#oneaday Day 985: Engage!

I've noticed a marked increase in YouTube comments recently — and not of the spam variety, either, which is nice. (Well, I did have one guy who was constantly asking about Atari NFTs a while back, but he got his ass blocked. We don't talk about New Atari, particularly if you spam every video I make with the exact same question that is nothing to do with the actual contents of the video.)

View counts are… pretty much where they've always been, perhaps a bit higher. Every so often a vid breaks a hundred views and that feels like it's happening slightly more often than it used to, which is cool. I appreciate I'm doing something niche-interest with YouTube, but I'm often surprised at how much worse the performance is for videos where I deliberately take on something I know is popular and well-known.

The trouble with trying to be part of a more competitive field, I guess; you make a choice between being one of the few people making videos about things that only specific people want to watch, or one of millions of people making videos about things that everyone wants to watch. To be honest, I'm mostly happy with the former; as I've said on numerous occasions, I do this for fun and always have done; the fact that more people seem to be actually enjoying what I'm doing just recently is a pleasant bonus.

On that note, it's been a slow crawl, but I reckon I'll probably hit a thousand subscribers on YouTube by the end of the year, assuming nothing disastrous happens and I don't have a Google Doc written on me by some teenager on Twitter keen to destroy my life and YouTube subscriber count. (I have no skeletons in my closet, don't worry; the most exciting thing about my past life is that time I… wait, ahhh, you almost had me there, didn't you?)

I'm in no hurry to monetise as a tiny channel — largely because the earnings won't really be worth bothering — but a thousand subscribers does seem like a nice milestone. I've had my YouTube account for over ten years at this point, but the majority of those nearly-a-thousand people have showed up since 2018, when I started doing stuff semi-regularly on the channel.

So yeah. Happy with things are, and this seems like a good opportunity to thank you all once again for your support of my passion projects online. It's always a pleasure to know these things are more than just vanity projects — at least some people out there are getting something out of them, too! And there's plenty more where that came from, so please continue to enjoy!