2023 End of Year Roundup!

Hello lovely Patrons - and also non-Patrons, because this post is public!

It's the end of the year, so as is customary I wanted to give you some insight into how the channel and I are doing. The headline is - slightly better than last year!

We made five full episodes of Philosophy Tube- the first three cleared a million views and then some, and the most recent will clear a million soon. The one I made on AI, curiously, lagged a bit? I'm not sure why. On the bright side, a lot of people who work in the field got in touch to say how much they liked it, so that's not all bad. I'm very proud of the episodes we did: I pushed the boat out on a few of them and I think they've been some of my best work to date. I did a couple of good collaborations this year, one with F1nn5ter and one with LegalEagle, and those did very well so I might look into doing more collabs next year. The channel grew by 224,800 subscribers (slightly more than last year!) and we also hit 1.5 million subs, which is neat! The Patreon grew by 393 new patrons, which is slightly less than last year but hey - that's still growth!

There were only two things that I would say went unambiguously wrong. The first was merch: we brought out some new T-shirts this year and they bombed, they were a loss, which - hey, a little embarrassing, but not the end of the world. Lesson learned for next time: if I do merch again, don't do shirts! The second was a silly mistake I made with the AI video. The Nebula signup link underneath the video wasn't clickable for the first three days of the video being live, so the number of people who signed up to Nebula was about half what it usually is. Since Nebula pays me according to the conversion rate that means I should have taken a steep pay cut on the final video of the year. It was an amateur mistake that I really beat myself up over: one of my biggest fears is letting people down and I felt it hurt my professional reputation to do something so sloppy. However, it came right in the end! It gave me a kick up the bum to develop a new original project with Nebula - Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend - and the announcement video for that drove enough signups to make up for the error I made earlier. So, some mistakes, but nothing unfixable.

Outside Philosophy Tube, I did a number of very exciting things! I filmed a couple of TV shows that I can't talk about yet but which will be announced in the first half of next year. That'll be an interesting moment for my acting career - we'll see what happens! I'm also attached to play the lead in a series that's currently being pitched around: if that gets picked up then that could be a significant moment too! I was the voice of Nocturne in Baldur's Gate III, which a lot of people enjoyed, and Nora in Harmony: Fall of Reverie. We also had the premiere of The Prince in New York in February, which was a huge success - thank you to all of you who came! The Prince opened up to licensing too, so maybe in the future somebody else will put on a production of it - that'd be interesting! And I wrote Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend, which got greenlit, and which we'll be filming in February for Nebula! Kill James Bond, the podcast I do with my two best friends, continued to grow steadily and made a lot of people laugh.

And in my personal life, things have gone pretty well! I've stayed healthy and happy: no big disasters, thankfully! There were a couple of acting roles that I wanted but didn't get, and a couple of mental health wobbles, but overall I can't complain - it's been a happy year!

NEXT YEAR

Philosophy Tube will return in 2024, and I have a few ideas for episodes - in fact, I have a theme in mind! You'll see! I think the first one will be about urban design and cities, with a surprise twist. I have someone in mind for a collab partner for that one. I'd also like to do an episode on Judith Butler's new book Who's Afraid of Gender - that'll be our big 'trans themed' video for the year. (I don't like to do trans stuff every time, but just occasionally, like with the NHS video, it's good to fly the flag.) Also, I have a strange desire to do a deep dive on the Eragon books? I haven't done a media analysis video in a while and I enjoyed the new book in the series so much - maybe it'd be fun to just do an easy video for once, haha! I did a lot of research in November and December for a video on Gaza but for a variety of reasons I've decided to put it on the back burner: it was going to be my first episode of the year but right now I just don't think I have a cohesive video essay in me about it. So instead I decided to take the research I've already done, break it up into pieces, and sprinkle it throughout future videos.

FINANCES

Income to Philosophy Tube comes from you patrons, from advertising, from merch sales, and from Nebula sponsorships. If you superchat me during a livestream this also goes into the 'Advertising' bucket from which YouTube takes a cut. The biggest slice this year, as usual, came from you patrons! All that money goes into a separate bank account (i.e. not my personal one) and if there's ever anything left over from the budget of an episode it gets rolled over into the budget for the next one. Expenditures include hiring crew, venues, transport, food and drink, research materials, costumes, makeup etc, which all vary a lot from video to video. This year the greatest share of expenditure went to the crew, as usual, and rightly so - they work very hard! Expenditures were slightly higher than last year - I spent more on travel, for instance, because I was in the US a couple of times - but overall things are looking healthy because Philosophy Tube also made slightly more money than last year. Not by much, but definitely a slight improvement! There's not really any one reason for that, just - slightly more AdSense, slightly more Patrons, Patreon growth was slightly more stable, sponsorships were slightly larger - all good news really!

The money I make from acting work goes to me - I think that's fair enough since, y'know, that's an independent job. If you're curious, this year I made less from acting than I paid in rent despite the two big projects I did - acting does not pay well, haha. But hey, worth having!

Final Thoughts

Overall, a good year! I don't know what 2024 will bring - life might get very weird once these acting projects get announced. Or it may not - you never really know with acting. I've certainly had a lot of fun this year, so thank you for sticking with me!

Abi XXx