quantifica september

Hey team! Here's your update for September

VIEWS 

This month I released Why Don't You Respond to Criticism?, which has performed quite well! Didn't mana-track this one very closely, so I decided to look at the view stats and compare with previous videos. These are the numbers for first 48 hours of the new video compared with 1) the other ARP shorts (2nd biggest opening), 2) the biggest openings in my channel's history (4th biggest), and my channel's most popular videos (2nd biggest opening again).

I think it's telling that the list of Biggest Openings and the list of Biggest Videos has so little overlap. Partly that's a matter of time - the openings have gotten bigger as the years go on (at least for TARP vids) so there's a recency bias there, where videos that have been popular for 5+ years have had a long time to accumulate. It is interesting, though, that some of my biggest videos had downright teensy openings compared to their numbers now - wild to remember that We Don't Talk About Kenny didn't take off for nearly two years, as it's now the 2nd biggest vid I've ever made with 2.4 million views. But even videos that have been out for several years that had big openings haven't necessarily racked up enormous numbers in the long run: The Cost of Doing Business had my biggest opening ever, and is over two years old, but it hasn't cracked the top 8. In fact, the youngest video in the Top 8 is I Hate Mondays, which is 4 years old.

Basically: it's impossible to predict from the opening how strong the legs are on these things, though a big opening does, at least, bode well for the future.

I'M SO FUCKING ANGRY

Kept saying to myself, "It sure is lucky that How to Radicalize a Normie took off right after the age-restriction was lifted and I could finally get ad revenue from it!" I was assuming that Biden dropping out of the the campaign, for some reason, prompted people to share that video again. Only put it together the other day: it took off because the age-restriction was lifted.

I looked at the video stats and went through my email and Twitter history to confirm the date on when it was first restricted, and... yep. You can see a pointed shift in its numbers where the algo suppressed it, and see it taking off as soon as the restriction ended.

It did half a million views in two weeks.

On the one hand, this has been very good for my finances these past couple months, but I'm also sharply aware of how many thousands this cost me over the past few years. Who knows what numbers it might have done? I am an unhappy chappy.

FINANCIALS

The divergence of my Patreon goals and the reality are coming to bear. Even with a very successful month in terms of ad revenue, my income is still slightly below target. Despite the success of the last video, it's really not driving much traffic to the Patreon. My numbers are still in the negative for the month. I don't think anything short of a fresh "pledge drive" video or a lot more regularity is gonna turn it around. Aiming for both - have rough plans for monthly releases thru the new year, and will ideally do a relaunch after that (wanna show some consistency before asking for new patrons). We're still on-track to hit target for the year, and October's ad revenue is looking to be even higher than September's, so we're not in trouble. Just not where I'd like to be, hoping to do some tweaks going forward.

As ever, this is all subject to change: I've been saying "I wanna do a Patreon relaunch video" since Spring, and was planning to do a run of three ARPBs in a row in the lead-up, but things shifted. They may shift again. But that's the plan for now, written as ever in pencil.

BINGOS

Two more on the board, giving us our first three-on-a-line - two of them, in fact! The most exciting of these is that Innuendo Studios has officially hit 500k subscribers. It's been a long time coming. :D

SEPTEMBER MINIMIX

More tunes!

Same Shite Different Night
- every noise at once: exploring the Celtic Punk microgenre

Flathead
- Discover Weekly

My Son John
- Spotify rec after training the algo on Celtic Punk, Folk Punk, and Cowpunk

Riot Rhythm
- Discover Weekly

are you the only one now?
- listening obsessively to the new Zeal & Ardor album

Call ACab
- Discover Weekly (came on my headphones while I was walking home from the gym and saw the cops arresting someone on Mass Ave; stood and watched to make sure nothing sketchy happened while playing this song on repeat)

MOVIES & BOOKS

Fell behind on the Movie Randomizer List these past few months, so I have to average 4 movies a month for the rest of the year to get through the whole thing. Highest average star-rating so far, though! Helped by nothing being terrible and The Zone of Interest being the first unambiguous masterpiece on the list.

Reading habit took a big hit, lowest page count of the year. Too busy working.

-I