TLDR; This is a long post griping about viewership loss on both Youtube and TikTok. I'm mostly venting, but news is buried here somewhere. Kind of. Potential news about future plans that might need to happen if I can't fix the viewership problems with my next couple Youtube releases. It's cool if you don't want to read it all, people rarely do.
Long time no post. I know, I know. Seems like I only ever have bad news. Guess that much is to be expected when you try to do this thing alone. But I've never been good at networking, so I'll always be on my own.
Things were looking up at the start of the year. Youtube earnings weren't as high as you'd think, but they were stable. And the TikTok account randomly got a surge of attention in January, enough that I was able to get monetized there too. Between those two sources, I was actually finally making enough to pay bills without help. Been several years since I could say that. That's changed in the past month.
The Bloop Diet series (the one that got my Youtube channel re-monetized back at the end of 2022) has hit a hell of a snag in recent weeks. Well, the entire year has been a huge letdown, honestly. I keep doing videos I think the audience will like, only for them to ignore it time and time again. I started this series by making fun of what they like, what should I expect? They laugh once, then probably bounce once they realize I'm not laughing with them. Or they're stupid spoiled children who get mad that I'm not catering to their random requests for random monsters to show up and get roasted. You get what you pay for (a joke about none of them ever donating. Again, what should I expect?). I try to do the popular requests, but even those rarely succeed in a way that justifies the time spent making it. I've fine tuned my process to the point where I can make 10+ minutes of animation a month, but time is still precious and time spent on a video no one watches still fucking kills me. And to anyone who says "MAYBE YOU SHOULD SPEND MORE TIME ON QUALITY ANIMATION", I can't AFFORD TO. The animations I produce currently are good enough, I feel, and with my health being what it is, getting animation out at all is a bit of a tall order. I'm not an art snob and I'm not spending 6+ months on a cartoon just for people who hate on it. Again.
Viewership on TikTok is also basically dead, though that's likely due to me being based in the US and their algorithm basically turning off viewership outside the US. My audience on both platforms is only 30% US based, so if you turn off the worldwide audience, that kills most of the reach I had there. If the worldwide audience can't see it, I won't get the view numbers needed for each release to get the data it needs to know who else to send the video to. It corrupts the whole system. I went from getting a comfortable 20k - 100k to now being lucky to get 1k. And I don't earn money on TikTok if I don't get over 1k views, soooooo yeah. I have some older videos there still trickling views in, but I'm lucky to earn $5 a day there now.
I've never been a formula kind of guy. If I'm not surprising anyone with my content, I'm not doing my job right. So I do my best to inject interesting ideas or new approaches to old ideas with the series, but that's not what my current audience wants, which drives me up the wall. They want the same kind of slop, time and time again. They want predictability. They want brain-dead nonsense to match their brain-dead desires.
I'm writing all this to say, I'm going to have to make a choice soon. A really difficult one, one I've been putting off for quite awhile. Last post I made on here, I mentioned a potential new series due to being tired of the Bloop series back then. That potential new series is back on my mind again, and looking like a real possibility if the next couple episodes of Bloop Diet don't perform the way they need to. I can't keep producing episodes of this if the viewers don't start showing up to each episode. They largely haven't been.
I'll be the first to admit the series has problems, the main one being that the people who want the full story will have a super hard time trying to figure out where to start and what videos to actually watch. I write in a way that references every other video and rewards viewers who watch everything I do. Sadly, most people simply don't. But that's the kind of humor I like writing, so I keep doing it. Which probably turns people off, I don't know. Also the fact that it's a niche topic that has to be explained to most people who might actually like my humor style. Giant monster fish who makes a stupid sound the internet pretends to be afraid of because "water is scary". It's not a super obvious source of comedy, to be sure.
I've noticed that I have a hard time letting go of a cartoon series when there's even a little bit of success left. I feel like the few fans that are left still need to be served content. I did effectively get 800k+ subscribers due to this series, so if/when I stop doing it, I'm basically starting over and telling them to fuck off. Those subscribers are mostly from shorts, and shorts subscribers are next to worthless since maybe 1% of them stick around to become actual fans. Most just click the button because they laughed once and go on to vanish from the damn Earth. But if I keep going with Bloop Diet, I'm literally going to be serving the same shrinking size audience as I was before I got re-monetized. I can't earn enough to live on such meager numbers, and making these episodes is killing my interest anyway, especially if every interesting thing I want to do just turns people away anyway. I need an audience that wants MY style of content, not for me to slave away doing stupid repetitive shit.
Obviously starting over with a new series is going to severely fuck up what little audience I have left. They aren't loyal to my content or desires, they just want their stupid giant monsters to crack jokes at each other until the end of time. That much is obvious with how they comment and how their viewing habits change throughout the year and releases. I've never been good at getting people to stick around for MY content, they only want what I do with other people's ideas. It's disheartening as hell, but it is what it is.
On the plus side, if I do go ahead and start over fresh with a new series, I feel like it'll be a series I'd be comfortable with sharing on Newgrounds. I know I never really did Bloop releases here, but mostly because that's a super niche topic that I doubt you guys would much care for. I really didn't want you guys pointing out how different it is from my normal style of comedy and content. I try my best to bring my style to it, but ultimately it's a series whose topic is out of my control. Failure really messes up my motivation to keep making more, and Newgrounds has the tendency of being little art snobs when I don't meet random art standards. I have my style, that much isn't changing for anybody. And yes, I know, "don't read the comments if it bothers you", but I've always prided myself on at least reading comments from viewers. I even keep up with it on Youtube, even back when I was getting hundreds of comments a day. It's a recipe for disaster, but my diet has always been rubbish.
If you wish to help by checking out some of my recent videos, or if you're just curious where the "Half Beard" and "Runesuck" guy went, check out the Youtube channel. John (little bro) plays the part of Megalodon, for instance. It'd be nice to think that I could maybe get people interested in a new series and justify making the switch, but at this point I'm not expecting anything. It's only getting harder to get public interest in an unproven property, and nobody ever sticks around for my content. I'm just a relic people are too busy to bother remembering. They feel I'm best experienced in their rearview mirror, or behind the lens of a pair of nostalgia glasses. If I'm not a part of some "I REMEMBER BACK WHEN I" story, I'm not important. I'm just struggling to keep earning enough to live.
