on success and failure (150k subscriber blog)

so today I reached 150,000 subscribers on youtube 

at this point in my life, I make around $3000-$3500 a month from my channel. that's split pretty evenly between ad revenue, patreon donations, and regular video sponsorships. I get anywhere between 500,000 and 1 million+ views  on my channel each month, and as of now I have almost 500 patrons directly supporting my work. I also have 40,000 followers on twitter, which definitely means something.

if you had told me any of this two years ago, I would probably consider that a dream come true. in fact, I can say with confidence that I regularly thought to myself, "if I could just make a stable income of like 3 grand a month and guarantee at least some people would care about what I had to say, I would be happy". I was 24, felt aimless following university graduation, and was desperately starved of attention. I made no money from my channel, and instead earned a living writing academic papers for a website I've now forgotten the name of -- I say "earned a living", it was like 50 pounds per 1000 words and I didn't get paid for edits so I made maybe 800 pounds a month tops just constantly pumping out work and stressing out over revisions. I'm pretty sure I was just doing college essays for rich kids, but you know, the work was consistent, I could still do it from overseas while working on getting my green card, and essay-writing was the thing I'd spent the last four years doing already. I didn't ask many questions, and mostly didn't care - I only ever really thought about it when people asked what I did. I'd say "I do academic research papers for a company", they'd jokingly say "writing students essays for them?", and I'd say "heh". now I say that I do youtube video essays, which I guess in a way is sort of the same thing.

the only thing I was really committed to in the first half of 2018 was getting a pilot done for my first original series, Big Iron. it was a collaboration with an old friend I'd been partners with on an indie game development project a few years earlier - the series actually originated as a spin-off to a game idea he'd had that could be boiled down as a dark, realistic take on pokemon. it was genuinely a lot more interesting than that sounds. think of it like, what watchmen did to superhero comics but for pokemon. ok i'm not doing a good job selling it, which may be some foreshadowing for later. so anyway Big Iron was an idea for a distant prequel series to that, all about the development of the community and corporation through which the monsters would be birthed. the point-of-view character was travis stiletto, an indigenous orphan who was raised in rural louisiana in the 1920s. he made money as a kid helping the mob hock goods during prohibition, then after getting caught up in dirty dealings well into his 20s he'd set himself straight by joining the us army during the pacific war. after that he'd make a natural transition into law enforcement, where he'd be respected for his military record if not his racial background (it was, after all, the deep south in the 50s). oh, he also had a love affair with a sex worker, the only person to ever truly show him love, who'd then die in childbirth leaving him to raise their son alone. and because of his record in military and in law, as well as knowing he'd be interested in a chance to move his kid out of a racist crime-infested city, in 1960 the ceo of a large corporation situated in a mysterious fictional peninsula near nova scotia would ask to hire him on as chief of security. this would be because he was closing down the mines his family had made their fortune with, putting much of the working-class community in the area out of work, in favor of some SeCrEt EnTeRpRiSe. travis would find a nemesis in irish union leader magnus molony, a mayoral candidate and avowed marxist hoping to use the unrest of the workers to spark a small-town revolution. 

it'd be a whole series about how the state and capital pitted oppressed groups against one-another, there'd be a historical element to the series, and all of this with a strange paranormal element tying it to that original game concept. it was pretty cool imo, and I had an entire first season outlined with the help of my collaborative partner in late 2016. throughout 2017 we'd script and make revisions to the pilot, i'd start producing artwork for an animatic, i'd hire voice actors and commission artists for series promos, and I had an incredibly talented friend on board to produce the music. I haven't talked to him in a long time, incidentally - I should do that. by early 2018, the pilot and all promotional material was pretty much done, we were ready to publish the first episode and build up some hype for a kickstarter to fund the whole series. and so, we launched. 

so here's a few problems with putting out a full-length pilot episode for an animated series on youtube in 2018:

a) it was an original series pilot, not based on an existing IP or attached to an already-popular creator.

b) it was an original dramatic series pilot, not usually as popular as comedy on sites like youtube.

c) it was an original dramatic animated series pilot, which youtube hates because episodes can't be pumped out as regularly and rarely relate to current trending topics.

d) it was an original dramatic animated series pilot that was 30 minutes long, had very little action, and was deliberately slow-paced, taking inspiration from shows like deadwood, mad men and fargo. people on youtube do not go on youtube to seek out long, lethargic, dramatic cartoons which are there to set up series' they've never heard of.

after over a year of production, i'd produced a pilot that fit an incredibly niche market and had absolutely everything going against it. on release, after weeks of link-sharing and hype-building, we received about 700 views in the first day. within a month, the number had ballooned to the astronomical 1400 views. it did not go higher that year.

on its own merits, I still like a lot of things about the pilot. I feel like it makes its ambitions clear and does a good job setting up travis as this morose antihero, with a solid performance from its lead voice actor (who incidentally never got back to me after I sent him the link to the pilot). the art is obviously not particularly impressive, though I try to look at it in the context of someone who is a) not a professional artist, b) spends most of his days writing academic articles or doing random manual labour work for pocket change, and c) could not even humour commissioning someone else to storyboard a 30 minute cartoon. also the music is great. 

mostly though, if I could go back, I would slap myself in the face repeatedly and point out the obvious fact that I was better off skipping all this groundwork and just commissioning artists to storyboard one high-intensity 6-7 minute script, then shopping that around instead of torturing myself for a year to put out a pilot nobody was going to be interested in. that's hindsight though, I guess.

shout-out to kc green, one of many inspirations to me that I sent the pilot, and the only one to basically just flat-out tell me all of this immediately.

anyway, this was originally just going to be a blog about how success is complicated and can often feel like an illusory concept, so i'm not sure why i just went on that massive tangent. it's definitely cathartic in a weird way to remember the days when thoughts about that series consumed my life, then to think about the week i just spent crying on the floor because all my work had amounted to nothing and now i had to just write more boring tedious essays for people I didn't and would never know, then to think about the position i'm in now. I don't want to narrativize my own thoughts too much and act like this is an inspirational story of how I achieved what I wanted and feel so content now. I still think in some ways I'd rather be working on my own stories than talking about things other people have said and made. I still have moments where I feel like I'm not getting the attention I want.  even though materially I'm much more comfortable, I'm still constantly worried about money because I grew up poor and panic over the concept of suddenly losing everything. sometimes I do still cry thinking about how I haven't achieved what I wanted to.

I'm relatively content to be in my current position. I'm relieved that money is less of a concern. I'm extremely grateful to all of the people who have helped me along the way. if there's anything I can say unequivocally in terms of my happiness, it's that I'm happy to have my spouse and the emotional support that they provide. all of this feels strange because even as I type, I can imagine myself from two years ago reading this and sort of understanding on a certain level what I'm talking about but not really being able to feel it, still thinking to themselves "well yeah but obviously your life is better now in every way so it's not that bad".  It's genuinely pretty cool to have graduated from "frustrated creative who lives with his mother and makes food money with random odd jobs" to "frustrated creative who lives away from home and pays taxes". I guess I'll say that I don't think my life is a mess. it's just sort of tangled. I have some of the things I wanted, I'm lacking in other ways, some of that is things I think I can change materially and some of that is just stuff I need to get straight in my own head. right now I'm behind on my script for this month, it's going to be about the ideology of apocalyptic media. I think if I get the script done in the next couple of days, I can get it edited by the 28th or so. I actually talk about philosophers for once. I think it'll be really good. I hope you all enjoy it.

thank you all for helping me reach 150,000 subscribers

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