One of my many YouTube thumbnails - Writing an accompaniment
When I first started this website back in 2005 websites were all the rage. In those days many of those sites were still written in HTML direct and consequently many of them had a unique style and no one cared that they looked "amateurish". Bulletin boards and forums were everywhere and people would surf their way through hundreds of sites looking to READ interesting content. Bandwidth was modest as ADSL was the common internet connection in those days and ADSL2+ was only just beginning.
YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, who were former employees of PayPal. I had already started my website on January 21, 2005 just 3 weeks prior and didn't become aware of them for a couple of years. They were bought out by Google in late 2006 and the rest is history. They are, as of 2026, the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google itself. They have more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively consume more than one billion hours of video content every day. They offer in excess of 15 billion clips, double the entire population of the world!
With such an incredible choice of entertainment on offer at our fingertips we all began surfing from clip to clip, consuming anything we might fancy. We became easily bored and often clicked away after 30 seconds even though it was a subject we found interesting. Traditional TV struggled to compete, they couldn't offer the choice, they couldn't offer the specialised content, they couldn't offer the individuality of the amateur hosts, they couldn't offer the risky, extreme or offensive content... YouTube became entertainment destination of choice for the internet generations. A mixture of information of variable reliability and pure brain rot. It was a delicious and addictive drug and we largely stopped reading. Most of the numerous small niche websites dried up and vanished.
I posted my first YouTube clip in 2010. It was just a rip of a cartoon show from my youth. I was just experimenting with the technology to see how easy it was to use. It was simple, VERY simple...
A couple of years later I made my first clip with original content with my partner at the time, Anna, recording it on my mobile phone. No proper camera or microphones, no editing, just a quick unscripted guide to cleaning a vacuum cleaner, straight from the phone to YouTube via my computer.
I released a smattering of further original clips over the following years but still didn't take it seriously as I hadn't tried using my SLR for videos and hadn't tried integrating that with my good microphones. I was busy taking still photographs and doing various other things and didn't feel that I had the time or the expertise to immerse myself properly in this world. I knew that it was the way forward though as I was watching a lot of YouTube by this time.
My content began to increase in 2019 when I started making Hearthstone videos for fun. This soon stopped though and it was not until January 2022 that I got serious. When I was recording "The View From Phobos" with Nick Young at Move Studios I saw the opportunity to have the entire album videoed with professional equipment and I took it. I immediately released it onto YouTube in an attempt to find an audience. The result was disappointing...
My second album with Nick Young: "The Death Of Franz Schubert" the same year was similarly videoed and released and it was clear that I was on the right path. I was still relying on others however and still hadn't attempted professional quality video recording on my own. Viewer numbers remained disappointingly low.
This all changed in November 2022 however, when, whilst driving back from Queensland with my newly-acquired, secondhand caravan, I stopped at Cunnamulla and had the idea of videoing myself singing "Cunnamulla Fella" outside the eponymous statue in the centre of the town. I had no tripod and no proper mic but simply propped up my Nikon D7000 on my camping table and recorded the song using the crappy built in mic. I uploaded the clip that night, told the local caravan park owner about it, she passed the link onto to her friends and in 2 days I had 10 times the number of views that I had achieved with my careful professional production comprising an entire album of a famous work at a proper studio...
The encouraging numbers and the ease with which the clip was achieved started a new path for me. I gathered my tripod, bought a stereo camera mic and windsock and made a thing of it. I travelled the country singing Australian songs and my "Martian Country Live" playlist currently has around 60 clips. These clips are simply the unedited best take, uploaded direct from my Nikon D750 to YouTube. My most popular song clip: Three Rivers Hotel currently has 24k views which is almost respectable in the YouTube world. Sadly, most of my clips currently have less than 1,000 views but at least I'm getting a section of my music out there and preserving my performance and songs for posterity.
In January 2024 I began making cooking videos and my Martian Cookery playlist currently has around 70 videos; More than my Country Music! With these videos I used dual cameras and edited the footage together using ShotCut. I also began doing proper thumbnails created in Illustrator. These were generally less popular than my Country Music but for a while the numbers looked promising. I enjoyed making these much longer, unscripted pieces that showcased my cooking style and presented my original recipes, of which I have many!
My video output is not limited to cooking and music however and I have made a raft of other content including: DIY practical, anime, gaming, talking about music and miscellaneous other weirdness. No doubt there will be more playlists added to the current selection in the future, which will probably include a lot more talk...
I have 3 YouTube channels: Warren Mars, Red Planet Industries (RPI) and WazzoTheMartian.
Use the menu at the top of this page to read more about any of these channels.
Enjoy!
Warren Mars - March 2026