Me neither. But Make Magazine caters to the scientists, engineers and do-it-yourself hobbyists who do. The magazine has been doing a brisk business since it began publishing quarterly in February 2005 under the direction of publisher Dale Dougherty, who also publishes the O'Reilly Network, and boingboing co-founder Mark Frauenfelder.

Make's DIY content is, by its very nature, visual. And its contributors' projects—see LED-powered bonsai tree, above—often have that "Woah, that's cool" factor that incents readers to share the projects with their friends.

So recently the editors decided that the perfect complement to their amateur, viral-by-nature content was the penultimate amateur, viral-by-design site: YouTube.com.

Last week the magazine joined YouTube's new director program. The program allows content producers to post longer content and brand that content on YouTube. The result: Make is one of the first magazines to use a free amateur content service to extend their brand into video. Moreover, with this experiment, Make has the chance to demonstrate that sharing content over open platforms like YouTube can enhance brand power and translate into actual paid subscriptions.

The experiment starts this weekend, when Make will debut the YouTube videos during its first annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif.

Publish.com caught up with Associate Editor Phil Torrone to talk about why Make is getting into video, why it chose YouTube, and what a move like this means for the larger publishing world.

So, did you consider other sites? I recently did a comparison article on video sharing sites. There's so many out there! Did you consider any of the other ones, like Metasocial, or a service like Videoegg?

I saw the article, I thought it was good. The interesting thing about YouTube is just that, well, I'm just as impatient as everyone else out there. [With YouTube] I can immediately upload and it's almost immediately available. And distribution is just so fast. I think at this point their brand kind of represents to most people, "Oh wow, there's going to be something cool and interesting right away." For us, I've been trying all of [the video sharing sites] too, and a lot of it was well, y'know, I'd upload a video and it wouldn't work out or it would take too long to get published.

I think the thing that was driving us was there are just so many eyeballs that can potentially look at the video. We own our content, and we can do anything we want with it. When someone like us has that flexibility—I mean, we do a tour of a laboratory and show people who make all sorts of things for a living, from low-cost eyeglasses to laser etching parts to building a protein folding machine. We have the opportunity to get those videos out there because we don't have to worry about music clearances or lawyers or whatever. We can go anywhere and put our content anywhere, and that's why we'll try all of them and whichever one gets us the most metrics back, we'll use. One of the things that's important to us that we're tracking with YouTube is how many people will actually click through. Are we getting new users that wouldn't normally encounter the Make brand?

That's an interesting question. Because I know when I go on YouTube—which is, well, more often than my editor would like—when I go on the site I click around but I stay on the site. I don't want to go anywhere else. What do you think the likelihood of somebody coming to visit is?

I think it's just like all types of advertising. If 1percent of the people go through and investigate you and find out more about you, then that's a pretty good metric for online advertising. It's basically no different from television except we don't have to spend $14 million for a 30-second ad. The types of things that are starting to be interesting on the Web are a lot of the things we do at Make. Like, y'know, jam jar jets. We've got water rockets. And those types of things are what people are sending around. Like, check out this video of a pack of Mentos and a two-liter coke bottle.

Dude, was that you guys? Did you guys make that?

That was one of the ones somebody sent and somebody put it up on Google Video and YouTube. And everybody saw it. And that was when we said—this was a few months ago—well you know what? That's really neat! And everybody on the Web saw it, and we asked ourselves what could we do to take advantage of the viral nature of video. And if we could expose how cool our projects are on the inside of our pages in Make and use YouTube as kind of an advertisement, a television network that we don't have to pay for. And already, after the first week or so, I'm already seeing a fair number of people coming to us from YouTube. All of the URLs, which I'm of course able to track through this director program, are people coming to Make who haven't visited us before. These are probably younger folks who aren't normally exposed to a science and engineering magazine.

One of the things I'm starting to see now is that, while tons of people use iTunes and really, really like iTunes and iPod video, there's a lot more people who are going to browse a Web site and watch a video on a Web page. Embedded browser videos or just watching videos on a site is of more use to us than just iTunes alone. There's a tension between the content makers and Apple and iTunes, because all the TV networks want to do this on their own, but iTunes is iTunes, you've got to go and figure out how to work with iTunes. I like being this neutral property, which is Make. We can do anything we want. We can put our video everywhere, and we'll never have to make exclusive agreements with anyone.

Is that the future? Will every radio station, record label and movie house have their own downloading platform? That just sounds like a bad idea to me.

The way I see it is, as a magazine publisher, we'll never have the engineering team and the servers and the capability to run a full video download service, and if we do it means we're not concentrating on our core competency, which is making the best possible do-it-yourself magazine in the world. If companies want to [make their own download service] and get distracted and they want to spend a lot of their time on the engineering and the legal stuff and absolutely every little piece that goes into distributing terabytes of data per day, that's OK, but they're not going to be keeping their eyes on the prize. If you're a company that believes content is king and you like your brand, you can set it free.

For magazine publishers like us, in the future, you won't be able to tell what's online or what's offline, what's in print, what's in video. For instance, we have a video we're putting up shortly about a guy who modded a shopping cart and put a gas engine in it and made it the shopper chopper. It's a great video. And we're going to put it online. And maybe people will see it and go check out Make. That's how it's going to work.

Wow. A shopper chopper, huh?

Yeah. Cool, right?

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