May was another busy month, taken up in the first week with a holiday to Tenerife, and later in the month going away for London MCM. I had a great time doing both, but it did eat into some content creating time. Due to that, I only had time to do one stream, and one podcast. But I made sure to keep up my weekly video schedule on the main channel.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about the content I made this month. The 40,000 subscribers video I made to begin the month went down very well with my regular audience, but there was one comment in particular which struck a nerve with me. I tried not to think about it too much, but they did have a point… Here is the comment:
It hurt to see this, but they do have a point. I’ve been constantly fighting myself all year to be able to make the kinds of videos I actually want to make. I struggled with this a while back, but ended up slipping back into the habit of making videos because I need to, rather than I want to. So again i’m planning to try and get back on track and focus on actual retro videos again. One year ago, in May 2023, I wrote this post:
Reading it again today, it’s clear I haven’t done enough to distance myself from promotional videos. I have two more to make, then I’ll try and take a break again. I am beginning to question whether opening the PO Box up at the start of the year was a good idea or not. It’s quite expensive to keep running, and whenever I get something through, I feel obligated to make a video on whatever it was, causing me to push my actual plans back further and further. See the video at the end of this month, a video on some XR Glasses. That isn’t a topic I would ever choose to make a video on, and although it’s really cool that companies want to send me expensive tech items like that, is it really good for me and the channel to make that video? As I expected, it’s one of the worst performing videos of the year already. I don’t think it’s worth the tradeoff any more.
I have two more sponsored videos to make, then I think I’m going to go back to making videos for myself again.
If i’m being honest with the videos I made this month, the only other one I enjoyed making was my Sega Journey video. The “Games I’ve been playing” one was just a quick throwaway video to fill the gap while I was busy, and the micro handhelds was a sponsored one when two companies had sent me systems at the same time, so I bundled them together so I only had to make one video instead of two. I knew I wasn’t happy with what I was making, so I rushed that one too…
I felt so much better about making the Sega video, and really want to be able to make more of that style! I think the audience would appreciate that too, as the Sega one, despite not getting as many views as some of the sponsored ones, has had such an amazing response, and people on other platforms have also been telling me how much they enjoyed it!
So, expect some big changes next month!
As for the analytics, perhaps I’m being a bit hard on myself, because the numbers are actually very good.
Obviously, I’ve been thinking about how I can make working on the channel more enjoyable for myself, and my viewers, so I’m very excited to put some new ideas to the test! Expect things to be a bit different next month as I try some experiments after the last few sponsored videos.
Join patreon here to see my preliminary plans for June – https://www.patreon.com/posts/plans-for-june-105381370?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
Videos
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Streams
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Podcasts
Listen on Podcast Apps —> https://anchor.fm/retrobreak
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Website Updates
I made a few changes to the website this month, for one, I changed the theme back to light, and added a blue highlight when selecting links, I think it looks nicer than the dark greys and blacks before. I also fixed a few broken links and re-arranged the homepage a bit. Nothing too exciting, but I do like playing around with he site every now and then! I also changed the blog post reader to wide, so the posts take up more of the screen now. Let me know what else you’d like to see on the site!
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