In just three years, Dr Becky Smethurst has built an enviable following on YouTube, all while holding down a full-time career as an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. What she’s learned can help other researchers to build their own audience.
“I’ve always been massively into sci comm,” Smethurst told The Brilliant. “At university, it would always be a conversation starter. When I said I was studying astrophysics, the reaction was always, ‘Oh my God! Tell me more.’”
Smethurst got her first taste of online creation while a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, which has a YouTube channel, Sixty Symbols, created by videographer Brady Haran and the School of Physics. After submitting a research proposal and a two-minute video, Smethurst was tasked with attracting a younger audience. She created videos to explain the science of Netflix’s blockbuster Stranger Things and whether Thor would really have used a Neutron star to reforge his hammer in The Avengers.
After leaving Nottingham, Smethurst found a position at Oxford, and started her own YouTube channel in October 2018.
“I didn’t really think it through. I realised if I didn’t just start it, I was never going to do it,” she says. Her advice on how to get started? “Just upload a video of whatever you can think of.”
Her first video was about a fashion trend at the time: so-called ‘galaxy print’, where pictures of space dust and gases were printed on everything from leggings to posters. “It was annoying me so much. It’s not a galaxy, it’s a nebula.”
Smethurst was soon doing a monthly wrap of space news, and making videos on unsolved space mysteries such as Direct Collapse Black Holes and Fast Radio Bursts. “I liked that idea because it was fun and I thought people would keep coming back to watch the next unsolved mystery,” she said. “Without realising it, I was thinking about bingeability.”
Within nine months, her videos were attracting more than 100,00 views. Today, more than 230,000 people subscribe to her weekly videos.
Learn as you go
Smethurst laughs as she describes her beginnings. “Those first videos I made were terrible! My face takes up too much of the screen and the light and the audio is terrible. The editing is reasonable, but it’s nothing special,” she says. “You learn by just doing it. You are prepping, filming and then editing. You see every single process and you quickly learn what you like.”
Smethurst also spent time watching other videos and dissecting them. “I hate watching YouTube videos where there are jump cuts, where people are talking and then suddenly it jumps because they’ve cut something out. I hide this by overlaying an image of a picture of a galaxy or something like that.”
Smethurst also suggest taking pressure off yourself around production values, because people go to social media to see “normal people doing normal things”.
Do what appeals to you… and experiment
Smethurst isn’t afraid to experiment, and she’s constantly looking at trending content.
“One of the things I’ve been doing is making what I call ‘trend crossover’ videos,” she says. “I look at what is really popular on YouTube and adapt that for science.” One trend she found was ‘day in a life’, where students create videos of a day in the life of a Harvard student, or an MIT student, or an influencer. “I created a day in a life of an astrophysicist,” says Smethurst. Over 1.2 million people have watched this video.
Meme reviews are another popular type of crossover video. “This is where people will sit down and film a video where they either laugh or pass judgment on funny memes. So, I reviewed space memes. And the comments were brilliant. Someone commented that they learned more in the 15-minute video than they did in high school.”
Beating YouTube’s algorithms
Smethurst has another reason for working so hard on crossover content: she wants to beat YouTube’s algorithms. “Their algorithms recommend videos to you based on your age, your gender and your location,” she says. The problem is that the average science or physics audience is over 50, white and male – and that’s who YouTube shows her videos to. Smethurst has been down this road before. “When I was publishing my book, Space: 10 Things You Should Know, I wanted to write it for my generation; millennials and women. And the publishers said no, that I should just picture your typical BBC Radio Four listener, or an uncle. That’s who is interested in space.” She says she hated that, and is dismayed to find the YouTube algorithm doing the same thing.
Not only is Smethurst working hard to use her crossover and meme review videos to reverse the disservice that algorithms do to younger and female audiences, she’s also done research into how these algorithms work. “I’m really worried that they use gender to suggest videos.”
Part of her mission is also to overcome ‘threshold fear’, where people assume they aren’t smart enough to read, watch or attend something.
She’s already seeing results. “The gender split on my channel is 13% female and the biggest age range is 25 to 54,” she says. “But with the ‘day in the life’ video, the split is 35% female and the age range is 18-to-24 years old.”
How much time?
Smethurst is often asked how much time it takes to produce videos, and the answer is eight to ten hours for a 15-minute video. But she spreads the effort over the week, rather than doing it in one day.
Fortunately, she also benefits from a supportive employer. As a junior researcher at Christ Church College at Oxford University, she has eight hours available for teaching, which she uses instead to make her videos. “They’re supportive of that, they recognise that there are so many different roles people can take up as part of the wider responsibilities of an academic career.”
The many benefits
Smethurst has been gratified by the thousands of students who have been inspired by her videos to become scientists. She has also found that the videos have changed attitudes among parents. “If a kid wants to be scientist, but the parent says, ‘No, it’s not a real job, you can’t do it’, it’s just so detrimental. You have to change the parents’ attitudes, as well as the kids.” She says her proudest achievement has been changing these kinds of perceptions and, “that my videos bring families together so they can understand why their children love science”.
Smethurst has seen career benefits as well. “It’s called your ‘Yes, and…’”. As in, “Yes you are published, and yes you have great research. But everyone does.” Smethurst says her YouTube channel is the thing that makes her stand out. “It’s my ‘Yes and…’.”
The channel also gave her something to focus on during the Covid-19 lockdowns, when nobody knew how long lockdown was going to last. “But each week I had the videos to produce. I get so much joy from seeing people engaging with content, loving it, and responding and asking science questions.”
Smethurst wants huge numbers of academics to get involved on social media.
We need to normalise science, to show that it is not done by Einsteins and gods – that normal people can do science It’s important to flood social media with academics who actually know what they’re talking about, so that you drown out all of the conspiracy theorists. When someone logs on to YouTube and searches for astronomy or space, we do not want to see flat earth style videos. We can change this.”
Dr Becky Smethurst is author of the popular astronomy book Space: 10 Things You Should Know, which was ranked one of Sky at Night magazine’s most popular space books of 2019.
Follow Becky Smethurst on Youtube | Twitter | Instagram | Website
Article by Kylie Ahern
Photo Credit: Angel Li
Comments are closed.