This post was originally made to my ko-fi page on the 26th of January, 2022 which can be found here. 

YouTube for a small channel is very swingy. Both in how your videos perform, and how you yourself interpret their performance. Some days I am absolutely stoked about everything I have been working on, and other days I view the performance of my videos through the lens of an outsider, like how I look at other more established channels. That can bum me out. If I'm searching for something and I see a video with, say, 70 views... How often do I actually click it? It's rare. 70 views may as well be 0 if I'm not browsing YouTube mindfully. And even less interesting than 0 in some ways (can't be first).

The rules of YouTube for someone making vlogging-style content differ greatly from someone working on what I would call a "passion project" like myself. I spend hours on the thumbnails and I generally walk away feeling pretty proud of them – but when you're making videos covering chronological takes of mid-80s video games from the perspective of someone playing them for the first time – there really isn't a very big chance that anything will get recommended outside of having some sort of an angle. For the less popular games; it's really not going to happen outside of search. For games like Metroid/Zelda – there's a stronger chance but it's still unlikely. For me, it actually hasn't happened yet.

It's not stopping me and I intend to keep pushing, but it is difficult sometimes to see something you worked on for weeks on end just kind of sit there.

It's not all doom and gloom though. Other times when I look at my channel page I really can't help but feel proud of all the work I've put into it. And while I may not have many views at the moment, I have been really happy with the community I've been building. It brings me legitimate joy seeing familiar names come back and genuinely get something out of it. When I first started posting again I would see a video cap out at 15-25 views in a week. I now get ~60-70 guaranteed views on the first day of any given upload. While modest, it is progress. 

I'm also nearing 1000 subs – something that was always my goal back in 2012 when I was running a Yu-Gi-Oh channel. While I started with ~600, so really, ~1500 will be a truer 1k; it'll still be something. And that's part of how I have to look at it. Segmented, smaller milestones. X video reaching the next 100 view increment. Every new comment. Every time someone finds a video through search. Each engagement; a small victory.

Sometimes I get comments that are so kind they make my entire day. When someone recognized the amount of work that went into something. Idk. I have a lot of things I'm excited about though and a lot of videos I want to make. If only I had the time to make them all.

Thanks to anyone reading this or anyone watching. I appreciate it more than you know!

~HPR