It's been a second

Hi-di-ho,

It's been a second since I last posted anything here but I figured I might as well stop by and say hello.

Let me start out by saying that my gaming YouTube channel is still going and I still upload a new video each and every week. I think I missed maybe one or two weeks a few months ago but I am really trying to get videos up each and every week and to actually have something to them more than just watching me playing a game. I set myself a little task or at least make the video focus on a specific aspect of the game I'm playing.

What this has taught me is that I was absolutely kidding myself about making a motocamping YouTube channel. The effort involved in just finding the time to play a game, capture enough interesting footage to make a 20 minute video and then edit it all, add music, add a voiceover and get it uploaded to YouTube each week is actually quote considerable. 

I was working on the channel today that may me want to drop by and write this down. Today I have roughly three and half hours of footage that will make my episode for this week. There is a lot of grinding and not so exciting aspects to the footage so I need to cut it down to my usual 20 to 30 minute video length. That basically means I have to watch and rewatch the three and half hours of footage and cut out the boring bits whilst still keeping the story line making sense. Once I've cut it down I then usually try and find the background music and tie it to the video so it makes sense and adds to the video. So ambient music when just kicking around, action movie music in exciting parts, and so on. Then once that's done I do the voice over and then I do subtitles. There's hours and hours of work involved.

The good news is that my videos seem to be well received and my channel is growing. At times I think my channel is growing too slowly and I'll never make anything of it and at other times my channel seems to leap forward. I've tried figuring out if it is my content or the schedule that I upload new content but I really think it is just the YouTube algorithm figuring out who my viewers are and then it is targeting that demographic and seeing if it makes a difference. It would be a bit of a balancing act for YouTube as if they don't promote new creators then they'll go stale, but the new creators can't monetise their videos so YouTube wouldn't be making anything much from their videos.

Anyway, I now think about what it would have been like trying to make motocamping videos and cringe. The effort involved in finding the time to get away, camp, film it all, then get back and edit it all would probably be too much for me. Not to mention if I spent all that effort to make a video and no one watched it, that would be very disheartening. 

There's a motocamping channel that I used to follow when I thought I was going to do it myself, he hasn't uploaded anything for over a year now and he videos are pretty good and somewhat similar to what I wanted to make. His early videos are now at something like 60,000 views but his more recent ones are lucky to be at 400 views. I'm not sure what happened to his channel but I'm betting he just found it too hard to keep making content on a regular schedule. His channel was active for around 4 years so he really put in a solid effort and he wasn't really rewarded for it. He would have been lucky to make $200 a year from his channel for all that effort. Whilst that's still $200 more than I've ever made from YouTube I would hope that after four years I'm at least making that every month otherwise it's not really worth it apart from it being a hobby.

Recently my channel has taken off a little, I grew by around 50 subscribers in the last couple of weeks so I'm now at just over 300 subscribers. A video I made several months ago suddenly took off and got a couple of thousand views which is amazing, yet I have some videos with only 40 or so views on them which I think are just as good if not better. So it's a little interesting seeing how it is all working out.

I don't really do any promotion of the channel anywhere, I occasionally post something on Reddit but that's very rarely and I've really been letting YouTube do all the heavy lifting for me.

On to other matters, I still want to change jobs and I almost walked off the other day but that's a whole blog in itself, I've basically had enough and my care level is completely gone, which could be a good thing as I'll just do my own thing and to hell with everyone else. I'm really starting to plan my long service leave now and looking at possible dates.

Which leads me on to the new house, well it's still getting built. The build itself is moving along, it's going slower than my wife would like but I think we're still on track for moving in the week before Christmas. The plan is to take a month or two of long service leave once we're in the new house to sort out a few things and just enjoy the new place.

Thanks for stopping by!

Bomber
Still doing the same things as always

Where to begin... This week I finally gave up the diet officially, however I really stopped around Christmas and then had a few weeks off work where I didn't really do the diet either. I put some weight back on over Christmas and for the last couple of weeks I've been half heartedly following the Optifast diet but I can't continue to eat just veges for dinner. We moved on to having a proper, but trying to be healthy dinner and I was having shakes for breakfast and lunch, or having a salad for lunch. We've now run out of shakes and I'm not going to buy any more. I'm still about 10kg lighter than when I started so that's a win. I can always give the shakes a go another time if I feel the need.

In other news, we've finally got some traction on our house build. After nearly 2 years to the day from when we paid our deposit, we finally got all the approvals done and work can commence on the actual build. In fact, this last week has seen the site cut occur so things are actually happening. Next it's the drainage and then the concrete slab goes down. The slab should be poured late this month or maybe early next month depending on the weather.

My gaming YouTube channel is still slowly growing, I've currently got 100 subscribers and I'm still releasing videos each week. I was actually watching a live stream of another gamer and I mentioned something in the live comments and he knew who I was and said that he loved my videos, that was really cool. My videos only usually get around 200 views at the moment, but it's great to get actual feed back from someone who I was watching myself.

Finally, the work situation is still uncertain. I'm kind of resigned to the fact that I'll be there for another year or two, the world is a changing place and I need the security of the position I'm currently in and the perks that comes with it. I just need to try and keep my head up and not let things out of my control ruin my day. Once we're in the new house and have our finances back in order I can reassess and figure out what direction I want or need to take.

Anyway, good chatting :)

Bomber
Things can always be worse.