It's that time of year...
June 25th is the anniversary of the day that I started my Youtube channel. Usually I have some kind of celebratory video to mark the occasion, but I'm afraid I have nothing this year. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of toys that haven't been reviewed yet. It's all just kinda...waiting.
Last July was something of a wake-up call. Within a week I found myself with two copyright strikes and my channel teetering on the edge of oblivion. I made the conscious effort to preserve my channel as best as I could by setting questionable content to "unlisted" status. What hasn't been struck down over the past year is still available, it's just a little bit less straight-forward than it's been in the past.
Even in it's current protected state, I do find myself losing a random video every few months. I'm currently without any strikes...which is a nice feeling, but one that can change at any moment.
-----
The thing that this year off has allowed me to do is to really observe Youtube.
For all of those years of weekly uploads, I never really caved or buckled to trends. Looking back, I'm glad that I put the blinders up. Content can fall somewhere between dogshit and mediocre and still have unjust exposure thanks to the whims of some pretentious dev implementing new changes to the boogieman algorithm. There are some stellar channels out there like this guy that have some proper quality videos and never really took off despite having some random hits. I know cars aren't everyone's cup of tea, but the auto scene on Youtube is HUGE and it really doesn't take much for some low-end creators to get big. To see a channel featuring basically every surviving Back To The Future car and then some sitting at only a smidge over 65K is genuinely baffling...
The fight for relevancy has become pretty desperate. One MASSIVE channel in particular (that I guarantee you know) is currently living out this godawful zombie-like existence. The face of the channel clearly has zero interest in carrying on with making content to the point where a company has taken over every aspect of production. The creator has the new role of "talent" and no longer contributes his unique voice--which is what made his content special in the first place. What you will see on the channel is his mug in the thumbnail of every video despite his only contributions to said videos are him saying "Yep..." to the bunch of randos who run his business.
You should never hang up doing something you love. However, when the spark isn't there, you're not fooling anyone but yourself. This section really doesn't have to do with me or my uploads since I was genuine whenever I made a video, but I feel like it was worth stating since the people who work *really* hard to get a foothold never get anywhere while the ones coasting on their past fame are just aimlessly plodding along. Is anybody happy on Youtube anymore? Nobody is having a good time...I'm convinced. Shit on TV all you want, at least cancellation is a thing there. When you have a Youtube series about a group of four people talking about a movie that only three of them watched ("talent" couldn't be bothered...despite the silly face he's making in the thumbnail) it could theoretically go on well past the point where anybody is really watching.
-----
So I may not have uploaded more than a handful of videos since my 11th anniversary last year, but I've tried to understand this void that I've been throwing my videos into all of these years. Yeah, it's really depressing. I did my own thing all this time, but I guess I need to get my personal affairs in order before I return with new content. Viewers can smell the discontent no matter how well you try to hide it...
That said, I really miss making videos. Some things need to be better before I get back into it. You can always catch up with me here on the site at least. Yeah, I know going from Youtube to a personal site is a backwards thing to do these days, but at least I can sit down and enjoy some kind of Tokusatsu thing for the site.
Oh, and hey...thanks for being around all this time. For watching all of the videos, for reading everything on the site...I thank you.
Thank you for these twelve years.
-CC
Have you ever thought about uploading videos to something like Vimeo and featuring them on the site? I know their monetization is not very good but you would still have a place you could upload things until things got better at YouTube (though I don’t think anything about it has really gone better over the last few years.)
ReplyDeleteI'm not really interested in making money off of my videos. They're just a hobby. Monetization is kinda what killed off hobbyists from Youtube. Feh.
DeleteMy videos are mostly still on Youtube, just unlisted. I've toyed around archiving everything here in case shit goes down, but we're talking 500+ videos that I'd have to archive. Just thinking about that makes me feel faint.