The past three weeks have been very interesting. I have spent quite a bit of that time thinking about life, the universe and everything. Well… that happens a lot at my age anyway, but the events of the past few weeks… and even the past few months have really focused my attention on existentialism. However, one of the recurring thoughts is about the nature of time and effort. Time is the one resource we cannot ever recover or make more of… but effort is something that we can control. We can determine how much effort we put into something and into which projects we want to invest that effort.
Across these two things comes a couple of ideas… necessity and happiness. There are things that we must spend time and effort on because they are necessary. Eating and sleeping are at the top of the list. Unless you are independently wealthy, then work is probably up there too… as are school and family obligations. You can probably throw doing your taxes into that stack as well. Then there are things that we want to spend time and effort on. In the best case scenarios, there is overlap… such as spending time with family. We need to do that, but that’s okay because we want to do that. However, for most of us, there is not a whole lot of overlap. So after you account for the stuff you must do… whatever time and effort left to you can be spent on the stuff that you want to do… and undoubtedly there is probably not enough time or energy to everything you want to do.
Yeah… money is a consideration too… but that complicates things too much… so keeping it simple… we all have a limited pool of time and effort that we can spend on the stuff that we enjoy or stuff that gives us satisfaction… or a sense of accomplishment… or in the best case scenario… all of the above. I think that all of that is probably intuitively obvious to everyone… but I don’t know that most folks really understand the implications until they get bashed in the face with an example.
I got bashed in the face with an example. I have already mentioned that my long time best friend passed and he was only 57. For some of you, that might seem ancient… but when you get into your late 40’s… you can trust me that it won’t seem old at all. Anyway, my friend Eric had just retired and less than 10 days later, he was dead. He had a huge backlog of things he wanted to do that he had been compiling over the course of his whole life, and just when he thought the road ahead was clear and straight and he put his foot to the accelerator… he ran out of gas. Game over. That kind of thing gets you thinking. And I have been.
And one of the things I realized is that I could feasibly retire now. But… I will be eating catfood and stale leftovers from the bakery if I do… so I think I need to remain working and saving a bit longer. No retirement for me… at least not anytime soon. So my pool of time and effort is still pretty limited and while I remain committed to sharing a good portion of that with all of you… I think I need to reevaluate exactly what that entails. I recently made some changes to the release schedule on my channel and now I have videos coming out at least every five days. I like that. I enjoy that. The numbers I get from Youtube seem to indicate that you do as well. Great!
However, the numbers also tell me something else. As the nature and mix of my videos has been shifting… so has the my audience and their viewing habits. For a long while, hardly anybody watched my videos… so it was hard to see what the data implied because there was hardly any data to work with. Then I started to get some traction… and the numbers showed that most of my viewers came to watch something… and rarely returned. Later, when I wrapped up the Gryphon Manor series and most of my output was centered around the Mod Deep Dives while I worked on the planning and infrastructure of the Let’s Play series… the number of views and subscriptions started to climb steadily, but the number of repeat viewers was consistently low… in the lower half of the single digits.
Eventually, I started doing the Let’s Play videos and I have been releasing them on a much more frequent basis… and over the course of the past month, I have seen a shift in the numbers. Initially, I started losing a few subscribers and my views plateaued and then eventually started dropping. I was having more fun than ever before with the channel, but it looked like it was hurting my channel. And then the numbers started to change again. The number of returning viewers started growing… and not just a brief momentary spike… but a small, steady, and growing number of people began to come back to the channel… again and again… and so did the views and the subscriptions… AND some of these videos are getting very good view times. People are watching more of these videos… often times… most or even all of a given video… and these are my Let’s Play videos. These are the videos that I made the channel for. These are the videos that are the most fun and interesting for me to make.
The people interested in the mod videos were coming in to learn something. When they learned it, they left. The folks watching these Let’s Play videos are investing themselves into the projects I am creating. They are returning to see how it goes. They are reaching out with comments. In short, they are forming a community. That is incredibly interesting and exciting to me.
And in returning to the idea of time and effort that I started out with, I think that all of this points to an obvious conclusion. If my time and effort is limited… and the Mod Deep Dive videos are not building the kind of relationship with the audience that I want… but the Let’s Play videos are… AND they are a lot more fun to make and thus make me happier… well… you see where this is going.
So, I am not saying that I will stop make the Mod Deep Dive videos… nor am I committing to continue making them. Well, where does that leave us? What it means is that I may make more of these videos in the future… but for now, I am removing them from the planned rotation. If or when I feel compelled to make another one… I will. When will that be? I don’t know. What will it be about? I have no idea.
But until that time, I am doubling down on the Let’s Plays. I will continue to have fun with them, and if the trends I am seeing in the numbers pan out, then the channel will continue growing and I think everyone will have a lot of fun… and as they say in the Hokey Pokey song… that’s what it’s all about. So I hope you will continue to be around as things progress. If you want to reach out to me, you have access to my Facebook, Youtube, Discord and even my LinkedIn through this site.