I quit my job in order to hike every trail in Ireland with my girlfriend and make videos about it: https://www.youtube.com/toughsoles. We're not making a profit by any means - so, not successful in that regard. But we are seeing the country that we belong to, and I think we're slowly raising awareness about the incredible places that exist tens of kilometres from people's front doors.
As someone who is pondering about doing something like this in the future, i just watched some of your videos.
If I may, i want to give some suggestion. The first one is: consider adding some background music, for example when showing the landscape or walking otherwise it feels a bit empty. The second one is about the format: i think it will help you doing it as a sort of 'daily vlogging'. In this way you do not have the problem of having too much footage around as you mention and also it helps to convey a sense of story, even if it is just waking up - walking - eating - walking - going to sleep. It may also be a more watchable format for your followers if the videos are shorter.
Hope it helps you, keep up your adventure and good luck!
Appreciate the feedback. We'd never even edited a video before we started walking, so we're definitely still figuring out what we're doing, creatively and even just in terms of using the tools. It's also a function of doing it as we're walking - often we just don't have that much time to put a video together (very short backlog). I think that the style of our videos differ from one to the next - some with music or montages, some with very vlog-style cuts, and so on. For instance the Cavan Way video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvOQU_ZWoWQ&index=1&list=PLX...) is quite different from the One Second Per Kilometre video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXJvOvkJbcM&index=6&list=PLX...) :)
We do more than just the videos, too - we keep a pretty active Instagram/Facebook account, and write much more in-depth blogs on https://toughsoles.ie. It's hard not to be overwhelmed by the work and the newness of it all :)
Thanks again for the feedback! It really helps. Our audience is so small still that it can be hard to get honest, uninvested feedback.
Something I was thinking about earlier today is that the longer I'm away from day-to-day programming, the more I want to think about bigger, open-ended problems. Lately I've been thinking about code synthesis, for instance. I wonder why distance from a desk does that :)
At any rate it's amazing to be outside all the time. I would highly recommend getting outside and walking your nearest trail to every single person reading this! In Ireland, we have a gigantic network of walks, including short 2-3 hour loop walks: http://www.irishtrails.ie/trails.aspx?c=-1&t=-1&l=-1&g=All&f...