. That’s the value of video. That’s the value of branding. That’s priceless.

Video How-to Guru