I hate doing YouTube on English.
The only reason that I have an English-language focused YouTube channel is to promote myself as a teacher. That’s it. If I didn’t have to worry about my own marketing, then I would be off YouTube faster than you can say Jackie Robinson. I love teaching English. I love seeing individual students improve their English. But the YouTube part of English, I absolutely hate. That’s why I don’t care about subscriber counts.
However, over the last few months, I started becoming the dreaded “YouTuber” that I never wanted to be. Now it’s time to go back to focusing 100% on teaching. At least for Dave’s English.
I originally decided to do videos about other channels because I felt that these channels were teaching English incorrectly. Whether it was their methods, or just blatant mistakes, I thought that it would be something that benefits the students. I also wanted to shed light on what I would call unscrupulous business practices. See, as a teacher first and foremost, I think that it’s important for students of English to get the best information possible to improve their language learning.
This is when the train fell off the rails.
Seeing that views went up, I focused more on individual channels than the actual topic of English itself. It was a complete deviation from what I had done previous. I focused on YouTube.
While more people were watching my channel, as well as getting more one-on-one students, the quality of content was going down. It started to be focused more on other channels instead of being focused on students and English.
As a result, those who ended up following my channel were no longer people who were interested in learning English. They were people who have ironclad opinions of one thing or another, and were just looking for confirmation or confrontation. Once I said something that they didn’t agree with, I was the enemy.
This all came to the point of ridiculousness last week with two important things.
First, I made a video in which I showed a number of native speakers pronouncing “mirror” with one syllable. However, in the comments, people stated that each of the speakers were using two syllables, which is absolutely incorrect. I then realized that no matter what facts some people are presented with, they will ignore the facts simply to cause controversy or to be contrarian.
The second issue was when people were claiming that I wasn’t a native English speaker. That’s the absolutely crazy!
Basically, the videos that have been made over the last few months have brought people to the channel who cannot connect with reality. I’m not saying that this is everyone, but it is quite a bit. Basically, it’s become a circus.
I will admit my part in this affair. It was my videos that brought these types of parasites to my YouTube channel in the first place. Unfortunately, many of them are on the channel to stay. I feel that the only way for them to leave is by changing the content entirely focused on the English language. Maybe then they will just die off.
As of today, December 29th, I will be only posting videos on my site that put the student front-and-center. All videos that I feel don’t benefit the student will be taken down. I want to clean my channel of these parasites, and only have people interested in learning English. Yes, some of the videos where I critique others will be left up, but others will be taken down. It’s solely based on the educational content of the video. And yes, there will also be critique videos in the future, but education will be the primary focus.
Happy New Year,
Dave