Please wait for properly edited talks before sharing.
I don't have much to say about the lectures yet... in fact I still haven't watched any of this. I'll be watching as I edit each talk.
Here's a chance for me to share a failed experiment. It might provide useful insight to anyone looking to built a pilot plant overseas...
1 Million Views
Previously, the most viewed video on my YouTube channel was not about nuclear power. It was an illegal copy of "Schoolhouse Rock - Math" which I posted in 2012 and was blocked in 2015.
I uploaded it because YouTube was the easiest way (at the time) for me to play videos on our TV. It just happened to become popular before it was taken down. (Now our home uses Plex instead of YouTube for this sort of thing.)
My YouTube channel has 6.2 million views of Thorium / MSR / Nuclear videos, and 1.1 million views of the now-blocked Schoolhouse Rock video.
I did notice that Schoolhouse Rock went from 1-million to 1.1-million extremely quickly. It appeared to be some sort of threshold after which YouTube favored and started recommending it to everyone.
And until now, I did not have any other YouTube video with 1-million views with which to test this notion... of a threshold after which YouTube recommends a video.
That's because the 6.2 million nuclear views I have are dispersed across hundreds of videos.
It was only The Thorium Problem which was close enough to 1-million that I thought I could get there with AdWords.
That's not my best or favorite video, but I needed to confirm this notion.
Domestic AdWords cost 1c per-view. A "view" is anyone watching to at least 30s (if a video is over 30s in length). People who wait for the 5-second countdown then immediately click SKIP do not count, and cost nothing.
ASIDE: Geographic Targeting with YouTube
Most people who have used AdWords are familiar with Search-Term based keyword bids.
From a YouTube perspective, there's another way to go about this... only target demographic characteristics and do NOT bid on keywords.
That is where 1c views are found.
END-ASIDE
Thorium Problem was sitting at 900,000 views, but was no longer popular. It would take years to hit 1-million.
Wanting 100,000 views fast, this would cost: [ 100,000 * 0.01 = ] $1,000 in AdWords.
I consider $1,000 "real money" and other looming costs will be far more important (once those other costs finally happen). So I wasn't going to blow $1,000 on AdWords.
But I did start experimenting with $3/day spend, to get 300 AdWord views per-day, and see if I could figure anything out while it ran.
I did start to think about this field...
...and how it would only accept $0.01 and not $0.005 or anything fractional. I'm Canadian so presumably I was already getting access to lower bids than Americans? (CA$ = Canadian Dollar.)
Friend-of-a-friend in India gave me a hand. We messed around creating AdWord accounts and campaigns, and eventually I realized I could create one from Canada... the Credit Card could be Canadian and the verification phone number could be Canadian. Only an address needed to be Indian to create an Indian Google account.
...that is the same bidding mechanism using Rupee instead of CAD. It is 0.06 Rupee.
About 50 Rupee to a Canadian Dollar.
So with bids around 0.05 Rupee, the cost-per-view can be bid at $0.001 CAD instead of $0.01 CAD.
It is possible to collect 1,000 views-per-CAD not just 100 views-per-CAD.
And so collecting the needed 100,000 views would cost $100.
Which I did. I spent $100. (Well, $300 in course of figuring this all out, but if I knew then what I know now it could have been $100.) And I hit 1-million views.
So what happened?
Nothing!
After clearing 1-million I turned off AdWords and saw daily views plummet to ~125/day. Just like it was before the experiment.
So either there is no 1-million threshold, and my observation of Schoolhouse Rock gaining traffic after hitting it was just a co-incidence. Or, it was perhaps a thing YouTube did in 2015 but doesn't do any more.
But I do think that it important to know AdWord campaigns have greater bidding flexibility when run off different currencies. There's no magic 1-million mark (apparently), but it still does expose people to new concepts. Average AdWord view duration was 5 minutes. And from testing I can confirm this really does vary depending on what the video contains.
Thorium Problem was never designed to be an ad. But a good ad could easily pack a useful factoid into the first 5 seconds, so that even "skippers" learn something. (Those would be free advertising.)
And a good ad would also start of with something more compelling than "This is John I met about 3 years ago..."
While I personally don't have the budget to promote nuclear power to a general audience using AdWords, I'm hoping organizations like Generation Atomic can experiment in the AdWord space until a cost-effective campaign is figured out. (Eric attended TEAC8 and introduced us all to Generation Atomic. You'll see a lot of him in TEAC8 videos, but not Day1-AM.)
Other characteristics of YouTube AdWord behavior:
The only course of action users can take is to click the link you provide.
No comments, shares or likes will result from AdWord campaigns directly.
1.5% viewers clicked on the AdWords link. That can take them anywhere, including to another YouTube video.
Because some MSR startups are looking to pilot outside North America, I'd think it is pretty important any AdWord campaign targeting other countries be run NOT using Canadian or American currencies. The price-floor for bids is just way too high when entering "0.01" with our currencies.
Fluid Fuel Reactors
The other non-video related thing I've been working on is trying to get "Fluid Fuel Reactors" (1958) released on Kindle.
Also, "First Nuclear Era" (with Richard Weinberg, son of Alvin).
I'll give details in a later update as both of these are waiting on responses, so I might actually have a conclusion to report if I wait a bit.
It is a ball I got rolling in 2015, and each book now has a lengthy and amusing email chain associated with it.
If you are a copyright-lawyer or a lawyer who's dealt with publishers before please email me [ gordonmcdowell@gmail.com ]. Would like to bounce the two (very different) situations off a lawyer as inexpensively as possible.