Now that Rational Animations has the human capital, budget, and experience to make high quality videos like this one, I think they should develop a more consistent brand.
They should have a consistent single face or voice of the channel. Popular edutainment channels often take off when viewer connects with a likeable personality. Examples:
Tom Scott, VSauce, Veritasium, Physics Girl, …
Channels which don’t show their face in their typical format: Wendover Productions, 3Blue1Brown
Even high-budget channels like Vox are starting to lean into this format by structuring their videos more like vlogs, where the viewer connects with the presenter. example
Also just look at the comments of these videos. People engage with the content, but they also feel connected to the person presenting, and write things like “Wow I liked how excited <presenter> got when <thing> happened”.
They should mark as private or remake the old videos without Rob Miles as narrator. Personally, the old videos are a bit jarring to click on—sometimes you get a guy with an accent and a bad mic (one is ok, two makes a video difficult to understand), sometimes you get a generic overly cheery American “radio voice”.
Maybe get rid of the dogs/cats? Looking at the last year of videos (there are 8), the top 5 most viewed do not have dogs/cats in their thumbnail, and the bottom 3 do. YouTube allows for extensive thumbnail A/B testing and so if they’re not doing this already, Rational Animations really should prepare more kinds of thumbnails and optimize for getting people to click on their videos (in a truthful way). Personally, when I first visited the channel, I found the dogs/cats in the Bayes video off-putting (“why are dogs/cats here? did a 12 year old girl draw this?”), but I thought they were fine in the How to Take Over the Universe (in Three Easy Steps) because they were subtle and the animation felt cohesive overall.
Now that Rational Animations has the human capital, budget, and experience to make high quality videos like this one, I think they should develop a more consistent brand.
They should have a consistent single face or voice of the channel. Popular edutainment channels often take off when viewer connects with a likeable personality. Examples:
Tom Scott, VSauce, Veritasium, Physics Girl, …
Channels which don’t show their face in their typical format: Wendover Productions, 3Blue1Brown
Even high-budget channels like Vox are starting to lean into this format by structuring their videos more like vlogs, where the viewer connects with the presenter. example
Also just look at the comments of these videos. People engage with the content, but they also feel connected to the person presenting, and write things like “Wow I liked how excited <presenter> got when <thing> happened”.
They should mark as private or remake the old videos without Rob Miles as narrator. Personally, the old videos are a bit jarring to click on—sometimes you get a guy with an accent and a bad mic (one is ok, two makes a video difficult to understand), sometimes you get a generic overly cheery American “radio voice”.
Maybe get rid of the dogs/cats? Looking at the last year of videos (there are 8), the top 5 most viewed do not have dogs/cats in their thumbnail, and the bottom 3 do. YouTube allows for extensive thumbnail A/B testing and so if they’re not doing this already, Rational Animations really should prepare more kinds of thumbnails and optimize for getting people to click on their videos (in a truthful way). Personally, when I first visited the channel, I found the dogs/cats in the Bayes video off-putting (“why are dogs/cats here? did a 12 year old girl draw this?”), but I thought they were fine in the How to Take Over the Universe (in Three Easy Steps) because they were subtle and the animation felt cohesive overall.