A climate activism storytelling challenge: can a YouTube audience moderately engaged in an eccentric rural extension be nudged towards measurably reducing carbon?

Room From A View

In March 2025, following a few months of experimentation and testing, YouTube channel See Through Together soft-launched a Playlist called Room From A View: can he build it?.

The Playlist description lays out Room From A View’s premise:

A Wiltshire homeowner reckons he can get an extension built for less than half what local builders would charge, by using what he can see from his front door.  

His own building experience extends to assembling flatpack furniture, but he’s ‘done his own research’ and reckons he can get his (equally amateur) mates to build it for free. 

Deluded, or inspired? 

Find out along with everyone else. Episodes are uploaded in ‘real time’, so no one knows how this story will end…

As promised, the first three episodes were uploaded to YouTube a week apart.

• Ep 1: A Crazy Idea? (3’41”), filmed late Jan ‘25, uploaded early Mar ‘25
• Ep 2: Avengers Assemble (18’00’), filmed early Feb ‘25, uploaded mid Mar ‘25, 
• Ep 3: Shopping in the Woods(20’21”), filmed late Feb ‘25, uploaded end Mar ‘25

Gaps between Episodes are filled with 

• Shorts (sub-60” clips) which YouTube tends to show viewers around 10x more often than 1min+ Videos
• Extras (60”+ Videos) consisting of extended or supplementary material not seen in the Episodes.

Series producers See Through Together are a team of award-winning veteran filmmakers, working pro bono, involved in variety of factual traditional TV and YouTube successes.

See Through Together is the YouTube content branch of the See Through network, a global network of pro bono experts with backgrounds from filmmaking to social media, AI, advertising and carbon consultancy. 

Along with See Through News (journalism, outreach), See Through Carbon (carbon reporting) and See Through Games (online education), See Through Together’s volunteers contribute their skills in the service of the See Through network’s common goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown By Helping the Inactive Become Active.

A promising start

From a standing start, with no publicity or paid ‘boosting’, Room From A View has got off to a strong, if unspectacular, start.

Here are some YouTube Analytics data on the first 3 episodes: 

• Nearly 50K views in 3 weeks: 100% ‘organic’ – no boosting or third-party promotion (= 900% increase in views)
• Shorts: driving engagement to longer Episode Videos, at the 12:1 view ratio implied by YouTube’s monetisation requirements. 
• Subscribers: added 200+ YouTube subscribers (=200% increase), mainly from Episodes, as anticipated, but also from Shorts.
• Engagement: big spike in YouTube Likes, from dozens to high hundreds, and Comments, from single digit to dozens.

Are these numbers impressive?

This largely depends on your point of comparison. 50K views in three weeks is very respectable for ‘quality’ content not specifically engineered as YouTube clickbait, but falls far short of professional influencers whose content is optimised for YouTube’s algorithm.

Some comparators, for context:

• Sky-Seeding’: planting rain forest trees by drone in South West England, a 7 min video uploaded on The Woodland Trust’s YouTube channel (22.3K YouTube subscribers) at the same time, had 1.3K views in the same period. Woodland Trust’s Shorts average around 1K viewers.
• After 10 months of hard work this tiny house is finally starting to feel like a home, a Short from the @TheDoerDuo channel (15K YouTube subscribers) uploaded around the same time, has had around 1.8K views since October 2024
• Is It Possible To Build A Cheap House in 2025?, a Short uploaded by @tinyhousediy1536 (63 YouTube subscribers) in Oct 2024, has had around 500 views in 5 months. 

For unpromoted content, uploaded without fanfare and depending 100% on ‘organic’ growth to find their audiences, this YouTube debut can be considered impressive, but unspectacular. 

The upward trend, exponential after 3 weeks, could easily plateau or plummet, instead of become a viral YouTube hit.

YouTube experts might notice something unusual about the videos in the Room From A View playlist. The first line of every Description of every Video and Short is a link labeled simply

‘For more: https://bit.ly/RoomFromAView. ‘

Anyone clicking on this link, then clicking again when YouTube asks them if they’re really, really, sure they want to leave the comfort zone of Google’s warm embrace, and reading to the end of the of the article it lands on, discovers that Room From A View’s ‘true purpose’ is rather different from most other YouTube videos.

But, as you might imagine, and is revealed below, hardly anyone is that curious.

The only important stat

As  explained in its Methodology FAQ article, the number of people who click this non-YouTube link is See Through Together’s’ key metric.

The producers are not interested in numbers of YouTube views per se, still less in monetizing its social media reach – See Through’s pro bono model means it doesn’t even need a bank account.

For See Through Together, attracting YouTube attention and interest is a means, not an end. ‘Education’, ‘outreach’, ‘raising awareness’ etc., while necessary steps for most people to take carbon reducing actions, are not sufficient on their own. They’re not even required for everyone to take a step towards sustainability.  

See Through projects all serve the same Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active.

To be absolutely clear, Room From A View’s ‘stretch goal’ is to hoodwink a YouTube-lurking climate denier into building a zero-carbon, sustainable home, because it saves them money and gives them a ‘better’ story than their peers. 

Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is, by See  Through’s definition, ‘effective’. Talking the talk without translating it into action, See Through considers ‘ineffective’.

So, See Through Together’s strategy is aligned with that of YouTube up to the point when viewers click on the link that takes them away from YouTube. Up to that point, they’re adding to the problem, via the additional carbon generated by our Silicon Valley Overlords’ data centres.  

Anyone who declines to take this critical step through the social media portal, and give themselves the chance to follow See Through’s pathway of measurable carbon reduction action, may have had their ‘awareness raised’, but has practically been a net contributor to increase, not reduce, greenhouse gas emissions.

The only stat that matters to See Through Together is how many people click on that ‘yes, I want to leave YouTube’ link. If the number is zero, the entire project has failed.

Care to hazard a guess as to how many of Room From A View’s 50,000-odd viewers clicked on the link?  

This is the number used by See Through Together to measure Room From A View’s success or failure.

What do you think would be a high number, denoting obvious success? And what, short of zero, would be a low number, evidence of unqualified failure?

Advertising experts would expect this number to rise with prolonged exposure, as See Through accumulates brand trust and familiarity. We’re unlikely to buy a fizzy sugary drink the first time we see an ad for it, or the second or third, but become more likely once we’ve seen dozens plus.

Anyone who followed See Through New’s ‘I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas’ experiment to benchmark this ratio will be at an advantage in benchmarking this ratio, revealed below.

The YouTube Algorithm Guessing Game

To ju-jitsu YouTube’s algorithm, you must first understand it. 

In this sense, See Through Together is playing the same never-ending, spy-versus-spy, guessing game as all other would-be YouTuber influencers.

By these metrics, the early Room From A View analytics suggest the content has followed a standard 3-step plan to get people to the point where they’ll click on the ‘For More’ link: 

1. Shorts have driven viewers to Episodes
2. Episodes have driven subscriptions
3. Shorts and Videos have prompted engagement in the form of Likes and Comments

Among the wealth of data YouTube provides – viewers’ gender, your content’s ‘stickiness’, when viewers tend to watch your content etc. – the most intriguing and direct feedback comes in the form of the Comments.

Assuming #DIY, #timber or #construction aren’t the kind of tags online bad actors point bots towards in order to disseminate misinformation and disinformation, Comments are the best place to get a feel for why  ordinary people are watching, and what they think the show is about.

It’s all about the money right?

Interestingly, none of the dozens of YouTube Comments has yet questioned the Playlist’s ‘purpose’, as they did at a sold-out local test screening held before launch. 

See Through Together’s true carbon-reduction purpose is explained in detail via the link at the top of each video, but so far only around 30 viewers have been curious enough to click the ‘For More’ URL.

This might be because they assume See Through Together’s ‘purpose’ in making these videos is either to make money directly by reaching the threshold at which YouTube decides to start paying content providers a tiny proportion of what it earns from their IP, or indirectly, by gaining enough viewers to become an ‘online influencer’. 

Following See Through’s ‘transparent Trojan Horse’ methodology, Room From A View neither discourages this assumption, nor highlights its ‘true’ carbon-busting objective.

But whether they’re aware of the content’s ‘true purpose’ or not, what’s the focus of Room From A View’s YouTube Commenters? 

Predicted Comments

Most Room From A View viewer Comments follow the patterns predicted by See Through’s team of social media experts, and intended by its team of filmmakers, i.e. falling one side or the other of the Deluded/Inspired binary set up in the playlist description.  

Encouragingly for those who see all social media as a cesspit of humanity’s worst instincts, even on the limited sample of the first three weeks, the Comments have overwhelmingly leaned to the positive side:

• I absolutely love this series and all the people involved.  @michaelreid1209  
• You got this @Supernaturalcloak
• Give it a go mate! @RegAtherton
• You got this @Supernaturalcloak

No Comment has yet overtly supported the ‘deluded’ tag, but many could be filed under the adjacent category of ‘advice, admonition, scepticism and warning’:  

• Using solar panels for the roof is not a great idea. You’re better off doing a traditional tried and true thatched roof like the main house. It would be better in every way. You can grow your own roof material for later repairs etc.  @samcarver317
• Try to merge old ideas with new techniques.   @xokomak252 
• Flat roof…@marty1234able
• You’ll do just fine, I’m sure and if not the council will have you rip it down and you can try again! @zacsayer1818 
• Planning permission would be the problem initially. Building control – if it’s listed (at 400+ years old, it might be) – building it using the same method as the original may be the only way he’s allowed to do it.@michaelleiper 
• Good luck with Building Control..@Mole-Skin  
• You beat me to it.  Come back in two years, to see if the council have made a decision, I would doubt it.@RoggoesontheTube

Unpredicted Comments

A third, unanticipated category of Comments, however, has emerged. 

These are not directly related to the technicalities of the construction, nor the minutiae of British local government planning regulation coming from predictable onlines sub–tribes (natural builders, DIY nuts, tree-huggers, crafters etc.).

Rather, these Comments from much broader pools of people, less easy to categorise. 

They appear intrigued not by the Homeowner’s state of delusion, or Wiltshire County Council’s interpretation of national planning guidelines, but by various elements of what could be called the Situation. 

They want to know more about the personalities of the people involved, the landscape and its history, the role of local characters not yet encountered, the kind of people involved, and the broader community implied by the particular extension narrative.

• Great plan!! Is the cottage on Lord Bath’s land? Is he giving permission for the staff of Longleat to use the materials?  @robertelliott2026
• Imagine having people like this in your dugout @jintsfan
• 4-500 years ago, that was all forest  @Automedon2 

Small though the sample size is, and minority though such Comments currently are, this kind of reaction suggests the possibility of diverting Room From A View from its relatively narrow DIY/property show/traditional craft niche, towards potentially appealing to a much wider, broader audience, engaged by soap operas/reality shows.

The themes that drive these kind of viewers cleave closer to the characteristics Homo sapiens has depended on for the 300,000 years of its low-impact history up to the exploitation of fossil fuels in the Industrial Revolution. Logically, these same values should underpin any sustainable future where our species reverts to living within its resources. 

• Community
• Mutual aid
• Living in Harmony
• Living with Nature

Might it be possible, even at this early stage, to steer Room From A View away from its relatively limited audience, towards a larger one, more interested in broader underlying themes?

Might a ‘universe’ of interconnected sub-plots and characters be able to gradually and subtly replace what initially appears to the the central narrative of Deluded/Inspired homeowner building/not building his extension?

If successful, this experiment could also find a broader audience. 

This re-imagining of Room From A View could provide an interesting case study not just for YouTube influencers looking to expand their brand, and brands looking to extend their franchises, but also to activists looking to attach their messaging to more effective and appealing stories.

Franchise expansion/brand extension

The Cleavage Party (working clickbait title), filmed a couple of weeks after the publication of this article, is designed to test this potential future direction for Room From A View. 

The next two episodes of the central Extension narrative are obvious, and driven by standard property show formats: 

• Ep 4, Budget, assembles the quotes from the builder, grounds works experts, foresters, structural engineers, renewable suppliers etc., to reveal whether – in principle at least – it’s feasible to beat the £100K budget limit implied by Ep 1.
• Ep 5: Planning, reveals the final drawing that will be submitted to Wiltshire Planning Department for its approval/rejection.

The problem from a storytelling perspective is What Next? 

The Wiltshire Council website states a minimum of 15 weeks to process planning applications. Anecdotally, it could be much longer.

How can Room From A View maintain momentum during this narrative ‘hungry gap’?

One way may be to nudge the property show story in the direction of a soap opera/reality show, greatly expanding its room for manoeuvre, and diminishing the importance of the Extension.

The Cleavage Party links these two narrative paths by:

• Featuring returning characters (Jim the Forester, Paul the Thatcher, Clare the Partner) so far only seen in the Extension narrative context
• Introducing new characters of diverse ages and backgrounds, but still linked to the Extension narrative
• Introducing viewers to a wider Horningsham community outside the Longleat context already familiar through long-running BBC series  Animal Park.

If viewer response to The Cleavage Party is positive, it opens up Room From A View’s potential to ‘expand its brand’ beyond the central Extension narrative. 

This in turn could construct a bridge to engaging general-interest viewers into the community beyond Little Pottle Cottage’s extension, while retaining the core ‘transparent Trojan horse’ methodology of smuggling in sustainability messages under the guise of money-saving/DIY/craft/reality show etc.

Using polls and quizzes, Room From A View can be lead by real-world, real-time audience demand, e.g. by asking viewers if they’d like to see, for example:

• A Day In The Life of Jim The Forester
• Paul the Thatcher’s Day Job
• Andy’s garden Twigloo, made from hedge clippings.

RFAV as The Archers

The Archers provides a useful case study for this possible new direction. 

Launched by the BBC Home Service on New Year’s Day 1951, it was a clever storytelling trick that could have failed immediately. 

The Archers was artfully designed to smuggle post-war agricultural technology and policy information to farmers, by wrapping it in a soap opera package.

To the surprise of the BBC, producers and audiences alike, The Archers quickly turned into something quite different, with far wider appeal.

Over decades, its narrative sub-plots, strong characters, and infinitely adaptable format expanded The Archers’ fan-base way beyond its original farming audience. The interleaving narratives of its expanding cast of characters have been updated, adapted, refreshed and renewed ad infinitum, matching changing tastes to the present day, when less than 1% of the British population is engaged in farming.

The nominal central narrative remains the fictional Archer family farm, in the fictional village of Ambridge, in the fictional county of Borsetshire, but The Archers has grown well beyond such a narrow focus. For generations, it has been a central feature of British culture, becoming the world’s longest-running radio drama. ​​ 

What started as ‘an everyday story of country folk’ is now promoted as ‘a contemporary drama in a rural setting’, reflecting its changing character.

Like 1930s radio storylines designed to sell laundry-powder morphing into an entire ‘soap opera’ genre funded by all manner of different advertisers, The Archers turned a niche innovation into a national institution – but without abandoning its central original function. 

The Archers still smuggles new agricultural practice, innovation, issues and policies, along with the storylines reflecting the changing nature of the countryside and country dwellers, and British society in general. Expert storytellers ensure it remains relevant while retaining its core purpose, by constantly reflecting, adapting to, and capturing the public imagination as society changes.

A YouTube Archers?

First, the questions.

What if Room From A View  can make a similar transition from property show to authentic reality show?

It is possible, in this online age that so values ‘authenticity’, for an authentically authentic, old-school, fly-on-the-wall, observational documentary to still work online? 

Can this be done without standard ‘linear’ TV entertainment format assumptions that authenticity needs a helping hand via ‘casting’, or the confection of  jeopardy via elaborate rules and games?

Can Room From A View retain its core purpose of smuggling sustainability messages, like The Archers still transmits farming change information, while entertaining a broader range of viewers?

Might this modestly successful start become the seed of a non-fictional update of the Archers model, by:

• Reflecting the different social backgrounds of modern rural dwellers
• Replacing fictional narratives with old-fashioned fly-on-the-wall observational documentary, and selfie-style video diary style familiar to the TikTok generation.
• Deriving the much-sought-after ‘authenticity’ from actual authenticity, instead of confected reality formats.

By artfully nudging its existing audience, and targeting everyone interested in a good story (i.e. everyone), might producers See Through Together be able to turn ‘an everyday story of 21st century country folk’ into ‘a contemporary reality show nudging a sustainability agenda’?

Cleavage Party

Here’s See Through Together’s plans to answer some of these questions.

The Cleavage Party episode is set up to test four overt things, and one covert one:

The four obvious tests have been seeded in the first three Episodes.

1) Delusion Test: Robert the Homeowner’s theory that traditional building ‘can’t be all that hard’ even for novices, be upheld in practice? We’ll find out at the end of the party, when we see the results of the guests’ amateur efforts.

2) Budget Test: can the assemble novices secure the replacement retaining walls in Little Pottle Cottage’s garden using cleft timber costing tens of pounds, rather than bespoke angle iron costing hundreds of pounds?

3) Free Labour Test: will Robert’s ‘free labour’ wheeze, based on the example set by the TV show episode he and millions of other British viewers have seen about The Man Who Build His House In The Woods, work? Will any of his friends, family and neighbours actually show up?

4) Gender Test: at the end of Ep 2 Avengers Assemble, Dylan the Builder unexpectedly observes that in his experience of running workshops and build-camps teaching round wood timber framing, women are consistently better carpenters than men. Half the cleaving party guests will be female, so viewers can draw their own conclusions.

The final, unstated, covert test may turn out to be the most significant one of all.

5) Storytelling Test: can the filmmakers turn this amateur wood-splitting party into a nexus of narrative sub-plots, that will hook viewers into wanting to know more about the characters, the village, the community, and generally curious about What Happens Next, irrespective of the fate of the Little Pottle Cottage extension?

Here’s a taster, to help readers make their own predictions. In the spirit of Room From A View’s format of uploading episodes as they’re filmed and edited, no one knows whether any of this will work.

Cleavage Party Guest List

Brief descriptions of the Cleavage Party attendees, all cleaving novices:

• Mother & Daughter: Robert’s partner Clare (60s) and Clare’s daughter Alice (30s). Clare has many practical skills, from ceramics to sewing, and Alice, a professional bike repairer now teaching herself to be a car mechanic, is a chip off the old block. But will they be any good at cleaving?
• Married Couple Ka Fue & Katherine: Ka Fue (60s) may be the only guest with cleaving experience, but it was in the jungles of Vietnam half a century ago. He’s now a social worker in Salisbury. His wife, Oxford graduate teacher Katherine (60s) is an accomplished violinist, but a cleaving novice.
• Neighbours: Jim the Forester (60s) lives in Horningsham, and we know well from his critical role in the Extension project as the manager of the woodlands surrounding Little Pottle Cottage. Even closer neighbour, however, is Andy the Gardener (50s), from five doors up Pottle Street.  Andy is gardening consultant to Garden Rescue, promotes ‘natural gardening’, and recently set up Horningsham’s community association. He and Jim don’t know each other yet, but should have plenty in common – but will their mutual interests distract them from their cleaving?
• Random Pairing: Paul the Thatcher (40s) we know from Ep 2, though we’re yet to learn his remarkable back story – what do you think he did for the fifteen years between working as a runner in Soho’s advertising industry, and training as a Master Thatcher, and why is there such a huge difference in the responses of men and women when they discover his second career? We may be there when Robert’s London friend Chris (60s), documentary filmmaker-turned physics teacher, finds out.
• Students: Nessa (20s) is a family friend, whose mother was 7 when she shared the Trans-Siberian Express with Robert from Beijing to Moscow in 1985. Now studying to be a nanny in nearby Bath, she may bring a student friend to help balance the numbers, as Robert will probably be making tea, or supervising the landscaping logistics.

Cleavage Party Schedule

First task for the Cleavage Party guests, should they actually show up, is to walk a few hundred metres to the dead end of Pottle Street.

Within sight of Little Pottle Cottage, they’ll locate some 6-foot lengths of a dead sweet chestnut Jim’s Longleat Forestry lads recently felled, and which Robert has bought for less than the price of a round of beers. 

They hump them into Robert’s battered Zafira, to transport them back to Little Pottle Cottage.

Over an outdoor lunch, Robert reveals the challenge. Instead of using £400-worth of bespoke metal spikes to secure the sleepers he’s bought to replace some rotting retaining walls around the garden, they’re going to try using cleft wood instead. It’s much cheaper, but can a bunch of cleaving novices do it, without the guidance of an experienced woodsman.

• Robert passes around Ben Law’s Woodland Way book, which includes some B&W photo instructions. It explains how round wood loses 50% of its strength when you saw through it to make standardised lengths of lumber, but much less if you cleave (i.e. split) it along its natural fibres, like when you chop firewood or split kindling.
• He shows them a video he filmed 13 years ago, of Ben teaching his apprentices how to cleave and split wood. 
• He shows them the collection of rusty old axe heads, hatchets, spikes, pickaxe heads, sledge hammers and spikes he found when spring-cleaning the garage.

They all have a go. We see the results.

***

The original working title for what became Room From A View was What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

If you’re curious to find out, subscribe to the @SeeThroughTogether YouTube channel.

If you want to help See Through’s underlying mission to measurably reduce carbon, share the series widely, and encourage your friends, family and colleagues to do the same.