Milestones and that
I'm trying to keep up a habit of writing some sort of state of the union whenever I reach a numeric milestone with the channel, even if only as a selfish reminder of my state of mind at the time.
So, witness!
This is a weird one because I've not put out any single big game-changing video. It's been a solid run of things that have done "generally okay", either because they're niche games or very technical or just because I threw something together quickly so I could continue to exist in some online sense.
Instead, I've been absolutely smashing it on back catalogue. Stuff which continues to gain views and subscribers even when it's months old. When a video performs "generally okay" purely because it's a niche subject, then it never stops serving that niche. I get a steady stream of viewers essentially for all time, especially if I'm the only person ever to cover that particular thing in an entertaining and well-presented way. The more I do of this, the more I have a "bingeable" channel; one where someone finds one of these weird early PC games or simulators or bits of long-obsolete programming ephemera and watches 3-4 of them in one go.
I rarely think too much about what's happening with the existing stuff, though. Because I'm thinking about the future.
Interesting Soap
An audience of 3,000 subscribers means there's about 2.69999 billion people on YouTube who might potentially be persuaded to come and watch my stuff. Now, some of them are going to be more interested in funny animals or the eternal dramas of people who've injected so much spodge in their bum they can probably bounce around on it like some kind of human space hopper. Some of them are more interested in writing comments lecturing people about th-fronting than actually enjoying anything, and I'd rather consign those to a deep hole than have them watch me.
This still leaves an awful lot of people who are good fun to have a community of, who'd probably watch something about weird simulators or old PCs if they thought it would be presented in an interesting and fun way. But getting that impression across is not trivial.
One thing I'm terrible at doing is the storefront.
What I mean by the storefront is those videos which get new people in and watching. See, almost everything I do is a 20-30 minute video essay on an esoteric subject. This is fine. I don't want to stop doing this. It's what most of my existing audience are there for, other than a few confused souls who just wanted more OpenTTD advice, and it's where that back catalogue performance comes from.
But I need something else. I need a class of video which invites people in, an easy 5 minutes or so to on a topic with wide appeal to build up that trust of, "yes, I would watch this guy talk about something I have no interest in for 20 minutes, because once he's done I will have found it interesting".
(Side note: I think the biggest difference in state of mind between here and my last milestone update is confidence in my ability to present. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I do at least feel there's something solid enough there to rely on.)
This is hard. I have a natural instinct to go, "but what about this? And this other thing? And if I'm explaining those, surely I need to talk about the context all of this existed in?"
Which is what occupies most of my thoughts about the channel right now. The need to be me on camera, but also be a tightly-edited and focused version of that person. If you watch closely you'll notice me wandering between fully-scripted, partly-scripted and even unscripted approaches of late, trying to get that ideal balance between sharpness and ramble. Also, to look at the camera rather than over there at that interesting tube of shaving soap.
What I'm really looking for, though, is not interesting soap. It's the breakthrough where I find an approach which lets me do things which are naturally 4-6 minutes long.
0-70
The reason I want to start making videos which run for about the length of time it takes a fully-laden Volvo 240 to accelerate to motorway speed (don't @ me, Volvo fanatics, you know it still feels like that) is that this gets me the storefront. I can still do what I'm doing, which is making these firesidey deep dives into a topic as and when I feel like, but also have something snappier where I can just pick something and turn it round in a day or two without feeling like the quality's dropped.
The reason for that is not just laziness, though.
A few times recently I've wanted to put together something topical for a new indie game or a big simulator update, and in some cases got a way into production before realising that what I'm doing is too slow, both in schedule terms and actual video terms. 20 minutes on the latest Euro Truck Simulator update three weeks after it's released might do reasonably, but it's not going to have the impact of a few minutes irreverently having fun with some of the new features within a day or two of them hitting general release.
Again, if I can get people to watch that, then maybe they feel like they know me well enough to watch something much longer on the history of these things, or me attempting to program my own in QBASIC, or any of the other weird ideas I love putting together.
Business Studies
Alright, this is a weird milestone update. It's not a detailed precis of how to emulate what I've done, or a celebration of small channels supporting each other, or even the frustration I felt years ago when Let's Play wasn't really going anywhere for me. It's just a distillation of thoughts I've been having, which I have every change of unthinking or reimagining by the time I ever implement them.
Perhaps this would be different if the recent growth was off the back of a single tentpole video, but it's not, and so my thinking is less around analysing a success and more about how to turn business as usual into Business with a capital B. Caps Lock, Shift, or right-click after the fact and apply some formatting option, usually.
I'm not sure it's even the milestone so much as it is naturally getting to the end of the year and thinking what 2024 will look like. Right now, the aim is to do more of this "high/low" production - adding in a stream of smaller, shorter, more me things so I can go deep into increasingly esoteric niches with vast amounts of detail knowing that stuff doesn't have to carry the channel's growth any more.
If only I could figure out how to keep myself concise...