<1950s style PSA begins>
WATCH MINUTES. All the cool kids are talking about them. Very slowly. Why slowly? Ah well you must be new to watch minutes! With watch minutes, the goal isn't to get views - that's what the olden folks used to do - in today's modern age it doesn't matter how many video links a person clicks on, but rather how many minutes they spent watching your videos. A single 10 hour view, or 600 1-minute views, it's all the same now thanks for the miracles of magic-internet-stalking.
So that means if you wanna make it big in the big city like a big boy, maybe you should slow things down a little, make sure you don't get to the point TOO fast, 'cause remember, every minute you make 'em wait, you're gathering secret analytics super-points that'll buy you backhands form the YouTube gods quicker than an afternoon under the CEO's desk.
Why am I telling you this, little Billy? Well, dummy, it's because your old uncle Devin's been looking at his own analytics to see if the rumours about all this watch-time magic were true. And by the beards of all the barflies in Baghdad it was!
Here's the skinny: more watch minutes in a day super-correlated with how many subs you get, which for a silly little channel like Offy-D who doesn't advertise, can only mean that more minutes gives more exposure which gives more subs, which all cycles up to a glorious road to the end of the American Dream!
But be careful Billy, because the cycle works in reverse too. If you slack off and don't collect the minutes you need, well you'll have to be punished with a loss of growth rate. Sure that makes it harder to get the minutes back again, but hey, you're a smart kid Billy, you'll work out a way to get 'em back in the end.
What's that Billy? You got minutes back but you didn't get the subs? Well gee-wizz Billy, those crazy YouTube gods have changed something haven't they! Hey hey, that's my cue to leave folks, I hope you have a great day and I'll see you in a few years' time once we work all this hootenanny out!
<1950s style PSA cuts out, camera pans back to reveal Devin sitting amid of a mess of paper in a dank room. He turns to a shrine with a huge blood-red play button on it, and places before it roughly-stapled together script. It ignites instantly and fills the room with smoke, but no other effect is seen. He turns back to the TV, but it's playing a video about fidget spinners at 3am. The entire scene explodes, then pans back again to reveal that all this was happening on a PC monitor on a messy desk, at which Devin sits, chewing an already-nearly destroyed ice-lolly stick and staring closely at the ups and downs of some irregular graphs>
Oh hi there. Didn't see you come in. I'm doing analytics!
The long and short of it (minus the long) is that my growth rate, which I have complained about previously, is at least somewhat tied to watch minutes, a connection that echoes what many creators have claimed is the new youtube meta. Likes, comments and audience retention don't correlate strongly with growth, (although of course all of these correlate somewhat to watch time itself, so there's at least a second-degree connection).
In general we see periods of positive and negative feedback loops; doing well makes you do more well faster, then once you peak and start doing less well by even a little, it all spirals back down, hopefully to a point still higher than where you started.
HOWEVER as the keen eyed among you may note from the graph, in 2017 the connection between watch time and growth seems to become much weaker - or at least, growth as a whole becomes weaker. The gap between the blue and orange lines grows larger and larger over time. That means that while this year has been slightly better than last year's half first in terms of watch time, we're only getting half the growth rate. So clearly something was changed during this period, or some other major factor is at play.
My current hope is that when I start my new series it will trigger one of these positive feedback periods and we'll see growth again, just like I saw when I started Fields of Mars, and when I started This Is Content. IT BETTER WORK YA?
It's just sad to think about my previous goals for the year, and various hopes for various things, and now half way through the year to realise we ain't even gonna get close.
I mainly get annoyed since the channel is below break-even, it needs to grow, growth is all that ultimately matters. The blue line in that graphic is basically Devin's morale, while the orange line is amount of effort being exerted. It's not very good eh? This doesn't just effect me either. Other creators of my size and bigger (but not self-sustaining-big) are burning out fast all cross the tubes, even in the TW scene.
OKAY FINE I'LL STOP MOANING NOW, but aren't blogs for moaning? I guess they're just for talking about what's going on. Well moaning has been going on. On this blog. Better blog about that.
I've also continued work on my hit video game, doing lots of world map design and writing of lore for the settlements you can visit. I've also got a new system where zooming out quite far on the map will make some region names appear, which I quite like.
Still lots of actual work to do on battle features, world AI and general player-friendliness, but making the world itself is nice since its easier to envision the game actually taking place when you have the actual play area there to look at. Next big features I want to implement are: the ability to access the party inventory for agents in battles, to swap agents in and out with reserve agents while fighting, to have reserves appear to replace fallen party members in fights and to have in-battle speech bubbles to let agents say flavour text.
I was going to write a fair bit about my new series in this post, but I guess I'll save that for next time - NO MORE COMPLAINING NEXT TIME K?
In place of that, I would like to note that I don't know what genre of music this is:
...but that it is very sanity preserving, and feels hipster enough that I think I am cool for knowing about it.
Okay guys so remember to like, comment and survive.
