VEDA

April isn’t quite over yet, but I am over VEDA.

“VEDA” stands for Vlog Every Day in April and is an annual challenge many YouTube vloggers participate in. VEDA has been popular since 2009 and grows larger with each passing year. I’m struggling to find the person who started it, comments with tips would be very much appreciated.

I attempted VEDA this year. I successfully posted a video for every day for 10 days. It only took those ten days to realize what I expected. (Since then I have been recording every day but taking my time to edit and post videos). In my relection bellow I am going to share pros and cons of my personal VEDA experience.

Pros:

• Posting daily helped me develop my time-management skills, learn how to use my camera more effectively, hone my editing talents and made me feel more comfortable in front of and speaking to a camera.
• I felt a sense of camaraderie with the YouTube community because many of my friends/vloggers I watched did VEDA this year too.
• The daily deadline of motivated me to make videos I might otherwise have put off.
• I feel a closer connection to my those who watched and comments my vlogs regularly.

Cons:

• I find myself saying “I should make vlog about this” or “I should be recording this” much more often than before, when I only made periodic videos. I would talk to the camera instead of to the people I was physically with and I’d focus more on the camera than what I was recording. I lost depth of my experiences because the pressure to record it was present.
• Viewers dislike VEDA. It’s amateurish to title a video Veda # _ because few would be inclined to click that in their subscription boxes when more intriguing titles are available, but once the viewer clicks a video and determines it’s just a VEDA video they often click away. 
  I received 1/3 or less of the views I received on my April 1st vlog on subsequent videos. Considering I had/have over 4000 subscribers disappointingly none of my VEDA videos have eclipsed 10% of that potential. I experiences aproximatly equal subscriptions and unsubscriptions for the first half of April – I assume because people are just uninterested in VEDA videos.
• It’s difficult to post a timely video, thus many VEDA videos are posted late at night. It’s not particularly healthy to stay up late each night trying to post a video every night. I compensated by editing and posting the next afternoon, but that not technically what one is supposed to do in VEDA.
• VEDA vlogs feel less meaningful than regular vlogs. Knowing it was rushed and possibly only created because of an arbitrary deadline of an optional challenge detracts from the content. A good vlog is one that requires lots of thought and planning. Turn-the-camera-and-make-stuff-up type of videos are rarely worth the amount of effort and time they take to watch.
• VEDA encourages a quantity over quality mentality.

In conclusion, I am not a fan of VEDA.  I don’t regret attempting VEDA and am pleased with what I learned from it, but I am not going to participate next and and don’t recommend that you do either. I believe that people should make vlogs because they want to share their thoughts, not because it’s the popular thing to do and not because they feel like they have to meet a deadline. Let’s focus on quality, not quantity, and fill YouTube with the thoughtful content that deserves to be produced.