Looking Forward to 2024! | The Friday(ish) Update

This week’s entry into the Friday Update is another slightly irregular one. Not only because it’s a slightly bit late (which, let’s be honest, happens fairly regularly!) but because I wanted to take the opportunity of the New Year to say a few thank yous and do a bit reflecting on the last 12 months.

2023 has been a pretty massive year for myself and the videos I make. And, whether you’ve been watching my stuff for several years, or if you’re completely new round these parts, I thought it would be nice to summarise some of the highlights!

The Team Expanded

Firstly, the team behind the channel expanded: from one to two. Or, not quite…

My editor Georgia actually joined the team in December 2022; but it’s been during the course of 2023 that we’ve begun to get into our stride as a team. Georgia’s After Effects skills have opened the door to exciting new animation sequences and motion graphics which help to make my videos more fun and more engaging.

From the super cool map graphics in Britain’s New Prison Ships to the computer screen windows which tied the various chapters of Griftonomics together to the awesome animated intro sequence which kicked off each episode of Treason Fest, it’s been a bumper year for fun editing!

More (or More Ambitious) Videos

Delegating most of the nuts and bolts of video editing to Georgia has also freed up more of my time to focus on research, writing and honing the “direction” (in the sense of a film/video director, not the velocity) of my videos. Not needing to spend so much tweaking cuts in Premiere Pro has, on the most basic level, allowed me to have more creative time to write and has thus increased the scope for how many videos we’re able to release.

At times, I’ve used this additional time to produce more ambitious projects: Griftonomics: Why Scams Are Everywhere Now was a bumper, 1 hour 45 minute documentary which spanned TV criticism, online culture, politics, modern history and economics. It included all kinds of set changes and costumes and took the best part of three months to make.

It was a lot of work, but all that paid off in terms of a vibrant response and a very generous shout-out in Sight & Sound magazine’s Best Video Essays of 2023: https://www.bfi.org.uk/polls/best-video-essays-2023

At other times, having a whole extra person’s worth of video-producing capacity has simply allowed me to produce more videos. Over the previous few years, my release cadence had generally sat around one video every two months. Working alone, this was simply the best balance I could strike between still producing work that was rigorous and intellectually worthwhile and the economic realities of needing to release videos in order to pay the bills!

With Georgia on board, I've been keen to explore whether we can increase that release schedule. Whilst I enjoy the process of making videos, I often found a bi-monthly release pattern deeply frustrating. There were just so many exciting video ideas that ultimately had to be scrapped due to a lack of time to make them. This included topics I thought were really important and worthy of discussion and yet which never saw the light of day.

I also missed the excitement of releasing videos more often! While there's always a handful of less-than-lovely comments to contend with on each video (alongside the lovely ones!), I do this job because I think there is some value in making videos and putting them out into the world. And it’s great to be able to do that more often!

We first put our ability to produce more videos to the test in the spring when I came up with the slightly weird notion of producing a mini-series of videos to tie-in with the coronation of Charles III. As a long-time republican (of the UK sort not the US sort), the opportunity to explore the role of the monarchy in British politics is one I’d been waiting for for some time.

Particularly after such a long period of working on much longer, slower projects, making Treason Fest was an absolute joy. Views-wise, the success of the series was really mixed: episodes one and two performed slightly below average whilst episode three did some decent numbers. However, I came away from the experience really re-energised and excited about the future of the channel. It proved to me that it was possible to make topical, news-related videos with a decent turnaround and that a decent number of people would watch them!

It’s this kind of cadence we’re looking to take into 2024. From October to December 2023, we actually released three videos (not on a perfectly-even monthly release schedule as one was longer than the others, but it averaged out!). And, that’s the plan going forward. Another mini-series I’ve got planned for the beginning of 2024 might alter things a little bit (if anything to mean *more* videos rather than less); but expect to see more videos more often going forward!

Bumper Views

It’s also worth mentioning that the year has been really positive with regard to the number of views my videos tend to get. At the close of 2023, I would generally count a video as a success if it topped 300,000 views within 30 days of release. As we say goodbye to 2024, that number has shifted to around 500,000.

It’s not necessarily the case that we can keep this up forever; we’re bound to release a dud at some point! However, it’s been so rewarding for our hard work during the latter half of this year to have been met with a record-breaking run of videos.

I think there are several factors at play in all of this. Better animations courtesy of Georgia surely play a part. As does my decision to stop using YouTube’s “premiere” feature (which, whilst really fun for those who attended, I found to have a severely damaging effect on video performance, at least in the short term after release). I’ve also continued to work with the design team over at Nebula to refine our strategy for video thumbnails and titles.

More than anything, however, I think the past year or so has simply been the period in which so many lessons I’ve learned about how to make engaging videos which perform well on YouTube have combined to make me a better video writer, presenter and director. I think there is still much more to learn; and I am excited to do so! But, I feel so much more confident now than I once did when it comes to my ability to create videos which are appealing to a broad (within reason!) audience whilst also hopefully having interesting and insightful things to say about the world we live in.

Again, maybe our luck will run out soon. And views, of course, are not everything. But they certainly don’t hurt!

More Responsive Videos

One final thing I’m looking forward to taking into 2024 is a desire to make more videos which relate more immediately to the news and to current affairs. Using trending topics as a jumping-off point to much larger political questions has long been an aspect of my work. So, to some, this might not sound like much of a change. But, over the past 12 months, we’ve released a handful of videos which have been much more clearly rooted in ongoing news events.

Something about Britain’s New Prison Ships, The Rise (and Fall) of Patreon and Treason Fest just felt a lot more visceral and immediate in their relevance. They may have involved adding somewhere between months' and centuries' worth of context to ongoing events, but it was exciting to know that there is an audience for work which leans slightly more towards “journalism” than “video essay”.

I’m never going to be someone who is trying to cover the minutiae of day-to-day politics; my primary focus will always be on adding the context and history needed to understand these topics properly. It's also not the case that all of my videos will do this going forward (Why YouTubers Hold Microphones Now, for example, was a nice break from more serious topics!). But I’m excited about the possibility of shedding light on events that have a more immediate relevance to people’s lives.

In fact, I have an incredibly exciting project which will sit in this ballpark to announce soon. But I need to wait for the proper permission to do so!

Thanks!

Having spend several hundred words navel-gazing, I want to close out this slightly rambling post with a massive thank you!

Whether you’re a viewer, a Patreon supporter or have supported the channel through signing up to Nebula using my link (https://go.nebula.tv/tomnicholas, haha!), I really appreciate you giving my work the time of day.

I’ve long been aware that, in an industry as unpredictable as online video creation, setting myself any “external” goals in terms of viewership has always been kind of pointless. The algorithm remains deeply unpredictable! My attention is better devoted to simply trying to make each video a little bit better than the last.

But, making videos is expensive. Wages for two people, research materials, filming kit, editing software, archive footage and music licensing; all of this adds up very, very quickly.

So, whether you’ve contributed eyes, shares or cold-hard cash to this little project over the past twelve months, thanks so much for your support. I’m really grateful to have the chance to do this for another year and am looking forward to what the next 12 months bring.

Thanks as ever for your generous support, and Happy New Year!

Tom