Thanks so much @kati.morton. Those are helpful thoughts. Although, I have to say – I think part of me was hoping you’d say that collaborations weren’t very important/useful. I’ve found them to be so challenging!
I’ve sent a handful of requests to large channels that I see as being well matched with what I do (science education) as well as being run by people who I know live close to me geographically. I’ve taken time to put together thoughtful proposals (sending a pitch and rough outline of the script/video idea rather than just sending a “hey, wanna collab sometime?” message) and try to tailor the proposals to being ideas that I think would be genuinely useful/interesting to them. All of that takes quite a bit of work, and so far I haven’t had any responses.
The large channels are SO much bigger than me (Science Mom has 1,500 subscribers right now), that I can see that they don’t have much incentive/interest in tapping into my audience. Plus, time is precious and I know the reality for most YouTubers is “I have more video ideas I want to make than I have time to make them.”
So after a few rounds of no response from the well-established/large channels (ranging in size from 100,000 to 2 M subscribers), I tried to find science education channels that were similar in size to mine, and I couldn’t believe how hard it was. I spent hours searching and kept coming up with the same “too big” channels. Occasionaly I’d find what looked at first glance to be a good match, but then I’d see they hadn’t posted anything in over a year, or that they lived in Europe. There have got to be some 1,500-subscriber-size science education YouTube channels out there who would be interested in collaborating, but how do I find them?
