Do You Need A VPN?

Announcements Videos
22

Greetings, Jordan! I’m really excited to see PrivacyGuides employing a dedicated content creator like yourself who clearly knows their stuff. I really appreciate how the video breaks down a complex topic and explains it in simple, layman’s terms.

One curiosity I have is what your view on featuring PrivacyGuides recommendations in the videos is. While VPNs have been a fairly stable category, the recommendations are prone to change, and I wonder how you view the impact of that on the longevity of the videos you produce.

Personally, I would be really interested in seeing a video on end-to-end encrypted messengers and metadata. I think a lot of people struggle to convince people to switch to e2ee messengers. Even more difficult is convincing them to switch from the likes of WhatsApp to Signal, etc. so I would really value an easily digestible, go-to video to show such people.

4 Likes
23

The nice thing is that Privacy Guides is a website & community that has a YouTube channel, as opposed to a YouTube channel that has a website & community.

I think the distinction here is that we can be a lot more proactive about removing videos that no longer meet our standards, whereas other channels may be hesitant to unlist videos with outdated/inaccurate information that are otherwise performing well, because those videos might be “core content” and big revenue generators for those channels.

On a similar note, although revenue-generation is a long-term goal for our new hires, we are not reliant on that revenue (or making any revenue from the videos at all right now), so that would not hold us back from cutting content. Jordan is paid a set amount full-time just to produce content, unlike most YouTubers who are paid based on their video performance.

Something I will discuss with Jordan is possibly seeing if we can mention recommendations in sort of a “modular” way, where we would be able to cut out an entire section of a video that mentions a specific tool with YouTube’s editor if we desire to do so, without really affecting the rest of the video’s content. Of course being able to do this will also be very dependent on the specific video, but if we can do it in at least some cases I think it’s a neat idea.

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24

Very interesting video! Welcome to the team! I’m glad that Privacy Guides is expanding, as it shows that they are very serious with their mission unlike their predecessors like Privacy Tools (or whatever they were called) and the old Privacy Guides subreddit. I hope their hard work is fruitful! I will also definitely be creating a YouTube account just so that I can subscribe.

Thoughts on “content creation” and the importance of formally establishing audiences

Ironically, just as we should ask what VPNs actually accomplishes and if they are the right tool for us, I am wondering what you want your future videos to accomplish, what part of the social media platform you want to exist in. Because, of course, social media has its “places” where certain creators thrive, and we should find one for Privacy Guides. You say the video’s purpose is to clarify what VPNs are for and to re-focus the picture towards their privacy benefits.

But who is the audience actually? Are we appealing to other privacy advocates and privacy-conscious people, trying to mitigate misinformation within the community? Or are we trying to introduce Privacy Guides’ ideology to the public? You say that your goal is to make the information easy for “everyone”. In my opinion, there is no content for “everyone”, only for specific audiences.

Your audience dictates how your content is created. If your audience is “everyone”, then the style of content necessarily has to be something akin to a Wikipedia-esque channel. If your audience is for the more technical folks, then your content necessarily has to use certain jargon and leave out unnecessary, surface-level information that they already know. Etc. etc. “Content creation” as how it is used in today’s market is the process of appealing to a very specific audience.

For example, if the video is for the public, it will most likely leave out nuance that members of the community most likely already knows. Nuance isn’t good or bad, it’s a tool for a particular purpose, That is the difference between content creation and merely making videos. There are “rules of the game” with these social media platforms. Not formally establishing your audience will make the content feel scattered, making people click off because they don’t understand some jargon or language, or lack the background information necessary to understand the repercussions of something, etc. If you appeal to everyone, you get to no one.

Analysis of “audience scattering” in the video

  • You begin by appealing probably to the average YouTube viewer at the beginning of the video. This is a good start insofar as you successfully grab their attention because that audience will probably have also noticed the vast number of ads for VPNs, thus intriguing them to watch further.
    • So what does your audience know so far? They probably only know as much as these ads tell them, which is that they are some snake-oil-esque tool for privacy and security.
  • Then you not only tell them, but also show them, that VPNs are not what they are purported to be in those ads. The viewer is now “realizing a lie”, which is a good method in attention grabbing.
    • You also add visual data and studies to back up your claim, which will maintain the viewer’s “realization” of the “lie”.
  • But then you suddenly jump to the question at hand: “Do you need a VPN?”
    • This is where your audience potentially begins to scatter, thus possibly making your video less cohesive to some actual potential audience. The question has two potential connotations and therefore two potential audiences that it will resonate with.
      1. Are you trying to illuminate what a VPN actually is for the average YouTube viewer? If so, this question should be regarded by you as a rhetorical question. It is not the audience that asks this, but you who are asking them rhetorically for the purposes of fighting against misinformation about VPNs spread by YouTube ads.
      2. The other is that it is the audience themselves asking this question, and you are there to answer them. The goal is not to fight misinformation about what a VPN actually does. That would only a byproduct of your actual goal, which is to explicitly state what use-cases a VPN is for, thus providing a good “Google search”-esque answer to a question.
    • Notice how these two provide completely different types and styles of content. I feel that the video falls more with the first, or at least it begins with the first.
    • You can technically have both audiences, since one audience might be a subset of the other. Specifically, those who have been lied to about the VPNs and use it because they believe the lie.
    • All in all, not a very big issue. The audience is “scattered” technically, but they have subsets of each other that will entertain or be entertained by the question.
  • You then consider a counter-argument the using a VPN: “Secure DNS is secure enough to protect you.”
    • This is where the audience now scatters a bit more. Both audiences described above will most likely not find that part useful. This counter-argument exists within a larger discussion that neither of them care much about (at least they don’t care about it “just yet”).
    • It’s arguable that the second audience will potentially care, but seeing that they are most likely new to VPNs, they will not understand what DNS is. If you want to introduce them to the discussion, it will have to be a single video itself or a series of videos, etc.
  • The next section is how when to not use a VPN.
    • This section does not pertain to the “average YouTube viewer” audience. They will likely not care in which instances you shouldn’t use a VPN, only that they were “lied” to by YouTube advertisements.

This isn’t to say that you need to appeal only to one audience forever. One video or video series can have different audiences from other videos or video series.

You might also appeal to two or three audiences, but this necessarily means the video must have more content to appeal to all of them, meaning it must be longer. It must be done in a cohesive manner. The transition from revealing the “lie” (for one audience) to the question “Do you need a VPN?” (the other audience) is too dramatic of a shift. Since the second audience might be a subset of the first audience, you can technically appeal to the first audience much longer. You can talk about the “lie” and maintain both audiences. But changing the topic quickly to the second audience will more likely maintain only that second audience.

5 Likes