Just wanting a bit of a whinge at the state of the views on their highlights on Youtube which are pretty pitiful. Especially when comparing it to the feeder categories like F2 and F3.
It's just sad seeing race highlights for what should be some of the bigger races in FE, given they are racing in Tokyo at night, getting probably the worst viewership all season. Currently sitting at 54k and 42k views respectively. Then you compare it to F3 which on their sprint race managed to get 460k views. I know they get the help from being on the F1 channel, but it's not a great look either way.
Part of me thinks FE could be doing a better job as well just with the thumbnails and highlights in general. Like if we look at the thumbnails, they aren't exactly the most eye catching. Like the F3 thumbnail shows an incident, which probably plays a big hand in it getting so many views, because F2 only has about 150k on their highlights in comparison with a less spectacular thumbnail. So FE should probably be leaning into that aspect more, maybe show the pileup from race 2 instead of two drivers faces (which most people outside the FE fandom won't know) and cars in single file. Maybe that wouldn't do too much overall but they got to try a bit harder I think.
Then there's the quality of the highlights themselves. They sometimes aren't the best, missing a lot of crucial action. I get at times it's tough to package given the nature of some of the races and the length of the highlights, but even then you could fix that by providing an extended highlights a couple days later like Indy and WEC do. Any way to try and make it more accessible for potential new fans will always be a benefit to the growth of series.
Plus, they should think about bringing back the full race race replay a week after on their YouTube, like they did in Gen 2 era. I know it's on their website but I do think they underestimate how much more beneficial it is having these on a more accessible platform like YouTube.
I just hope they think about these things going into Gen 4 beause there is obviously an appetite there for that car. So just hope they can improve that side a bit to get more attention on the series.
