Why Safari Videos for Data Science and A.I. Topics?

With so many options for publishing videos online nowadays, someone may wonder “why would I want to go through hoops to get something published on Safari?” This is a valid question, and it’s equivalent to asking “why should I get published through a publishing house when I can self-publish on Amazon, or some other platform?” Although there is merit in self-publishing, there are two main issues with it: quality assurance (QA), and marketing.

Before I get into the details of all this, let me inform you that I've been down the self-publishing path and it wasn't as glamorous as people make it out to be. I published not just 1, but 3 e-books, created a website for them, and even hired people to help promote them. A few years later the only real benefit I've seen through all this was the experience I’d gained through the whole process. So, if this is your sole motivation, that’s fine. If you however want to make enough money to make the whole thing worthwhile, then there are better options out there.

Getting published on Safari (or any other professional video platform) ensures a certain quality standard. Of course not all videos there are great, but at least you won’t find many that are a total waste of time or riddled with inaccurate information, like you would on YouTube, for example. The reason is that for a video to get on the Safari site, it first goes through some QA process. If there is an issue about it, you will need to revise it. This doesn't happen often, if you know what you are doing, but it’s a good fail-safe.

Marketing is another matter where platforms like Safari excel. If something is on Safari, people will see it and may watch/read it. If you have a video on YouTube, few people will notice it and even fewer will watch the whole thing. Especially now with the new strict policies that YouTube has adopted, content creators have it hard. Unless you create a lot of content regularly, your exposure on YouTube is bound to be very limited. Of course, if you create a lot of content, the quality is bound to drop, but YouTube doesn't seem to care much about this. As long as they get lots of people watching the videos they host, and keep the ad money rolling, they are fine. And if your vid gets flagged because some oversensitive person finds it problematic for whatever reason, that’s your problem, not YouTube’s.

I’m not trying to say that YouTube is bad. Every video hosting platform has its use cases. However, for quality content that you expect to at least pay for the effort you've put into creating it, a more professional platform like Safari makes more sense. You can create a promo video and put it on YouTube, or Vimeo. But if you spend a week creating a data science or A.I. video, you are better off publishing it through proper channels, like Safari.

To give you an idea of the profits that a Safari video can yield, last year I published a book. I spent about 9 months writing it and editing it. It was considered successful and helped me get some traction in the field, while also promote the programming language it was about. One of the videos I created and published for Safari yielded about the same revenue. It had taken me about a week to create it and edit it, while I also enjoyed it more, since it felt more like a creative endeavor, rather than work. Since I don’t have a huge following, I doubt that the same video could yield the same revenue if it were published on YouTube or some other open platform.

If you find that you have content you wish to share with the world, in a professional manner, I’d recommend you consider Safari as an option. If you find that it entails too much work and you are unsure as to where you need to start, you can always go through a publisher, like Technics Publications, like I did. As Nelson Mandela eloquently said, “it always seems impossible until it's done.”