2024 - A Year of Actualol (Newsletter)

Happy New Year patrons!

Thank you for giving me another year of Actualol. It’s been a tough year. So I thought I’d give an honest look back at my year - on and off screen. Please don’t share this outside of Patreon. 

January

At the start of January, I received my 100K subscribers plaque from YouTube. Which felt nice. It’s embarrassing to have feelings that have been artificially induced by a mega corporation, but hey, at least I didn’t cry. 

I made a video about myself, telling a few anecdotes that define my life. I’m naturally very sentimental, so I probably did cry while writing this (why can’t we all just have sleepovers with our friends and play SNES anymore?). It was nice to have a break from talking about board games - but I’m glad I’m not talking about myself every month, because I’d get bored very quickly. 

At this point, my daughter Aurelia was only 5 months old - and life at home was tough. She was waking up constantly at night, and we were exhausted every day. I’ve never been a big sleeper, but proper sleep deprivation is horrible. It makes everything so much harder - and it’s so hard to stay positive, especially in the winter. 

And then on zero sleep you have to be a parent?? Before Aurelia could crawl, she was a very demanding baby. She would shout at us all day long to communicate what she wanted, and wanted to be held all the time, so it was pretty intense. We were given hope by another parent at a baby class who said she seemed just like his daughter - and that as soon as she could move for herself she was happy, and that’s exactly what happened a few months later! It was life changing.

I was taking full advantage of Actualol’s generous flexitime policy so I could do more at home - let Serena get an hour’s sleep so she could face a day of baby shouting. I felt very lucky that I could escape to my studio to work.

With the lack of sleep, I couldn’t face the thought of trying to be funny, so my mind turned to video ideas that would get clicks but wouldn’t take too much work. It was time to talk about the 100 Games that had left my collection. I’d downsized in early 2023 as part of the pre-baby nesting instincts and knew I’d cover it eventually.

But when I got to the actual list - it was full of games no-one would know or care about, so I bent the truth, and included games I got rid of years ago. I was tempted to ad-lib the video to save time, but with 100 games, it could have lasted three hours. So I decided to script it to keep it snappy. Oof, that was tedious work - trying to write about fifteen/twenty games a day, and then doing it all again the next day, and the next day. It was a slog. But the video did much better than I expected - I think the provocative thumbnail was the magic bullet.

February

I spent February desperately trying to catch up on new games from 2023 for my Top 10 Games of the Year video. With dwindling income on Patreon, I was desperate for a big success to make money from YouTube ads. And historically my Top 10 Games of the Year has outperformed my other videos, because it’s a hot topic. 

But I was way behind on playing games. I’d barely touched a board game from July to December, and that’s when all the new games were released. So I had to step it up. I’m so lucky to have a group of friends who are available in the daytime to play games with me. Because at the time I was going to bed at 7pm every night to capitalise on those first few hours of sleep before the carnage began.

It helped that there were some good games released in 2023 - so I struck gold after very little digging. I take the Top 10 of the Year very seriously - my reputation depends on the quality of these games, so I can’t bring myself to make the video until I’ve got ten great games that are worth talking about. 90% of games released these days are 6/10 - they’re perfectly serviceable and inoffensive, but they don’t deserve to ever see the light of YouTube.

At home, things became more stressful as we started Aurelia on solid food, and it turned out she has three different food allergies. I remember it feeling so unfair - we were barely coping and this whole new dimension of worry was added to our plate. You have this perfect baby that you’re doing everything you can to protect, and suddenly there’s this new threat that you just have to accept. 

March

It took over a month to finish the Top 10 Games video. It’s always the hardest video to make - writing about and filming b-roll for ten new games is a lot of work. In the past I would pull late nights to get it done, but that wasn’t an option this time. 

While making this video I realised I just couldn’t keep up with the workload that I was used to - so I advertised for a video editor. I got 40+ applicants, but funnily enough it was the first person who got in touch that I went with, because he had his own YouTube videos which gave me a great idea of what he was capable of. Joaquin has edited every video since. He’s saved me from so much work, and from the existential crises that come from staring at your own face for days. 

I was expecting the Top 10 Games video to be my big hit, because it has been in previous years. And it was heartbreaking to see it flounder when it had been such a battle to finish it. 

In recent years, the money I get from YouTube ads has become an important part of my income. And it’s not just about the latest video - in 2023, when a video did well, the algorithm would show all my old videos again, so I’d get a much bigger boost across the whole channel. So when a new video doesn’t have that success, you also don’t get that boost. Success breeds success, and failure breeds failure. 

April

Still exhausted every day and short on time, I needed another quick video idea that would “do well”, and I could use as a test-run for my new editor. My collection videos in previous years have been big hits, so I decided to go with that. But this time I couldn’t get Serena’s help to film the video and ask questions, so I wanted to come up with a new way to keep it interesting. 

So I set about re-organising my shelves, putting genres and styles of games together, and coming up with funny names for each shelf. It was nice to get to spend some time with my shelves (what a ridiculous sentence!) - I used to do so much reorganising back when I first got into the hobby. 

Joaquin is much better at visual effects than I am, and so I asked him to create some on screen graphics for each shelf. It really helped to enhance an otherwise pretty basic video.

When I released the collection video, it once again floundered. You can see on the YouTube creators app how a video is performing compared to the last 10 videos you released. Information that has become a depressing but important part of my job. And from experience, you know how vitally important the first few days are to the video’s long term success. 

To try and stand out, I’d spent ages creating a high concept thumbnail about my collection being a work of art, in a picture frame, with me as an art critic in front of it. It wasn’t working. The next day I was straight back into the studio reshooting images I could use for a different thumbnail that presented a clearer message.

May

In December 2023, I’d come up with the idea to make a video about a collection you could store in a shoe box. And as with most of my projects, I’d been too much of a perfectionist about it. I spent ages researching games, creating lists, calculating fundensities and trying to make the shoebox collection as good as it could be. 

I started writing the script for the Shoebox collection video in May, but with 20 games and 20 lots of jokes and b-roll, I was never going to have it finished. So I needed another video to fill the gap. The big YouTuber ProZD had commented on my collection video asking me to make a whole video ranting about board game boxes - so I did that. Once again relying on Joaquin’s skills to make it look good with the on screen graphics. 

It was fun to film, and I enjoyed coming up with the tier ranking names. But it was never going to be a big success, and it wasn’t. Some people really enjoyed it, others were offended that I’d done it at all. 

6 weeks before Aurelia was due to start nursery, the nursery she had been booked onto since last year announced it was shutting down…in two months. So we were forced to scramble at the last minute to find somewhere else for her to go. In the most populated borough in London.

June

By this point in the year, I was starting to really worry about money. The Patreon levels were at a pretty desperate low, the YouTube ad revenue was way below average. So I decided to run a sponsored ad for the first time, in my shoebox collection video.

50% of the sponsor fee was only unlocked if I hit two viewing goals within 30 days of releasing the video. I felt like they were achievable targets because of the success of my previous small games video, but became very stressed when the video started off by performing terribly - especially compared to my Small Games video from 2023.

Realising I wasn’t going to receive half of the sponsorship money, or get a boost of YouTube ad revenue sent me spiralling. I felt like I needed to do something - fast, and I started to plan a Patreon pledge drive. 

During these weeks, I turned 40 years old - in the most anticlimactic way imaginable. I love hosting birthday parties and years ago me and Serena had dreamt about how we’d celebrate our joint 40th, with a band and a dance floor and all our friends. But as the date crept closer, we had no energy to organise anything big. So I just had some friends over to play games. 

I was also struggling with a medical issue, which I convinced myself was much worse than it  turned out to be many months later.

The response to the pledge video was incredible. Good and bad. Thankfully, so many of you chose to join or up your pledges, and reversed the fortunes of Actualol. On the downside, I opened myself up to more criticism and hatred than I’ve ever received before. It was a very weird time emotionally. I was happy for the support, but I was processing a lot of heavy criticism from people who spoke like they knew my life, my job and my situation better than me. 

July

A funny coincidence of the “plea video” is that it drew attention to the channel and the shoe box video, which skyrocketed - and hit both its sponsorship view targets just in the nick of time.

Having spent the last month revamping the Patreon, I didn’t have time to write a full video from scratch, so I turned to a backup idea. My Ultimate Couples Games guide - a compilation of recommendations from old videos. I used this concept once before to cover the channel during a personal tragedy. Reusing footage made some viewers very angry - but I didn’t have a choice. I was doing what I could to protect my income as a self-employed person.

Reaching Aurelia’s first birthday felt like a triumph. And around this age she started learning things so quickly that it made every new day exciting. All that talking and singing and reading to her was starting to pay off - and you realise she understands what you’re saying to her. We’d both waited a year to be able to effectively communicate with each other - and I love seeing her eyes light up when she realises her words are finally getting through.

One day in July, I was pushing Aurelia in the buggy, trying to keep her to sleep for her nap. I was walking in unsuitable shoes for hours, and I ended up hurting my feet - giving myself Sesamoiditis, which is inflammation of the ball joints of the big toe. In other words, it hurts whenever I walk. And despite countless visits to the podiatrist, custom insoles, an orthopaedic surgeon, a steroid injection, pads, gels and salt-water baths, I’ve had it ever since. The main treatment for Sesamoiditis is to stay off your feet - because every step is reaggravating it. And I’ve been trying my hardest to do that by cycling everywhere, but it just won’t get better. 5 months on, it has become the bane of my existence, and since the experts haven’t helped, I have no idea what to do next. The only consolation is it doesn’t impact my ability to play and review board games!

August

I was determined for my first proper video back to be a big one - and I borrowed an idea I’d seen do well elsewhere - 10 Board Games to Start A Collection. And thankfully it did do well! I’m really pleased with this one, and it feels like it marked a turning point for the year.

For this video, I experimented with hiring a videographer to film b-roll for me, but it didn’t work out. It’s a slow, detailed job - and it’s very hard to hand it over to someone else. It cost too much money to have someone else do a worse job, so I went back to doing it myself.

It has been a year of minor improvements. After 9 years of doing YouTube, it’s hard to find ways to speed things up. You want to believe that a fancy new piece of equipment will make your life easier, but it usually won’t. But this year, I’ve been loving my new editing workflow. Now my video recorder automatically uploads proxies (low-res duplicates) of my videos to the cloud so that my editor can use them to edit the video. Then he sends me the finished project, and I simply re-attach the hi-res 4K footage to finish it off. It’s modern day magic, and all thanks to Covid forcing companies to create remote working solutions. 

September

My Reiner Knizia video was a long time in the making. I spent most of the weekend at Lobstercon in May playing Knizia games, and the whole summer ticking more games off my list. Once I’d scheduled it for September I bought the final few on ebay in a hurry to get it done on time.

This was a passion project. It was fun to complete it, but it didn’t perform well. Why would it? Unfortunately, that has a knock-on effect now. The sponsorship companies determine your worth based on your average view counts - so a weak video like this and the box ranking one pulls everything down, and makes sponsors nervous.

I was delighted to get Flexispot as a client for the Knizia video, because I use their products already. But they’ve since told me they won’t use me again because they didn’t get as many clicks as they would want. So it adds this extra pressure to be consistent. Because the opportunities are rare - I couldn’t find a sponsor for October’s Clue video, and I don’t have any planned beyond the next video.

October

I went to Paris for a weekend with my school friends to celebrate turning 40. On the first night there, I had a lovely time playing games of Trio in various bars, taking in the atmosphere, and the cocktails.

I was trying to avoid unnecessary walking, so we cycled back on the local Electric bike rentals. As we were cycling, I was distracted by all the wonderful nightlife, and I cycled into the bike lane curb and went flying. I shouted out in pain and was soon surrounded by a crowd of parisians. After the shock wore off, I realised I’d bruised a rib and my shoulder blade, which made me very useless for a few weeks. 

I enjoyed working on the Clue video, trying to find the best alternatives to a popular game, like I did back in 2017 with Monopoly. And it was a nice opportunity to bring back the Sherlock character. I actually tried to involve some other characters, but I couldn’t make it work. By far the most time consuming work is trying to write character skits and make them funny enough.

Let’s say the catchphrase for the year - “I was expecting this video to do better, but it started terribly”. I was convinced this topic would be entertaining. I released it just before Lobstercon and tried to ignore it while I was there. The week after I shot a new thumbnail (throwing the box in the bin, a la January’s video), and changed the title to something more provocative. What happened next was unprecedented. It actually worked. I saw the video soar from the worst performing video of the last ten, to the best. I was so delighted to have saved the video from obscurity.

November 

In November, another miracle happened. We got our sleep back. After a nightmare weekend for Serena when I was at Lobstercon, we vowed to do something to fix it. It had been 16 months of attempts - routines, music, white noise, wake windows, sleep consultants (aka con artists), but what finally worked was to stop breastfeeding. Two days later we were sleeping. It feels like we’ve levelled up. Life has a sunnyness to it again.

The Christmas gifts video came together nicely. These were all games I’d been enjoying this year and was ready to shout about. I just wanted to find games that were available (very hard) and affordable (getting harder). And Joaquin excelled himself with the on screen gift tags and gift wrap transitions.

December

This year I vowed to get my Top 10 Games of the Year out earlier than I’ve done before. I usually take my time, slog through the Essen games and it arrives around March. But this year I stepped it up and got my list together in December. I’ve filmed the video, and it’s half edited, but the Christmas break has meant it’s not going to arrive until early January.

And it’s been so nice to spend Christmas with Aurelia this year. She loves saying “Santa” and “Snowman” along with hundreds of other words, and she’s just the smiliest, happiest baby there’s ever been. 

There’s been a lot of challenges this year - I’m happy to see the year come to an end. And I’m very excited for the next one. I’ve got lots of video ideas swimming around my head. And on a personal note, Serena and I are planning to move away from London, after living here for 17 years. Onwards and upwards!

Happy new year to you all!

Actually yours,

Jon