If I were early in my career now, instead of starting to think about winding it down, I’d be focused on learning video editing skills.
Actually, that’s been the case for many years now. When I started, I learned still photography skills to go along with my writing skills. In newswriting and reporting I had formal education from college professors and professional editors in the field. In photography I was self-educated, with a lot of help from books and magazines. Over the years that I’ve worked for motorcycle magazines and web sites, it has always been the case that getting the good quality photography was harder than gathering material and writing the articles. Partly that was because I’ve always been a much better writer and editor than self-taught photographer, but mostly it’s just the way it is. Other motorcycle writers who have to assemble a full package of words and images also say the same.
But however hard it may be to get photos alone, producing, shooting and editing a video is a far more complex and time-consuming undertaking, especially if you want a professional, polished product like the ones my video team colleagues at RevZilla produce. My friend and co-worker Spurgeon invited (read: coerced) me to come out for a brief appearance in a video the team was shooting this past week on the new Indian Chief. Spurgeon was riding it across Pennsylvania on U.S. 30, also known as the old Lincoln Highway, trailed by a three-man crew in a van, and I headed east from my home base in Ohio on my Honda VFR800 Interceptor to intercept them for the end of the shoot.
The universal truth of a video shoot seems to me that you plan an original schedule assuming there will be delays, then you revise that schedule when more delays crop up, and then you end up getting there late anyway. Sure enough, my original plan to meet them at 1 p.m. was switched to 2 p.m. before I even left home, then revised to 2:45 p.m., and they eventually arrived a little before 4 p.m., thanks to technical glitches and setbacks. So situation normal. I used the waiting time profitably to scout a location to shoot the final segment and since it was one of our first nice days of spring, I didn’t mind the riding and waiting.
It takes a team to put together a quality, professional video. My input was limited to scouting a scenic backdrop for Spurgeon’s conclusion and making a brief cameo appearance that will probably amount to 20 seconds of video.
Despite the setbacks and glitches, I know the end result will be something more than your typical YouTube video. (I’ll link it here when it’s released.) It will be more like a small movie, with scene setting and transitions thought out by the producer, Chase, and the content will be informative as well as entertaining, because Spurgeon will have done his homework and thought of the essential points to include. That’s not always the case, of course.
The rise and struggles of vloggers
When I was a boy, if you asked my elementary school classmates what we wanted to be when we grew up, at least half would have said major league baseball player, because we were all clueless kids and we didn’t know how to do anything other than play games anyway. I recently saw a survey of kids today and the top thing they said they wanted to be was a YouTuber.
That shows the importance of video today. It’s also evidence that the good times for motorcycle vloggers are mostly behind us. By the time everyone wants to do something, it’s too late. The easy money, so to speak, has been made. Once the field is overcrowded, it’s too hard to reach a critical mass of an audience and set yourself apart from the crowd when 500 new hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube each minute. The writing equivalent is the guy who started a sports blog in the 1990s and spun it into a lucrative career. (I actually knew Bill Simmons when he was a 16-year-old kid.) Try making a living with a blog today.
The same process has now happened for vloggers. You’re far too late for first-mover advantage, but quite a few motorcycle vloggers are giving it a valiant try. A surprising number are women and many of them are working alone, with just a few cameras and maybe a drone. The ones who make a go of it are totally dedicated to producing steady content. To give an example, Itchy Boots is on her fifth season of producing videos, traveling around the world and arranging her life around the visual stories she tells. Her work is very polished and as a result she has more than 700,000 subscribers.
It’s hard to achieve that level, though, which is why so many vloggers are pursuing a side hustle online. One popular vlogger, Her Two Wheels, produced a video explaining how much she made from one of her most popular videos, with more than a million views. The answer? About $5,000 at the time. Sounds good, but a couple of those videos a year and a lot of others that earn very little do not add up to anything close to making a comfortable living by U.S. standards.
Personally, most of the motorcycle vlogs don’t do much for me. I’m looking for either entertainment or information, and I find that most vloggers are just riding around their local roads talking into the camera about whatever is on their mind. Without the dramatic landscapes of world travel or a depth of knowledge that’s going to teach me something, I just don’t get much from those videos. But I’m also smart enough to know that more and more people all the time want to consume information in video form (even learning things, something that’s easier for me to do in written form). Video now accounts for about 75 percent of consumer internet traffic. I also understand that what I perceive as a lack of polish and depth of knowledge is actually seen by many others as authenticity. Many viewers prefer a product that is less polished because it feels “real.” They can identify with the vlogger.
While the access to post video online and the demand for it from consumers gives lots of people a chance to become the YouTuber that grade school kids of today aspire to be, few make a go of it.
In the end, maybe the example from my childhood and the one from the children of today is very apt. The difference between being able to throw a 100 mph fastball and a 92 mph fastball is only eight percent, in terms of speed. But the difference in salary could be 90 percent or much more. It could be the difference between riding around in a ratty old bus to minor league stadiums or living the first class life as a multi-millionaire star in the Major Leagues. It’s a winner-take-all economy in many realms. Lots of vloggers are posting motorcycle content online, and video is undisputably king. But just like me and my fifth-grade classmates, few ever make the big leagues.
good read/thoughts here, Lance… so, are you really in the “Autumn phase” of your career ? (aka: “winding it down”) no one can herd cats (at RevZilla) like you, sir… and I suspect those Zillans would resort to chaos and anarchy if you moved on !!! ;- )
Call it the “autumn phase” if you like and I won’t quibble. I’d just say that those of us who cultivate a career spend most of our lives looking to the next job to be bigger, more responsibility, more intense, and generally (for those into those things) more power and pay. I’m at the stage where I’m happy to keep doing the cat herding for the forseeable future, but I’m no longer looking for a chance to ratchet up the stress and responsibility levels.
By far the most gratifying thing about my seven years (that long!) of work with RevZilla has been the ability to create something from scratch, the only time in my career I’ve had that opportunity. And I’m very grateful for the success we’ve had, going from zero to nearly a million monthly page views. I know that nobody is irreplaceable and that’s a universal truth, so someone else will come along after me and carry on. But I’ll always have the satisfaction of creating something where there was nothing, backed by a tremendous amount of support from my team, the company founders and everyone else who contributed to RevZilla’s success.