ClickBait Guitar Lessons on YouTube Might Not teach You Much, But They Will Generate Clicks and Revenue for YouTube...



If you're serious about learning to play the guitar you probably won't learn the bulk of your guitar knowledge from YouTube. 

After all, there's nothing better than studying a proper step-by-step course with an organized curriculum taught by a professional teacher with hundreds of streamlined examples. That will absolutely excel your guitar playing better than a stack of random YouTube videos on any day.




HOW I GOT STARTED ON YOUTUBE:
Back in 2008, (that was the year when I first started posting a few short guitar lessons on YouTube), there weren't an overwhelming amount of guitar lessons posted on the site, at least not compared to today's standards.

Most of the guitar videos on YouTube were about how to play "this or that" song. I thought making some YouTube videos that focused on things like; scales, theory and technique would be a good way to help my local guitar studio and possibly boost my in-person business. 

At that time, YouTube had a "Partner Program" but it was very difficult to become accepted. So, making money on YouTube wasn't even on my radar when I began posting lessons. Have a look at the video below, (back from the first year I started posting)...





Posting on YouTube worked okay for my local business, but it grew into more of a direction where it stood on its own after YouTube expanded its Partner Program. 

After a year or two, I decided to focus on the YouTube lessons as more of a separate entity. Most of the people who were watching my YouTube videos did so because I was discussing more about guitar and music theory and I combined that with practical knowledge.

However, doing this type of video-post on YouTube does not spawn 10's of thousands of views in a matter of days when a video is first posted, and that's what YouTube wants today in 2017. 

YouTube does not care about substance, it rewards strictly on immediate video clicks. That is how YouTube makes all of their money.



WHAT YOUTUBE EXPECTS:
The way YouTube works has more to do with views, "gained quickly," (very quickly) than it does with high-quality intellectual content. You could make the best content in the world, but if your video doesn't receive thousands upon thousands of clicks and views in the first 24 hours, then our friends at YouTube use a computer algorithm to shuffle a video to their back-burner list and it sits there with 18 views (or whatever) going no-place fast.

New YouTube content uploaders often tend to think that YouTube has everything to do with gaining subscribers, but it does not. It is about very quick views when a video is first posted onto the website. 

That's probably why all of those silly, goofy, ridiculous content content videos are viewed a million times in their first 24 hrs. and your phenomenal YouTube guitar lesson only has 18 views in it's first week.

Some YouTube creators provide a slice of both good content and stupid ridiculous content, to gain subscribers but more often than not, the most successful YouTube videos thrive on something called, "ClickBait."

WHAT IS CLICKBAIT?:
ClickBait is when a YouTube creator places a titled on their video that reads something like one of these below...

- Here's why you should give up sex and devote your life to guitar

- Why guitar lessons suck

- 5 sexual reasons for learning guitar

- The most boring guitar lesson ever (Don't Watch This)

- Why you should forget everything you ever learned about guitar

The titles listed above sound nothing short of idiotic to any sane person. However, what they do quite well is entice a person to wonder "why" a video would be titled in such a ridiculous manner in the first place. 

This generates the all important, "Click." Which is what YouTube desperately needs for their revenue stream and when creators achieve this, YouTube rewards them.




STUPID CONTENT VS. GOOD CONTENT:
For me there are three kinds of content on YouTube...

#1). The first is the ‘digitalizing’ of things that people have always been able to do such as learning songs, scales and whatnot. How many song tutorials are there on YouTube, and how many "Pentatonic Scale" videos have you seen? Far too many I'd suspect.

#2). The second is ‘unseen’ content, involving the teaching and insight into how a player thinks. Which can be very hard to locate in today's world of clickbait. 

To me this is amazing content. I can get a lot out of videos like this. But sadly they are getting harder to find. Usually buried way way down in YouTube's filtering process.

#3). The third, is all of the ridiculous crap content that generally angers me as to why in the world I bothered clicking on it in the first place. I knew it was clickbait. WHY?




So after trawling though the crap, click-bait, and begging-for-subscribers videos, here is a fantastic video about rhythm guitar, sadly it only has a few thousand views...

Oz Noy Clinic – Rhythm Focus in Solos




If you haven’t heard of Oz Noy, then you should definitely check out his music. I like this lesson, and most of his other lessons, because he gets right down to the fundamentals that a lot of players are lacking and he provides concise and clear explanations.

In this video he covers how to inject rhythm into solos, which sounds obvious but you’ll find that a lot of guitarists, neglect this element of their playing and it remains underdeveloped.

You may think you’ve milked the A Minor Pentatonic scale to death, but take a look at how Oz makes it groove and how you can add this dimension to your soloing through a couple of really good exercises.



Sadly videos like the one above are buried on YouTube. This type of solid content gets shuffled to the back-burner and finding it can be next to impossible. 

Instead, your next search on YouTube for Guitar Lessons will have you only find those same videos that you saw time and time before, and time and time again...

Look, there's another song lesson on, "How to Play Taylor Swifts ********* Song." Oh no, it's another video by that guy who only talks about the Pentatonic scale (in every video he makes). And good grief, there's another video by the same dude (who comes up in every guitar lessons search) always showing the same triad chord as the same strumming idea.

Unfortunately, you'll need to dig and dig and dig to discover the good stuff on YouTube. It is there, only it gets buried under all the clickbait. Keep looking - I know it's like digging for gold - but there are great video lessons out there and they are worth finding.