Your favorite Karting (and non-karting) Youtube Channels and what would you like to see?

So, I am trying to figure out how to ‘grow’ karting on Youtube so am trying to gather some ideas and what not. Would be good to know what your favourite channels are to help with the research.

Tbh, the only karting channel I watch is Power Republic.

His videos have a lot of production value, zoom in on fine items, and the audio is always perfect. If only he did LO206 ones (i understand why he doesn’t)

Edit to adhere to your question: I really do think that the magic sauce would be anything that has good production value. I want to be a part of a narrative and invest myself in the subjects. I like B-Roll footage on top of everything and want to watch a series of events unfold over a day. Anyone can take a goPro and strap it on their kart, upload it and go. Those kinds of videos aren’t special. To emphasize my point, there’s a YouTuber named Peter McKinnon who does photography, I just was engrossed in a video of him reviewing the iPhone 13Pro… Filled with a bunch of “useless” footage where they don’t really talk about anything but I was sucked I for the entire 16 minutes of it. Link Now, granted, he does videography and photography for a living, so he’s a professional. You’re not going to find his quality of cinematographer in Karting videos… but why not? Ryan Norberg sitting at his desk in a lot of his videos is roughly of the same style, and I might even go as far to say that this is what makes his videos good. (Ok, ok, the content and personality is good too.)

In a world where all videos these days are highlight reels of someone’s life, that feeling of inadequacy and unobtainable achievements is actually kind of depressing. I like seeing the progressions of racers, the trials, the tribulations. No one wakes up and is just instantly good at racing, there’s a lot of hours needing to be put in to get there. I want that journey.

So yeah, I feel like if you’re going to put out a series to get viewers in to the sport, they need to see the day-to-day grind of it all. The 5:30am wake up and packing of the gear, the 7/11 Runs for RedBull or TimHortons for Coffee on the way out to the track. Being the first ones there. Setting up their paddock. Doing a track walk, signing waivers, greeting other racers as they arrive. Helping someone else unload their kart from their truck bed. The community that we have around our sport is one of our strengths and newcomers that see the hospitality that they don’t need a team to get started… Thats where the money is at.

Edit #2 Because My Brain is Racing: A lot of YouTube Karting videos is from one fixed point on a kart, and we watch the diver race around their track for 20ish laps and never really get a sense of anything other than their story. If you’re going to film karting for promotional purposes. Do it like how the Mountain Bikers do it… Set up a couple cameras on a corner entry/exit on top of the POV camera. Make me feel the speed. Feel the urgency of having someone right on your tail going at 100kmh.

1 Like

Yeah forgot about that. I’ve changed the topic title to expand the idea.

I honestly don’t follow many karting channels or consume a lot of karting content on YT since most of it is about other people’s racing and it’s just not my jam. I’m more into the projects side of things these days. Formula drift is about the closest thing to competition style content that I might watch.

Karting 1 and Kart Chaser are basically it.

I mostly go to YT for

Business/mindset stuff
Isolated instrument tracks and other music stuff.
Quirky projects like two stroke stuffing and robot cantina.
Pit bike stuff
Channels like CBoysTV and Cletus McFarland although I only pick and choose what I watch. It’s either got to be kart related or business/track development.
Cars and cameras is another one.

I guess I get my fill of karting content from these forums.

1 Like

I do a Youtube channel for my driver. Started out with the FPV view of karting, but has evolved into more behinds the scenes stuff for everything he drives. Not doing much karting any more. https://www.youtube.com/benmaier67

1 Like

When not watching karting videos, check out RegularCarReviews YouTube channel. Worth a laugh!

1 Like

Stahl racing has a great channel

1 Like

true racer, stahl racing and Ryan Norberg is my favourites

2 Likes

I’m going to buck the trend in this thread here and say that, right now, my favorite karting videos are actually the ones that simply show the onboard of a race, full-length, unedited, not embellished.

In particular, since it’s the karting I’m currently focused on, onboard karting videos of 125cc Sprint Shifter karting on the long tracks (Road Racing/Enduro).

And in the Midwestern Road Racing series, like CES and the Dart Kart Club, the 125 Sprint Shifter racers are very good at uploading their races to their youtube pages on a regular basis: Watzke, Pflughaupt, Gatto, Barth, Lagenfeld, Crago, Plahitko, and a few others.

It does not matter to me if these videos are not unique or have no high production values in them, because to me, an onboard video of a good 125 shifter road race is more engrossing and enthralling than even the slickest, most well-produced karting video possible. Plus, sometimes you just want to turn your mind off and the longer length of these races have the ability to put you in a sort of trance.

1 Like

I could write essays about this, but this succinctly puts it. I will write an essay still.

My ambition is to grow karting as a culture, and Youtube is part of that, but it’s a tough nut to crack. The comment you made about ‘project channels’ is important because I think CarsandCameras (as well as others) demonstrate there’s an appetite for ‘karting’ content. But in general those channels aren’t really ‘karting’ people. That sounds snobbish I know because I actually consider these hotrodders more in line with classic karting culture than modern karters in some respect. What I mean is that ‘karters’ and karting doesn’t actually seem able to generate (big) audiences for themselves as other motorsports do. I believe the potential is there, but trying to extract it is proving tricky.

I know in the right context modern karting can generate big views (especially crashes, association with an F1 driver or rather questionably titled videos). However when Youtubers have a go (SuperGT) they aren’t really anything beyond novelty or short term views. What I would like is a consistent audience. An evergreen audience so to speak. Super GT’s audience isn’t hanging around to consume other karting content, they will follow him as he does cars now.

It appears that karters don’t tend to consume much karting content from the analysis I’ve done (though it’s been a brief venture) and that means we don’t have an ecosystem of recommendations from Youtube. And maybe the type of content being made isn’t working in a way I think it could. I would like some karters do be able to generate revenue from doing karting. That’s my aim.

Obviously from a racing perspective karting doesn’t have a coherent structure and a true pinnacle (and a little dull. No new engines come out due to single-make too, so narratives harder to build). So it’s going to be hard to build a big racing fanbase due to the plethora of championships we have. Every other form of motorsport with a fan base is centered around one grid of around 20 or competitors (F1, WRC, MotoGP etc…). Karting doesn’t share that point of focus, thought I can appreciate KartChaser may well be developing that with the work they do.

‘How to’ videos like the ones Power Republic do are brilliant evergreen content as they serve a particular demand, but they have limited potential outside of that particular niché. They are ‘search based’ videos. PR have done the content, and that will sit there forever more. It’s a waste of time emulating it.

In addition karting is SO generalistic a term it makes it such a tricky audience to understand. Search karting on youtube and it really seems to prioritise old videos, whereas motocross seems to have a nice feed of new ‘consumerable’ videos being listed for the term in addition tot he usual ‘crash’ stuff motorsport has to suffer from.

Anyway… what was I asking again?

1 Like

i watch a lot of kart content. i put up a decent amount of kart content. the channels i watch are illegal alien racing, jam racing, sometimes ryan norberg, and depending on the repair or handling change i want to make, whatever comes up in the search. i also watch just to review tracks, get some recon, that kind of stuff. oh, i do watch super gt on occasion, too. one of my buddies puts up videos using his 360 degree camera, his channel is beyond the karts. i’ll watch everything, but i prefer race vids with commentary, and that’s usually how i format my content, as well. everybody seems to like the commentary.

i do like to put up rental track reviews, too. so i have probably around 50 different review vids out there (i think) of different rental tracks.

my kart is set up with rear and forward facing mounts, so i’ll most likely always use both cams in forthcoming vids. i don’t do much in the way of blogging, like some of the channels out there, where i’m walking around talking to folks and the camera, but i do enjoy watching others who include it.

Not sure that this will help but typical marketing analysis breakdown markets into segments and sub segments. The most obvious segments would be road racing, dirt, sprint and arrive and drive. Could you channelize YT videos according to the segments?

Maybe the title could be something like The Karting Life Channel. It seems that a human interest video journey about the karting experience might have an appeal to the non-karter or for that matter the karter. Then let the audience figure out what segment, sub-segment and who they want to follow.

It would take a huge effort on the part of the videographer, as I barely have time to maintain the GoPro at the track. Most would be mediocre but there might a few winners in each kart segment but maybe that’s all that is needed.

Maybe all you have to do is collect and categorize the various karting videos that might be of interest to a non-karter audience. (I don’t know if this is possible in YT)

Thank you for the kind words about our silly little channel! - Kacy

1 Like

Wow, very cool you rank us up there with those channels! Appreciate it! - Kacy

Hey Alan, my brother, dad, and I dabble with a kart vlog on our YouTube channel Stahl Racing.

As others have said, karting is a bit niche, so getting your channel started might be slow going at first. But if you post solid content, then it will grow! To be honest, it’s probably going to be more of a labor of love for you rather than a cash cow. There doesn’t appear to be a huge market, But it can still make an impact on getting people into the sport. If you need help feel free to message me on Facebook (Kacy Stahl) or email us [email protected]

  • Kacy

my channel is 17 years old (!!! what?), so more than aware of the labour of love, I’m a bitter old man :slight_smile: My channel was very successful in the early days (pre-monetisation), but in recent years (5-8 years) it has tailed off (massively) as ‘karting content’ appears to be less powerful in the recommendations market place. While I place a lot of the blame on myself because I bailed on making videos for years and the content has been very so-so to poor (good videos are expensive, but I won’t dwell on that too much), I am trying to figure out a way to increase the market share for everyone. I made a living off doing this type of stuff back int he day, I want younger karters to be able to do the same (and better).

Youtube is an ecosystem. Part of the reason karting channels remain small is because there isn’t many karting channels doing the type of content YT likes. The biggest karting content, generally, is content made by non-karting channels

Here my end, if we search ‘karting’ we have SuperGT, WTF1, and Formula 1 (and an onboard with 1.1m views. sometimes vids go viral for whatever reason)

Admittedly karting is a very generic search term, so we can’t draw all of our analysis from it, but it demonstrates that karters aren’t breaking through with their own sport. (i know SuperGT is a karter, or now was one, but his channel was built on Gran Turismo)

Compare to motocross though (which is very very similar to karting in many ways), and we lag behind massively in my view. What they do seems to interconnect. Project builds, race vlogs, elite race analysis, podcasts, ‘culture’ stuff… it all seems to fit under the same viewing umbrella… whereas karting is sporadic and all over the place for the most part.

While the karting market may seem small, I don’t think it is. If we take two of of videos which did OK

image

They are very much ‘karting orientated’ niché videos. They are very old now and Youtube was less competitive back then, and the titles worked well. but the views suggest a fundamental interest is there. I think a channel that ‘nails it’ should be able to average 30-50k views (with good levels of average viewing time), and others too. This is in money earning territory as well.

We can also look at Cars and Cameras who build project karts essentially. They average 100-150k per video. There’s doesn’t seem to be bridge between what they do and sprint karting as you may see with the dirt bike scene (which as a whole is just a lot more cultural solid despite their 2stroke VS 4stroke thing, which is mostly fun). But it shows there’s interest there in the vehicles we race.

Those Stahl Racing boys are pretty good (especially the younger fella). Hoping to do some more unique videos soon. Really want to do some testing videos about wheels, bodywork, mini gears, etc. Just need to find the time and best way to test them. Actually wanted to get out yesterday to make a video on the AMV 3F wheel but it rained all day, but hopefully soon. We will also be at WKA doing an arrive and drive with Margay Racing for the event in one of their Ignite chassis which should be an awesome event and great content. Definitely want to know what other people want. My main goal has always been to grow the sport of karting and I think we have been able to do that but we can do a lot more in the future as we keep growing.

1 Like

I will be out at the track this weekend doing some coaching and hopefully turning some laps if I can get all my shit together. If so, there will probably be some kind of video incoming.

2 Likes

Hi Alan, I hear where you are coming from. I think with the newer monetized platform, YT has shifted away from the curiosity/instructional seeking viewer to the “entertain me” based viewer. As a result their search algorithms yield more entertainment content than content of sustenance.

I think the crossover is where you are going to find the biggest traction for viewership. Some of the most viewed videos about karting are run by channels whose main content has little to do with karting. Many, however do have to do with some form of Motorsport and/or Celebrities engaging in Motorsports activities. People are interested in names they recognize, stories that lead to how they got there and general feelings about their performance.

In your examples above, SuperGT peaked out at 3.7M views, because he gave the average gamer a glimpse of what they could do in a realistically achievable racing experience for the average person. Even Lando Norris coming from the Pointy End of the sport, shows that the average person can have a go at karting if they desire. Sure, you are not likely to be the next gen F1 driver, but that does not diminish the Fun Factor racing provides.

To me, it sounds like what you seek is a Karting Magazine Channel. Drawing on several aspects of the sport from Personal Stories of how Drivers got started and progressed in their endeavors, different locations available to karting with what pros and cons to consider when choosing, to some sort of Tech Talk that provides instructional information and budgetary considerations for what level would fit your cost of investment. Combining into one episode: personal interviews, location shots, on-boards and hands-on footage. I think if put together in a way that is both engaging and entertaining to the audience you could draw in more viewers and grow the sport as a whole. It would take a considerable amount of editing time and there would be budgetary constraints until it grew out of its Grass Roots stages, but completely conceivable. In this Digital Age, you could even have Field Reports for others in the Karting Community contribute and not have to take on the burden and expense of travel to capture the footage.

Not sure if this helps answer your question, but thought I would express my thoughts on the subject.