Hey everyone,
Once again, there’s not a ton to report but I feel like I should post something since I normally give a monthly update.
The Website
The website traffic was below average because, again…no growth.
That, and I got tired of posting links through social media because the only people following those are friends and family anyway.
I plan to keep dropping one post per week for the foreseeable future and direct the bulk of my time to the YouTube channel.
YouTube
November was a slow month compared to October.
In October, we had over 34,000 views, mostly driven by a huge spike in attention we got around the middle of the month.
By the end of October, things were frighteningly slow.
In November, we had 6,255 views.
That’s quite a reduction, but I’m not too worried about it.
In September, we had 2,664 views.
October was also a month full of YouTube shorts views which I have stopped posting. I’ll explain why in a minute.
The point is there is growth for the channel and November was steadier and more predictable than October.
That’s not to say that I don’t want another viral spike but given that we’re still only three month in, I’m pretty happy with the progress.
The real bummer to me for November was the slow growth in subscribers. We picked up 74, which is not bad, but it’s pacing us to reach monetization in about 7 months.
That’ll do, but I’m getting more and more eager to finally generate some revenue from all of this work.
We also picked up an additional 360 watch hours in November which is nice, but we will probably reach the all important 4000 watch hour milestone way before we get to 1000 subscribers.
The first number I look at when I check stats is always subscribers. It is the critical path to monetization.
Shorts
So I’ve given up on YouTube shorts.
They weren’t much work to produce and they did generate views, but the cumulative watch hours and the number of subscribers we were generating wasn’t worth the effort.
The real killer for shorts though is the attention they were taking away from our long-form content.
The point was to steer people toward our longer videos, not give them the best pieces in a preview so they could move on to the quick video.
Also, I’ve noticed that the YouTube algorithm seems to only promote one video at a time. It’s not going to recommend 3 videos and 7 shorts to every viewer who might be interested in your content.
Unfortunately, this means every time I was loading a short video (3 times a day for over a month) I was pulling attention away from the last long-form video I had posted.
So, I stopped posting shorts and our watch hours actually increased as a result.
I’m not saying Shorts are dead for good, but I have no plans to use them between now and the end of the year. I’ve thought about looking into posting them on other social channels since that wouldn’t impact the performance of the longer videos, but I’m too busy right now.
Going Forward
The focus is still on YouTube. I’m still enjoying producing content and it seems to be going well.
By the end of December, we will have 51 videos up on the platform which is great for only 4 months in.
We’re still dropping them twice a week, but that will probably slow down in 2024. It gets stressful trying to keep pace and I know deep down twice a week isn’t sustainable.
In January, I plan to post once every five days (six times a month) instead of twice a week (eight times a month).
I think this will be much easier to maintain, will allow me to produce better content, and leave me a little spare time for other things.
Conclusion
Thank you all again for your interest and support. I’ve had some really interesting conversations with people from all over this last month and it’s been encouraging to get feedback.
Merry Christmas.
