If you are a close personal friend of mine… or even a close relative… you already know why I do this. Well, I guess my wife is an obvious exception to that… she gets me on so many fundamental levels, but she has never understood my obsession with my hobbies. But that is a story for another time… probably in a therapist’s office at a couple hundred dollars an hour.
But as I was saying… those who know me well, already know why I am doing this… so I would have to guess that if you are watching this, you don’t fit into that group. What may surprise you is that the answer is pretty straightforward, but to really understand how the answer is meaningful in any way, you need to understand how I got there… and it was a bit of a journey.
Several years ago, I was extremely unhappy with my job and I needed to find a way to decompress and lower my blood pressure before I had a stroke. I had almost completely stopped playing video games after I got married and that is probably another long discussion for the therapist. But the situation at home had changed over the years and to save my cardiovascular system, I eased back into playing video games and it really helped me relax.
Like I said, I had been gone a while… probably close to a decade… and of course, the games industry had chugged along while I was away and I needed to catch up on the changes. I turned to YouTube to find out what was going on in the gaming space. Up to that point, I had not really spent much time on YouTube except to post private home videos to share with the extended family.
Holy smokes! I thought I knew what YouTube had to offer, but I was wrong… and by at least a couple of orders of magnitude. I was amazed at what folks were posting… and even more amazed to find that many of them were making money by doing it… and some of them were making ridiculous amounts of money. At that point, the dollar signs popped up on my eyes like they do in the cartoons and I decided that if they could do it, I could do it and therefore, I would ultimately be able to leave the job I hated so much.
Let me just give you a little spoiler here… wanting to make money and leaving a job you hate are really good motivators in a lot of ways, but in terms of driving content creation… especially good content creation… they kinda suck as reasons to make videos. But I am getting ahead of myself.
So… I spent a few weeks watching videos with the specific purpose to see what the big name channels were doing so that I could learn from and emulate them. While I was doing that, I was going through a little bit of a homebrew media production basic training program. Then I put together the materials and graphics to brand my channel and I made my first video and then I finally created the actual channel and posted the video. And boy, it sucked. It sucked on a massive scale. It was especially sucky. It sucked so bad that it created vortex winds in all the neighboring states and a Canadian province.
But I left it up for a week and it got a grand total of 3 views. Two of those were mine and I can only imagine that whoever watched that third view was probably driven to alcoholism or a monastery. So… I took the channel down and went back to playing my games.
The thing about my game playing… it is a time when I kind of go into a zen-like state. And outside of the shower, it is my second best time for thinking about stuff. What stuff? All kinds of stuff. Like how do geckos stick to walls? Why did they cancel Firefly? Who in their right mind thought that New Coke was a good idea? And of course, why was my video so incredibly sucky?
After about a year, I started to entertain the idea of making a channel again. But this time I had some hard-won and rather painful experience under my belt and so I applied what I had learned from the first time around. I bought a decent microphone and camera. I found an inexpensive but fairly complete video editing application. I made a few practice videos. I thought more about what I wanted to focus on for the channel. I came up with infinitely better branding.
Then I put it all together and created a new channel. Things were much, much better this time around. Better… but still not good. My production values were finally better than what you see coming out of a Junior High Audio Video club, but this time around, I realized that my heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t making content that appealed to me… I was trying to make content that I thought that others would want… and at a pace that others would expect. Unfortunately, I had a full time job and a family with pre-teens. I just couldn’t crank out videos every day or three… and that was just the time constraint side of things.
I was trying to do let’s play videos, but I just couldn’t figure out how to generate enough interesting commentary to fill out the entire video… and frankly… the stuff that I enjoy doing in games is not necessarily all that interesting to watch in real time for more than a few minutes at a time. It is really more about the planning and the end result. And all of that combined to produce a lot of stress and pressure for me. While I enjoyed the technical aspect of the effort, the rest of it felt too much like a job and it killed the little bit of pleasure I got out of the effort. But I kept it up for almost three months before I took it all down and walked away again. In an effort to copy the successful channels and earn cold hard cash, I was trying to be who I’m not. It was a crash and burn moment.
It was at that point, that I realized that trying to start a content creation business as a business and ONLY as a business was probably not a good idea. At least not for me. So I totally abandoned the idea of trying to make money from content creation. But I really did enjoy the creative side of it all. I enjoyed the artistic elements. I enjoyed the sharing.
It was hard to see at the time, but I had made considerable progress. I had learned even more from that second round. While I settled back into playing my games… and playing them the way that ** I ** wanted to play them, I got to thinking again and after another year, I decided to try a new approach… podcasting. This is where I felt like I first succeeded. The turnaround time for each episode was shorter as all I had to do was produce audio… no video. There was no real profit potential and no plan to ever get to that point. In this case, the content was just me yacking about whatever I felt like yacking about and after a few solo episodes, some of my friends joined in and it was basically just a bunch of old guys talking about nothing particularly useful or earth-shattering… and we all had a lot of fun and a LOT of laughs.
We did that for a year… and frankly, I would probably still be podcasting but at the time, it cost money to host your podcast someplace and success in podcasting drives the need for more content and the more content you produce, the more expensive it becomes to host that content… and that eventually killed the podcast. Yes, I no longer felt driven to make money… but I certainly didn’t want to spend more and more of the money I already had.
But it gave me an idea… not a new idea… but a refinement of my previous attempts at YouTube. I now knew the technical side well enough, but this time I was going to focus my efforts on having fun and making the kind of videos that I would want to watch… and I didn’t… and still don’t really care if I ever get monetized. This time it is not about the destination, it is about the journey. It is about me making that journey… doing what makes me happy, and if I happen to help anyone along the way… that just makes me even happier.
And it is working. I am happy. I am having a blast with this… and much to my surprise, I have found others who find value in what I am doing. After a little over a year of me doing my own thing, I now have 100 subscribers. That just blows my mind. So far, at least 100 people have found some value in what I am doing and basically set a bookmark to come back at a later date with the expectation that I will be able to do it for them again… and again… and all I am doing is what I would normally be doing without a YouTube channel… exercising my inner and outer geek and goofing around in my own little extremely nerdy way.
So… for anyone watching any of my videos, and especially for those that have commented and/or subscribed… thank you. Really… thank you. You rock and make the extra effort to share worthwhile.
For anyone looking for tips or inspiration for making money as a content creator… you are definitely in the wrong place… but luckily there seems to be an entire sub-industry devoted to that… so I suggest you go check some of that out.
And if you are new around here and are simply interested in watching and listening to a nerd’s nerd geek out while spewing a nearly constant stream of dad humor and maybe learn a thing or two along the way… then pull up a seat and make yourself comfortable. You are more than welcome and I am happy that you are here. And if you pull any inspiration out of all of this… so much the better, and please… give me a holler in a comment or email and let me know about it. It will truly make my day.
I still have a whole lot to say and explore, and I will be posting it all right here. So here’s to the next year and another 100 subscribers.
I hope this finds you and yours in good health, good spirits and a touch of good fortune. Cheers!