What a week... | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

Wow. What a week.

When I wrote and posted the last edition of the Friday Update, I was feeling pretty sheepish.

Our last video, Wetherspoon: Inside Britain’s Most Controversial Pubs, had eventually found a respectable audience, and had recently tipped 250,000 views.

Nevertheless, it had taken a long and quite worrying time to get there.

It’s hard to know too much on how YouTube’s recommendations algorithm works (because the nature of these systems is that not even YouTube knows fully).

Perhaps having had our previous video demonetised and seemingly nerfed in terms of recommendations had led to our subsequent release being hidden from view too.

Or perhaps the fact that we’d made a longer video (it was around 90 minutes) meant that people were simply waiting to watch it when they had more spare time.

Either way, the afternoon of release had been a pretty bleak affair as I kept refreshing YouTube’s analytics page to confirm and reconfirm that this was our worst performing video for over a year.

While the Wetherspoons video eventually found an audience and climbed its way up the ranks to become a reasonably healthy performer, those gloomy first few days had really brought the broad uncertainty which underlies so much of the behind-the-scenes economics and logistics of this job to the fore.

I won’t repeat all the wallowing I bored you with in the this isn’t working. video which I know so many of you have seen.

But, I was feeling pretty sheepish about feeling the need to make that video.

And then, as I winced at the screen watching it go live, so many of you began to head over here to sign up to support the channel.

We gradually rose from 330ish supporters, to a slither over 1,000. Which is so heartening.

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Making videos for the internet is a strange experience in terms of judging audience response.

YouTube gives me, and other creators, all kinds of statistics on our videos in its “YouTube Studio” back end.

It gives me a huge amount of information about how many people are watching, where from, what your ages are, etc., etc.

It’s always much harder, however, to judge the depth of support.

Presumably there are quite a few people who click on our videos by accident! Some are likely hate-watching! Others might watch every other video but just kinda think they’re… fine.

That so many of you came over to support, then, has been a boost in a number of ways.

First and very much foremost, it’s going to really help us “steady the ship” (as I put it in the video). It’s allowing us to breathe a big sigh of relief and work on our next videos feeling like we’re on the front foot, not just battling to survive.

Secondly, it feels like such a massive vote of confidence in the videos my team and I make.

I’m very self-critical of my own work and aware there are many things we can improve on; but I do really believe that making these sometimes-inquisitive, sometimes-silly, hopefully-thought-provoking films for the internet is important in some small way.

And, if all of you newbies signing up (and oldies sticking around) is a sign that you think the same, then that’s only making me more excited about producing more stuff for you in the future.

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This week has seen us make progress on a number of different projects we’ve currently got in the works.

We’ve got a big deep dive on the rise of ads for testosterone testing and prescriptions which we’ve been working on for some months now and which I’m really looking forward to sharing.

It’s the kind of project which has driven me slightly loopy. I’ve begun seeing blood tests and double-blind randomised placebo-controlled trials in my sleep.

But, the topic opens doors to so many intersecting conversations around healthcare, masculinity, and so much more.

While that ticks over, we also broke ground on a slightly odd video about Uber and monopoly capitalism, which covers some ground you might be familiar with in hopefully a slightly less-obvious, and very personal, way.

The take-away is that, after a gloomy fortnight, I and my team have come out of this incredibly fired up and able to be excited about what lies ahead.

So, thank you so much for your support.

With so many more of you here now, we’re going to give a bit more thought as to what additional extras we might provide. So let me know if there’s anything you’d particularly like to see!

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!