Lately, I realized that videos I post on Youtube should have music in it, instead of being completely mute. That's because completely mute videos are bad for my engagement metrics, and bad engagement metrics are bad for my Youtube channel.
The reason I post mute videos in first place is because it's very difficult to edit videos compared to editing text, so I'd rather keep it as simple as possible. If the video had voice, I'd have to take it in consideration while editing it, which would limit my versatility. So instead I chose to made them mute.
The problem with mute tutorial videos is that while they're functionally equivalent to a tutorial video with a random background music in it, the audience will only watch for as long as they are captivated by the tutorial, which is a bad thing.
For example, if there are tips at the end of the tutorial, the audience won't stick around to see it, because the first part of the video already taught them everything they were there to know. Similarly, even if there is nothing at the end, they won't watch it until the very end, because the last few seconds are really just showing the result of the tutorial, so they will click away as quickly as possible instead of staring at an still image on Youtube. That sounds as entertaining as watching the wall dry.
While this sounds harsh, Youtube has the graphs to tell me that the average Youtube watcher has the attention span of a gold fish. They're just like me.
If the video has music, things are better. While I don't think I'd be able to keep someone watching a video for a long time just because of the music, nor do I think it makes sense to turn a tutorial into a music video just for the engagement metrics, at least the music will keep the audience entertained for a few seconds more than the sound of silence would.
Youtube lets me add music directly to my videos through its editor. Some of this music is Creative Commons licensed, which is nice. So there isn't much reason to have mute videos when I can just add some free music to it.
One problem that I do have, however, is that I don't know hot to search for music. There are so many songs, to listen to all of them would take all day. I don't know which one would fit a tutorial video very well. I try to avoid loud ones because that would probably make some people just click away from the video right away, hurting the metrics. Why is "Mood: Uplifting" so loud. Do people even use these in their videos. I'd like to see a video that uses this sort of music, just to know what it's like.