Your comments are writing your next video

You are sitting with a blank page trying to think of what to film. Somewhere in another tab are several hundred comments on your last few videos, most of which you replied to individually and never looked at again.

Comments give you direct examples of what some viewers ask, notice or struggle with. Read them as correspondence and as a source of ideas, alongside other evidence about the audience.

Why do you keep running out of ideas?

Because you are generating them from the wrong end.

Thinking up video ideas means asking what would be interesting to make, and the person answering has done the subject for years. That person finds the advanced case interesting, the exception interesting, the recently learned thing interesting. The obvious material was used up in their own head years ago, not on the channel.

Your audience is not in that position. They are stuck on things you stopped noticing were difficult around the time you got good, and nothing in your own head retrieves those, because the point of becoming competent is that you stop seeing them. The comments can. They are one of the most dependable routes back.

The exercise

An afternoon, a spreadsheet or a sheet of paper, and the last several months of comments.

Collect questions, recurring difficulties, requests and useful descriptions of people's own setups. Praise and disagreement can also reveal what matters; keep the context with each note.

Collect in one pass where practical, then review the themes. Return to the exercise as new work and new questions accumulate.

What counts as a question?

Broader than you think, and the borderline ones are the useful ones.

An explicit question counts. So does a statement of failure, somebody saying they tried this and it went wrong. So does a request for a variation: a different material, a smaller room, an older instrument. So does confusion about a word you used without noticing it was jargon.

Everything on that list is somebody telling you where the edge of their understanding is. Where the edge sits for enough people, that is a video.

Why is the most common question more basic than you expect?

Because you are answering from inside the subject and they are standing outside it.

Group your rows into topics, then count them. The count is the point of the exercise and the part people skip, because grouping feels like the finish. It is not. Ten questions about one thing and one about another look identical as a list and are completely different as instructions.

When you count, the top of the list is almost always more elementary than you predicted. Not the nuance you have been meaning to cover. The thing before the thing. How to know when it is ready. What it should look like at this stage. Whether the wobble is normal.

A basic question can be useful even if it feels obvious to you. Check how it is already answered and what your explanation could add.

Which comments are about the packaging rather than the content?

The ones that reveal what somebody thought the video was going to be.

These are easy to miss. Somebody says they hoped this would cover something else. Somebody asks a question you answered clearly, on screen. Somebody describes what they took away and it is not what you taught.

These comments may point to packaging, clarity, missing context or a viewer arriving partway through. Watch the relevant section before deciding whether to change the promise, the explanation or how the answer is found.

Questions you have already answered

Check whether the existing answer is clear and easy to find. Then decide whether to link it, improve its navigation or make a focused new video.

This objection dissolves once you look at the counts. If four people asked something covered in a video you published last year, that video is not findable, or the answer is buried inside a section about something else, or the phrasing in your title is not the phrasing in their heads. All three are solved by a short video answering the one question and nothing else, named in their words.

Viewers do not all follow the same path through a channel. A focused explanation may serve someone who missed the longer version, but avoid repeating material without a clear reason.

What comes out of the afternoon?

A ranked list, in your audience's language, of what to make next, with the count beside each telling you the order.

One caveat on that count: the people who comment are a slice of the people who watch, usually the most engaged and the most stuck, so the ranking is a strong set of hypotheses about what to make rather than proof of what the whole audience wants. The video you film from it, and what it then does, is the real test; where a theme also shows up in your search terms or your inbox, you can trust it further.

Take the top item and film it this month. Put the next two in the calendar. Leave the rest where you can find it, because it will not go stale quickly: on an evergreen subject the questions people ask change slowly, and the sheet you make today can still be feeding videos a year from now, though a fast-moving subject dates sooner and wants re-reading more often.

If the top question feels basic, compare it with what people asked. Your experience may let you answer it clearly; familiarity is not a reason to dismiss it.

Sources and evidence

What here is established research and what is our own method.

Standards and platform facts. The caveat about who comments comes from research methods literature rather than a platform source: Smith and colleagues, on sources of bias in research, and Vicente and colleagues, on sampling social media users for social science, both establish that people who choose to participate, post or comment are not a representative sample of everyone who watches or reads. Neither paper studied video comments specifically, so this is a general methodological caution applied to a studio habit, not a platform specific finding.

Our method. Reading a ranked list of comment themes as a strong set of hypotheses, and checking it against search terms or direct messages where they exist, is this studio's practice rather than something the research itself prescribes.

References.

• Kozinets, R. V. The field behind the screen: using netnography for marketing research in online communities. doi.org . Online-community discourse is a valid, naturalistic source of consumer insight, cheaper/less intrusive than focus groups. Comments do not necessarily represent the whole market or replace other research.
• Tullis, J. G. & Feder, B. The curse of knowledge when predicting others' knowledge. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Knowing something impairs judging what novices know; experts lose sight of beginner difficulty. Does not name a specific remedy or that any one technique removes the bias.
• Vicente et al. Sampling Twitter users for social science research. link.springer.com. Social-media participation and posting are self-selective. Twitter/X-specific evidence with wider methodological relevance.
• Moutidis, I. & Williams, H. T. P. Community evolution on Stack Overflow. journals.plos.org. Topic and community interest shift materially over years. Descriptive, not predictive of any one topic; counters a universal 'questions change slowly' claim.