A Rough Couple of Weeks | 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.

What have I been up to this week?

It’s been a rough couple of weeks.

I guess I should start with an apology for missing an entry in The Friday Update last week. It had been a hectic seven days and it ended up being the one thing that had to slip from my agenda to stop my brain from being completely fried.

It’s also been a bit of a tough time for us here at Tom Nicholas HQ (still not a real place!) which likely played into things too.

In fact, the first draft of this week’s Friday Update was a bit of a downer. I went back and forth on wanting to a) not make it too depressing whilst also b) not giving an incomplete reflection of what it’s like to make videos by pretending everything’s always fun and rosy and successful; when sometimes there’s really tricky months in this job!

I therefore decided to split this post into two halves: The Problem and The Solution. Hopefully, this puts a greater emphasis on the upswing and exciting plans for the future at the end, rather than the slightly moan-y first act!

(I also may decide to make this post public, to share some of these thoughts on what we’re working on next a little wider).

The Problem

In the last entry in The Friday Update, I told you about how hard we’d been working on the second entry in my planned Vape-o-nomics trilogy.

Putting the final touches to Vape-o-nomics 2 required a herculean effort on both mine and Georgia’s parts. It was a really complex video in terms of its editing which meant constantly having to look-out for slip-ups and render errors when trying to put the final product together. It was a constant game of whack-a-mole with little imperfections!

That being said, we were very proud of how it turned out. I was happy with how I introduced and explained the various ideas and historical events contained within, and I think Georgia was pretty proud of the motion graphics etc.

And then… It was a pretty astounding flop.

Of our last ten videos, it is currently the 8th best-performing when compared with how many views the other videos had at a similar time after release.

There are several reasons I think this happened. There’s a likelihood some people saw the video on their Home Page and simply thought it was the previous video and that they’d already seen it. It’s also a slightly denser video than some of the other stuff we’ve put out recently. Or, maybe the topic just isn’t that interesting to lots of people—which is fine!

Underperforming videos is part of the hazard of making stuff for YouTube.

I’ve just as often been a beneficiary of the recommendation system circulating my videos to many more people than they have any right to be than I have been a victim of “the algorithm”’s more fickle tendency to sometimes not recommend videos.

Nevertheless, even when you know the logic behind why something’s happened, it can still be tough. And, working on something so hard for so long for it to not get the audience we’d have hoped for is still a bit of a knock.

The Solution

One way of responding to this bump in the road might have been to scale back what we’re doing. Particularly given there are considerable financial challenges which come from a video not getting very many views (and thus less ads playing on it, less people signing up for Nebula after watching it, less people coming over to Patreon etc.). It’s tempting to simply make a series of what we call “desk videos” in fear that these viewership figures might be the new normal.

However, we’re taking a slightly different tack.

In fact, the next video we’re going to make is my most ambitious ever. It’s going to involve four days of shooting at multiple locations all across the UK, to tell a pressing story of political failure.

The downside for those of you who were enjoying Vape-o-nomics is that the next video won’t be the third entry in that series. We’re putting a pause on that for now. While we’d already done a decent chunk of work on it, the risk that we spent another month on it and then it performed even less-well than part two was too great. And that would have put the channel in a near existentially-bad financial position.

That being said, the video we are making is, I hope, going to be next level. It’s the closest we’ve come to making a full, TV-style documentary and I’m really excited to get on-the-road to make it.

Amping things up in the face of defeat in this way is something we’ve done before. Last year’s Treason Fest similarly received mixed viewership between episodes. Rater than just scaling things back, we took some additional time between videos to put together Grift-o-nomics: a video which I’m intensely proud of and which went on to feature in Sight and Sound’s “Best Video Essays of 2023” list.

There’s no promises the next video will be as good or as popular as that video was. It might also be a flop; or the final product might not be as good as the version we’ve dreamed-up on post-it notes on the wall!

But, I’m really excited by our ambition with this one. The video topic is one we’ve been planning to cover for months; but I feel as though we’ve really looked at the topic and asked “how can we make the best possible version of this?”.

After a difficult couple of weeks, then, I think the future is still looking really exciting.

And, thank you so much to all of you who support me here on Patreon. It really does make a huge difference to know we have a cushion of income which isn’t tied to viewership; it provides the reassurance that I am going to have some budget available to pay the team and fund the making of the next video during a period where Adsense and sponsorship income will be very minimal.

I’ll update you more on this next week, when our plans to up our video-making game will have progressed even further!

And outside of work?

This weekend, my wife and I finally cashed-in a voucher for a spa weekend my father-in-law had got us for Christmas.

The day itself was relatively low-key: it was just at a little hotel around 40 minutes from us so we drove up and back in the day quite comfortably. But, it was nice to have a whole day dedicated to relaxing and reading.

The treatment we got was a Rasul mud treatment. This involves smearing your skin in special mud which supposedly clears it up or draws out toxins, or something.

I’m not sure I 100% believe all the supposed promises of it but it was pretty fun! Ours happened in a timed room which automatically switched into a steam room and then into a shower room at certain intervals. And, in terms of results, I would have to admit my skin felt a bit smoother afterwards…

We also had a lunch thrown in so, after a quick trip up to the hotel bar for a fish and chips and a pint of cider, I actually ended up having a massive sleep during the afternoon!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

I finally saw Dune: Part Two on Wednesday night.

The final 20 minutes of Dune: Part One have, I think, a lot in common with those of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. In watching both films, you know there’s not enough time to tie up all the loose ends (and that there’s likely to be a sequel) and have a really guttural response to knowing you’ll have to wait to find out what happens next.

After being away for my honeymoon and then a busy couple of weeks, I finally got the fear that the film might leave cinemas soon and convinced my wife to come along to watch it with me (fantasy/sci-fi would never be her first choice).

There’s little which hasn’t already been said about it for me to add. My feelings on watching it were that this series (which, surely, is going to be a trilogy) is something truly special. For me, it stands next to The Lord of the Rings trilogy as an attempt to create a series of films on an epic scale; which everyone involved has managed to actually pull off!

There’s some bold choices in what the film does and doesn’t show. There’s the occasional time-jump (such as prior to the spice stores being blown up) which can feel a touch jarring. I also wonder whether some of the elements which are introduced in this second film (such as the family nuclear arsenal?) might have been introduced in the first part so they didn’t feel too Deus Ex Machina.

That being said, the sincerity of the whole thing, the depth of the world and the gorgeousness of every shot really had me reflecting on just how great cinema can be. If they don’t make a third one, I’ll be gutted.

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

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