Over about the past year and a half I’ve been slowly but surely recording videos about local history, preservation, and redevelopment for my Dayton history YouTube channel.
A couple weeks ago I was excited to see that my latest video, about what happened to a street where a surprising number of prominent early Dayton business leaders once lived practically next door to each other, quickly get more viewers than I ever would’ve expected!
It got over 10,000 views in the first two weeks, while my previous videos averaged about 200-400. My “typical performance” is barely even visible on the graph from my analytics!
Quite a few of those viewers also have been subscribing and I see I now have over 1,200, which I never expected to reach doing a channel on local history.
I uploaded my first video back in 2020 when I had a couple of history talks cancelled due to the pandemic. At the time I was just trying to record a video version of one of my in-person presentations, and I promptly forgot about it after sharing the link.
It was at least three years before I went back to look at it again, and I was surprised to see that quite a few people had been finding and watching it. That eventually inspired me to make a few more focused on a particular historical theme.
I’ve definitely improved over the course of my time making videos, and I try to hit themes like historic preservation, deindustrialization, and urban renewal in a way that might be interesting to people from other cities too.
I’m really looking forward to continuing to do these videos moving forward. I have my next few videos roughly planned out and I am also going to do a short intro video for my channel. I’m planning to do more coverage of both Downtown Dayton and some of its neighborhoods, as well as some that focus on architecture and current and potential adaptive reuse projects.
For anyone who is interested, you can check out my channel here:
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