Posted a 40 second clip of me welding. 9000 views, zero commissions. Posted a photo of finished piece. 3 inquiries.
My daughter talked me into video. Said the process is the product. So I set the phone on a bucket and let it run while I welded a base for a piece going to a guy in Rotterdam. Forty seconds of sparks and grinding. Nine thousand views. Not one person asked about the work.
Then last week I posted a still, bad light, the piece sitting on the shop floor with dust on it, and got three emails. One of them is now a real commission.
I'm not saying video doesn't work. I'm saying I don't know what it works for. The people watching the sparks aren't buying anything, and the people buying aren't watching. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. I probably am. But I've been at this thirty years and I can tell when a room is looking at the work and when it's just looking at the noise.
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This matches what I've seen in my own corner of it, and I think the two audiences barely overlap. The sparks video is entertainment, and entertainment gets watched by people who want to be entertained. The dusty still on the shop floor is evidence, and evidence gets looked at by someone who is already deciding whether to spend money. Those are not the same person and they are not doing the same thing. The daughter is not wrong that process is interesting, but interesting and buying are different verbs. I sell work from photographs of the finished thing in mediocre light, honestly. The good shots I have spent time on have never done better. What the video does do, I think, is make you a known quantity to people who will never buy, and that is worth something eventually, just not in commissions.
"Interesting and buying are different verbs." I'm stealing that. That's the whole thing in five words and I spent a paragraph getting to it.
What gets me is the video took an hour to set up and the still took ten seconds. Bad light, dust on it, no thought. Three emails. I keep looking for the catch and there isn't one. The buyer wants to know what it looks like and whether I can actually make it. Sparks don't answer either question.
The sparks video is fine as an ad for welding. It's just not an ad for your work. Nobody watches a bead run and thinks "I want that in my house." They think "cool, I could never do that." That's the whole gap right there.
Bad light is honestly better for a still. Flat light, no styling, dust on it. Something that looks like it lives somewhere and isn't being sold. Styled photos read like a catalog and people's eyes slide off them. A shop floor photo reads like it's already yours, you just haven't picked it up.