Is Motovlogging Dead? Four Riders Who Still Do It Compare Notes – Kickstand Conversations Episode 006

The four of us sat down for episode 6 of Kickstand Conversations to talk about something we’ve all done at one point or another: strapping a camera to a motorcycle and talking to it. Trekkie, Goofy, Scott, and I traded origin stories, gear mistakes, and a few confessions about how our channels have actually gone. Somewhere in there we got around to the question that seems to be on every motovlogger’s mind right now: is motovlogging dead?

If you’ve ever thought about starting a motovlog, quit one, or just like watching them, there’s plenty here. We talk about what a motovlog even is, what we’d do differently, and why so many channels that took off during the pandemic have gone quiet. Nobody in this conversation got rich, and it’s a better conversation for it.

That’s the recap. If you’d rather hear the whole thing (including the bunny tail debate and some camera mount jokes I won’t try to explain in text), the full episode is right above.

How We Each Got Started

Goofy has been at it the longest. He started in 2018, a year after buying his Vaquero, after watching a bunch of other Vaquero riders and figuring that if they could do it, so could he. He bought a GoPro Session 5, started uploading, and was sure he’d be YouTube famous. He’s still a truck driver, so you can guess how that went.

Trekkie came in around 2021. He was shopping for a bike, specifically one of the Honda neo retro cafe bikes, and spent his time watching motovlogs from people who rode them. The one that pushed him to buy a camera was Andy Mancam, an Englishman riding a Honda CB1000R around Germany. Scott’s story starts after the pandemic, when motorcycle YouTube blew up for him. He got a bike in 2022, the algorithm served up my channel, and he joined the Discord. He’d also watched some of his favorite pandemic-era creators go full time and change, so he wanted to make the “this is my adventure” version himself.

For me it was right around COVID, when I bought my bike and got back into riding. When I went looking on YouTube, I wasn’t watching bike reviews or spec sheet comparisons. I was watching people ride bikes, and I kind of never stopped.

The Camera Glasses That Started It

My first setup cost me nothing extra, because I already owned it. Long before motorcycles I was into competitive pistol shooting, and I’d run a slim Contour camera on the side of my head because I hated the way GoPro head straps looked. Then a company came out with glasses that put the lens right between your eyes. They were about $500, they were great for shooting, and after I quit competing I just wore them under my helmet.

They weren’t great for riding. They recorded through the visor, so there was always a glare, and the microphone was pushed up against the helmet padding. The audio was terrible. But it was how I got started, and it’s how Trekkie found me. He was searching YouTube for riders in our area, landed on my videos, and that’s how he ended up in this group. He said the biggest giveaway was the complete lack of stabilization. Goofy admitted he never noticed the glasses at all, and joked that I had Meta glasses before there were Meta glasses.

The Gear Rabbit Hole (and the Bunny Tail)

I moved on to one of the first-generation DJI Osmo Action cameras. The camera was a workhorse and I still use them off and on, but the audio adapter ran the mic so hot that anything louder than a whisper clipped. Goofy ran into a similar problem with GoPros. Anything below the Hero 5 Black just took a microphone, and from the Hero 5 on you needed an adapter and somewhere to stick it.

Trekkie’s frustration came from his television background. He bought the Hero 9 with the media mod and a lavalier mic, but the picture and sound weren’t up to the standard he wanted. His wife also couldn’t watch his videos because the chin mount made his head move around too much. His fixes were a second camera pointed back at him to cut away to, or an Insta360 X2 on the handlebars, which is horizon locked and ridiculously stable. The tradeoff is that it takes you away from the rider’s point of view. Goofy likes seeing the hands, the bars, and the gauges, so that wasn’t a tough call for him. He also pointed out that once you add a media mod or mic adapter, a GoPro isn’t waterproof anymore, so riding in the rain can be an expensive mistake.

Then came the audio. Trekkie wanted good motorcycle sound, so he mounted a recorder on the rear fender, which made it look like his bike had a little bunny tail. Goofy has never let it go. (He admits that when he’s riding behind it, he can’t not say something.) These days Trekkie points the mic toward his own backside, because it cuts down the wind roar coming off that big fairing. He records his voice with a mic inside the helmet and the bike with the external recorder, and he likes the stereo track that gives him. Goofy gets everything from one mic and thinks you need the wind sound anyway, since that’s part of being on a motorcycle. He also asked how many viewers would even notice stereo. Trekkie’s answer was “only pedantic former editors from London.” About that point I stepped in and said we were getting deep into the weeds.

Scott keeps his setup cheap. DaVinci Resolve is free, and his favorite product is the DJI Mic Mini. Goofy agreed the Mic Minis are inexpensive. Trekkie also made a point worth hearing before you spend money: talking about your new camera or your new microphone is a trap, and he fell right into it.

Filming Other People on Group Rides

Group rides came up as a gear problem of a different kind. Scott said he’s been doing more voiceover instead of using comms audio, especially when he rides with people who aren’t vloggers and might not want to be recorded. If someone says no, he just skips it. Goofy’s approach is blunter. He tells the group he’s recording, and anyone who doesn’t want to be in it can stay quiet. Trekkie blurred a license plate once for a rider who didn’t want it shown, and Scott mentioned that Insta360 has a built-in plate blocker, which is a good feature for riders (some of the women who use it have good reasons for wanting it). Goofy doesn’t worry about his plate unless he’s posting on social media or doing a product review.

What Is a Motovlog, Really?

I asked this one because my opinion on it has changed a lot. Goofy’s definition is simple: you’re doing a vlog while you’re on a motor. He’s even done one from a car.

Trekkie said most motovlogs are people talking about themselves the way people used to on internet blogs, just from a bike or a car. His problem early on was that he didn’t have much to say about motorcycles, so he talked about himself, then about his cameras, and nobody cared. His first videos were also all ride-and-destination: here’s where I’m going, here’s the lake, here’s the bridge. He called that boring. His proof that people want to hear you is that Goofy and I ride the same road to work and back and talk about whatever’s on our minds, and those are the videos that got subscribers.

I used to have a really defined idea of what a motovlog should be, where everything had to circle back to the bike. These days I don’t care. If it’s about motorcycles, great, and if it isn’t, it’s whatever I feel like talking about. Views are probably not coming anyway, so I might as well talk about something I like. Sometimes the only motorcycle part of the video is that I’m riding one.

Goofy and Scott pushed back a bit on dropping destinations altogether. Goofy thinks they’re still a crucial part of motovlogging, and you can ride to a cheesesteak place or a coffee shop and make a destination out of it. Scott keeps his destination videos a little personal. A rented bike in Metro Detroit, with a stop at Belle Isle, his happy place, did really well. His Watkins Glen scavenger hunt videos do horribly, and he makes them anyway. Goofy’s line on that was that it’s about what you want to put out.

For the record, my favorite is the plain old turn-on-the-camera-and-talk video, because it’s my outlet. I like group rides, but the footage never seems to be enough to tie a video together. Destinations are fun too, but the local well is running dry. I’ve done the Daniel Boone Homestead four or five times, and it’s starting to feel tired. Scott’s favorite is travel, Goofy’s is group rides, and Trekkie loves a good rant.

What We Hoped For and What We Got

Trekkie missed working in television and figured he’d make high-quality videos, everybody would love them, and he’d make a pile of money. That didn’t happen. He gave himself two years, got to about 260 subscribers, and then switched to doing what he wanted and not caring who watched. He picked up another 100 subscribers that way. One video, on the five things he likes about his motorcycle, got around 10,000 views, which was insane for him. Most of his other talking videos get somewhere between 15 and 50. His ride-only videos do much better, and they take about ten minutes to edit.

For me, it was an outlet. I’ve made video content on and off for a long time (cigars, competitive shooting, archery) until kids and trade shows made the time commitment too hard. Motorcycles stuck because the bike is always there and I can ride whenever I have time. The part I didn’t expect is that once you get some views and monetization, you start watching the numbers, and the numbers never feel like enough.

Scott figured he’d be monetized in about a year. Post-pandemic, he said, you really have to fight for it, with interesting thumbnails and titles, and he wasn’t doing either. He’s getting better at it with some help from AI, though he prefers vidIQ’s thumbnails to ChatGPT’s. Goofy has been at it for eight years and has the subscribers but not the watch hours, since he posts for a few weeks and then stops. I mentioned I’d heard the watch hour requirement had doubled to 8,000 a year, though I wasn’t sure whether channels that weren’t yet monetized were grandfathered in. Goofy and Scott both took that as proof they’re never getting there.

So, Is Motovlogging Dead?

Goofy saved the big question for the end, and the answers were all over the place. (Trekkie pointed out there are thousands of motovlogs about the death of motovlogging.) I said yes. Scott said it’s on the decline. Trekkie agreed and said he misses the early pandemic days, before everything turned into influencer partnerships. Goofy thinks it’s dead “to a certain extent,” but that it’ll come back like 80s fashion, maybe with another pandemic. Trekkie also promised he’d get back to it.

Why Channels Go Quiet

A while back I posted a motovlog asking where everybody went, and Ben over at Bikes Beards and Brews had a good answer. His take was that the pandemic made motovlogging easy because everybody was looking for ways to fill time, and it has only gotten harder since. People see what works for a big channel, copy it without adding their own spin, don’t get results, get frustrated, and quit. Trekkie agreed 100 percent. Goofy added that during the pandemic everybody had the time, and now they’re back at work.

Scott took a six-week break from posting recently because life got busy, and he nearly walked away from one edit that sat in DaVinci Resolve for a month. Goofy said that’s how it should be, because family, home, and work come first and everything else is filler. Trekkie’s response was my favorite point of the night: that’s exactly why family and work make some of the best things to talk about, because that’s what matters.

Where It Might Go From Here

Scott described three eras. Before the pandemic you had the hooligan crotch rocket guys, then the pandemic brought in the everyman riders with nine-to-five jobs, and now there’s a lull. What the next thing is, nobody knows. Goofy thinks it’s already evolving, with more videos starting off the bike.

I’d take that further. My ideal video starts off the bike, has a stretch of riding, then an off-bike segment where I’ve arrived somewhere, then more riding, and maybe ends off the bike. I’m watching more people who spend time off the bike, because on-bike content is starting to feel monotonous when I watch other channels. I still do the single-camera, no-cuts video because it’s dead simple, even though I don’t think people love it. I don’t love watching it either.

That led to the case for two cameras. I think it’s almost necessary, because it gives you a natural place to cut away the dead stuff without it looking chopped up. Trekkie added the editor’s rule that every cut forces the viewer to re-engage, which is another reason to have more than one angle. He’s shooting with two 360 cameras now. Goofy still wants hands, handlebars, and gauges in the shot, and the discussion of where to mount things took a turn I’ll leave for the video.

---

Ride With Me

If you’ve got a motovlog story of your own, or you’re one of the channels that quietly went dark, I’d like to hear about it. Subscribe to the WaltInPA YouTube channel for more riding content, send this post to a friend who rides, and come hang out in the WaltInPA Discord, where good people talk about riding.

You can also find the rest of the crew on their own channels. Trekkie posts at TrekkieMoto, Goofy’s channel is Goofy Bastard, and Scott is at Scott’s Moto Adventures.