Milestone time

Oh look, we achieved some sort of arbitrary number:

It's been a year of steady growth, with decent if unspectacular views on most videos - perhaps the telling thing is that my standard for a relative bomb is now something that gets 500 views, and I remember when I used to count that as outrageous success.

On the flip side, there hasn't been one of those outrageous breakout successes this year. There's a chunk of solid performances in the 1-3K range, which is not unreasonable for a channel of this size in this genre, especially given the wild fluctuations as YouTube try to build a better way to match viewers to videos they might be interested in, but nothing big and unexpected. Sigh.

Er, yeah. If you hadn't guessed already, it's going to be one of those states of the union.

This Is Fine.

What I take from this is that if I keep putting in the work and delivering a video each month of satisfying depth and quality, and keep working on making the lighting and the audio and the visuals slightly better each time, I will keep steadily growing the channel until it hits some sort of general limit for the niche which is probably a satisfying amount of views and subscribers higher than I'm currently at.

Also, I would need to keep a handle on what topics are of general appeal and recognisable and therefore not do things like this.

As I have often said on the channel, "oh no..."

cj_here_we_go_again.gif

In amongst the 6,000 people who'll watch something I put up if they recognise it and it looks interesting are about 300-400 or so of you who will watch anything I put up on the basis that if I find it interesting, you will too, and even if you don't you'll probably be entertained by me being inept or struggling to stay on top of the subject matter.

I feel comfortable saying "you" here, because if you've bothered to come here and read this and also get this far in my introspective ramblings there's an above-average chance you're one of those people.

Then as a further subset of this are the people who, even though I don't have my own Discord or a particularly big social media presence, will track me down to talk more in depth about stuff I've covered on video or suggest things I might want to look at.

And here I come to a realisation. What do I end up talking to those people about?

Death of a Non-salesman

It is indeed quite often retro gaming and computing in general. No, this is not me coming to a realisation about how I can't stand the core subject my channel has been about for the past four years. But there's a lot of other stuff outside of that and I am coming to a slow realisation here.

Why am I not talking about these things on the channel?

There's one metric in YouTube Studio which pains me every time I look at it, and it's this:

I feel a tremendous lack of connection for such a relatively large channel. People enjoy the videos in isolation, but there's something missing there - what I do does not inspire devotion. I think it's telling that most other people I know who got channels to this size had some kind of outreach from a much larger YouTuber by this point. I'm not saying I'm sitting here with that as a checkbox I'm expecting to tick but it's telling that nobody who does this stuff as a proper full-time career has spotted it and gone, "hey, that deserves a step up and the opportunity for a wider audience".

That's on me, by the way. This isn't a complaint about some notional capricious whims of the people whose subscribers number in the hundreds of thousands. It's something you need to stand out and be obviously likeable to deserve. Every time I settle for doing something that's a bit derivative, let the "standoffish lecturing" take over, well... being left to do it alone is the result.

Warmth and personality

I've written before about how I've wanted to move the channel in a better, more personable direction and I think you can see it in action with the Frontier and Black & White vids, particularly the little follow-up I did about the dancing bear plugin.

Spoiler: there are going to be more of those 5-6 minute videos where I just take a little thing that I like and chat about it with no real objective beyond sharing a few memories and hopefully making someone else smile.

Now the big spoiler: I don't think they're always going to be about games.

As I put together the Black & White videos, both the big one and the small one, I ended up having a bit of a chat about the looser, rambling style and who it would or wouldn't appeal to and a phrase started sticking in my mind.

Pub conversations about nostalgia.

That's it. The channel identity should be to feel like a conversation you'd have in the pub about some old stuff. This is beautiful to me because it's given me a single, identifiable goal to aim for while also massively expanding the remit. Now, I'm not going to start building some kind of fake pub set because that would be the action of a maniac and I think it's more algorithm-friendly to keep my associated beverage as a mug of tea, but as a unifying vibe it's perfect. All those sidetracks, backtracks, out-takes I forget to take out and the general lack of professionalism are exactly what you'd expect from a pub conversation, even a bizarre one in which someone has chosen to drink a mug of tea in the pub. Even without the maniacal act of building a fake pub to broadcast from, I know that my study ought to be set up with 2-3 filming locations that have the same sort of cozy, slightly worn old world feel.

I'm still not certain about that last word. Maybe "pub conversations about the slower things in life" if we count simulators too?

Junk

More exciting to me is the remit. If I pin the vibe I can choose the subject matter at will. I had a goal originally that the channel would be a one-stop shop covering all manner of retro and nerdy topics; games would be the starting point, but we could look at records, old toys, whatever took my fancy. Then I scared myself off it with early 2020s YouTuber paranoia that channels have to be about just one broad topic and if even hopping between different types of game was making it hard to attract an audience then making something not about games at all would be even worse.

To feel better about this I promised myself that once I'd got most of the house sorted out I'd use the freed-up spare time to run a kind of junk channel, where I could talk about all the non-game old stuff. This remained a long-term aspiration until I set up TimberwolfK Plays and realised in short order that having two channels is an absolute pain if you have to manage them yourself, and this would be way worse if the junk channel ever achieved similar popularity to the retro computer one.

So as we approach the channel's five year marker in November I'm going to put out an overview video of the first five years and unless I get an overwhelming sense of hostility from discussing it, start dragging old records out of boxes alongside the regular retro gaming videos, which themselves will probably start heading to more obscure stuff and likely back to general PC topics rather than things which carry the "hey, this is game, you remember game right?" familiarity.

Aliens

I say that, I might do it even if the initial reaction is hostility.

One of the reasons I think it's so hard for people to genuinely love what I do (without knowing me and having the extra context of what the person behind it is like in real life) is that I've tried a bit too hard to avoid it being possible to hate what I do. I toned down a lot of the earlier silly (maybe even dangerously close to wacky) side in acceptance of covering topics which attract people who take things very seriously, avoided anything too controversial, and generally erred on the side of pleasing everyone a little bit rather than pleasing a few people a lot. The problem with this kind of "it's for everybody" approach is that you often end up with nobody feeling it's for them in particular.

There is only one big alienating move I pulled on the channel and it's this: absolutely ram the shutters down on the Let's Play era with a stern "there ain't no OpenTTD here and there never was" leaving a confused onlooker starting at a tutorial for that very game. And if I look back at that with the benefit of four years of hindsight,

a) Most of the people I liked from the Let's Play era stayed around, for a few years at least.
b) The people who hate-disliked and left snide comments and did the subscribe-to-unsubscribe thing back when that was noticeable in the numbers left pretty quickly.
c) The overall result was massively, massively good for me and for the channel.

So yeah, I'm starting to approach this with a bolder mindset. There was a point a few weeks ago where I got some snarky comment about being too cautious in how I present an opinion I think is against the grain - a couple of years ago this would have gone in the list of yet another thing to throw in the stew of compromise that is Mildly Pleasing Everybody but my reaction was straight up, "no, you don't belong here, this is not the channel for you". If I'm willing to be harsh on people self-selecting that they don't want to see the channel any more, then it ought to come with the confidence to make it clear who would want to see it.

One of the things I realise about having achieved some moderate level of success out of retro gaming YouTube is what I want to get out of it beyond that. When I started I had these deluded visions of getting invited to panels and collaborations with all the big UK names of the time... and the funny thing is now that gap is a lot smaller and many of those names have given up or pivoted their channel or release only sporadically I can't imagine doing anything so awkward and forced when I could be invited to a table with any number of Big Red Arrow compatriots, have a great time and then say something career-ending because I got a little too relaxed.

With this in mind, I absolutely want to keep the computing stuff because I love going to those events and poking at old 8-bits and 1970s microcontrollers and Silicon Graphics workstations feeling like I belong there, while also reflecting that the last such event I attended I spent a lot of time talking about idler-driven turntables, early '90s hip-hop, model railways and the historical trends in tier lists of fast food chain French fry quality. Alright, maybe that last one would be a bit of a stretch to put on the channel.

Point

I do sometimes wonder if there is any point to these irregular "whenever I notice a channel milestone" addresses, or if they're solely for my benefit in structuring my thoughts and setting down some kind of record of them so I can, for example, go back and remind myself how burnt out I was at the 900 subscriber point.

What I'm learning through this process of building up a YouTube channel is a willingness to be more drastic in building it the way I want. I don't think it's a position you can start with, but there's a point where you've proven to yourself you can achieve something you used to talk about as unthinkable success, and had people you respect say they enjoy what you created, that it becomes yours to destroy and reshape.

Maybe "pub conversations about a slower-paced world" might be another one of those ideas I form in one of these posts and then abandon after a few experiments, like my idea of having tentpole "storefront" videos from my 3,000 subscriber musings or even the questionable fate of TimberwolfK Plays having spent so much time planning it. (I think it's going to end up being one of those things where I make a batch of videos when I'm in the mood, and leave fallow when I'm not). But these posts have also given us the dogs-in-videos norm, the spontaneity of the pocket gimbal camera, and the "it's fine to be me" approach which this next chapter feels like an evolution of.

Hey, let's do another one when I approach 5,000 subscribers again from the opposite direction.