YOU WERE PART OF MY EXPERIMENT

In the previous two issues I began revealing my plan to destroy my career by bringing back the old Stumpy Nubs and telling YouTube where to shove its algorithm. I’ve already taken the first step…

Two of my most recent videos were an experiment and you were part of it. I admit that I knew what the results would be before I clicked “publish” on either video. I’ve been a YouTuber creator for a very long time, I know how the game is played. But I wanted you to see for yourself exactly why I am calling this “career suicide.”

Both videos contained genuinely useful information for woodworkers. One video was about how to improve your work with a router by calculating the speed and depth of cut based upon the size of the bit. The other video explained how to read the grain and modify boards to help keep table tops and large panels flat. Granted, neither video had the viral appeal of watching someone sort and throw away a pallet of tool returns they bought from Temu for $5,000. But both of my tutorials were tried and true subjects that have been successful on my channel in the past. This time I used very different posting strategies to see how you, and YouTube itself, would react.

With the router video I went with full-on clickbait, the sort of strategy most viewers claim to hate. The thumbnail displayed a big, blood-red router bit with large letters shouting “DON’T BECOME MEAT!!” The title of the video itself read “WARNING: This FINGER EATER is already in most workshops!” This isn’t dishonest marketing; the video features bits you likely have in your workshop and explains how they can eat your fingers. But the intent was to package it in a compelling way to draw more clicks.

For the wood grain video, I tried the opposite approach. The thumbnail image featured a cupped, twisted board with the words “Why did my wood warp? How to stop it!” The video title itself was equally straightforward: “How to stop wood from warping.” Tutorials about wood movement have consistently performed well on my channel in the past and this video’s labeling was designed to make it easy for viewers to identify the value of its content. It was exactly the sort of “packaging” the old Stumpy Nubs would have used.

The results are striking. In its first week the clickbait video drew nearly four times the views, and twice the ad revenue compared to the non-clickbait video. I did get a few more salty comments about the title but the overall response was positive. While some viewers left quickly, likely feeling “baited,” most stayed and watched more of that video than the other. They gave it a “thumbs-up” 98.8% of the time. They left vastly more positive comments and more of them subscribed to the channel compared to those who watched the other video.

The YouTube algorithm weighed in, as well. After just a few hours it dramatically decreased its promotion of the non-clickbait video. After a couple days, it all but killed it. A week later that video is struggling to reach 50,000 views while the clickbait video is cruising toward a quarter million.

Do you see what I mean when I say going up against the algorithm is career suicide? I’m not afraid of viewers leaving the channel over titles and thumbnails. A very vocal minority will threaten to, but most viewers appreciate the value of my videos regardless of how they are packaged. What I’m afraid of is death at the hands of an algorithm that’s hungry for shallow videos that keep people clicking through an endless feed of garbage.

The results of this experiment were predictable, not just from my own experience, but from what we’ve seen happen to so many other woodworking channels. Once your channel reaches a certain age, the algorithm starts to ignore it in favor of fresh, new faces. You’re forced to either use clickbait to get its attention or suffer a slow death. Very few of my generation of woodworking YouTube channels remain active and those that do are struggling. I’ve been an exception for so long because I adapted. I played the YouTube game, and my channel has continued to thrive long past its expected expiration date. But I’m not having fun anymore. Something has to give.

Soon I’ll be posting another excellent video with a boring title. I bet I know what will happen…

-James Hamilton

THE NEW STICKERS ARE IN!

THE WAXED TOOL MYTH - BUSTED

There’s a persistent myth that waxing cast-iron tools, such as the top of a table saw to make it more slippery and to protect it from corrosion, will interfere with wood finishes because the wax will transfer to the wood surface. Let’s put that to rest.

For centuries, it was common to lubricate the soles of hand planes with wax. This was often done by “scribbling” on the tool with a chunk of bee’s wax. No effort was made to even it out or buff it away. The plane was simply put back to work. This practice was done for all sorts of planning operations, including the final smoothing of a surface before applying a wood finish. It did not have any negative effect.

Likewise, a thin, well-buffed coat of paste wax on a saw top or other tool is very unlikely to be transferred to the wood in any meaningful quantity.

It will not contaminate your wood
It will not affect finishes
It will almost certainly be sanded off long before finishing anyway

Even if microscopic particles did transfer, they wouldn’t be enough to matter. What wax will do for your tool is:

Make the surface slippery as snot
Make cutting easier and safer
Protect the cast iron from rust

Maintenance is simple:

When the top stops feeling slick, apply another coat
If wax buildup develops after several coats, remove the old wax with naphtha or another solvent and start fresh

If you’d like to learn more about how to de-rust and maintain a cast iron machine such as a table saw or band saw top, I made a whole tutorial about it here.