Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dead Mall Walking. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Dead Mall, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Malls across the US (and beyond) are shuttering at an unprecedented rate. Dead malls are a time capsule of what our culture used to look like in the ’90s and ’00s, filled with countless stories from those of us who grew up spending our time in them. Probably way too much of our time!

By documenting struggling malls before they close, I hope to remind people of better days through nostalgia and faded memories. And, when the malls in question are no longer accessible, I hope that videos like mine will help to preserve what they used to look like and offer a window into that history.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’ve been uploading videos about retail history for around five years now – coincidentally, I started just before the pandemic, which made accessing some of the buildings I wanted to explore a little tricky.

Since then, my videos have been clocked up around a million views. Not quite enough to break the internet, but enough to encourage me to keep going and preserve as many malls as I can on film.

I also have an Instagram account – @deadmallwalking – on which I feature behind the scenes shots of malls and liminal spaces, retail memes, and highlights from other places I’ve been exploring.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Building an audience, which I’ve done primarily on Instagram and YouTube, has been really tricky because of the ways in which social media companies continue to move the goalposts.

One minute you’re supposed to use 10-15 hashtags on every post, the next hashtags are considered fairly meaningless. Filling your video description with lots of keyword variations was once looked at as being spammy, but is now considered a best practice. The landscape is always changing.

I try to keep up with all of these changes as best as I can, but I also make sure to look at what’s working well (or not so well) on my own accounts and make changes to upcoming content based on that.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Perfection is the enemy of progress. I used to obsess over little detail in my videos, from tweaking the angle I film at to making incremental changes to background music levels. Although I still spend a lot of time and effort getting my videos just right, I now understand that focusing on telling an engaging story is much more important than minor technical details the average viewer may not even notice.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deadmallwalking/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DeadMallWalking