MONDAY UPDATE

Afternoon, all. Happy Monday and all that!

I’m bloody glad it’s September. I dunno about the rest of you, but August seemed particularly chaotic. Admittedly, since March life for us has felt like a puzzle, where we had to get creative to fit in everything we needed to do. In particularly, ever since Digi Live, we never seemed to have enough time.

Everything felt rushed or squeezed, and it was always an uphill race against our own exhaustion. And, inevitably, dealing with the latter always got pushed to the back of the queue of priorities.

Last week was – I hope – the peak of it all, and life might get a touch less frenetic from now on. The bank holiday – though I did work for a chunk of it, and do stuff for my mum – seemed to have an adverse knock-on effect. We looked after my mum on Thursday, and again on Friday morning, before heading off to Lincolnshire for the weekend to babysit. Which was lovely, of course, but I’m very glad I had kids when I was young and had infinite reserves of energy…

The short of it was, we only really had two full days of work last week, and I had to fit a bunch of day job meetings into those. Though we’ve still got our usual commitments, this should be our first week in a while where can actually make a dent in our enormous to-do list.

Theoretically anyway.

So of course last night I started coming down with a cold and woke up this morning with a phlegmy chest… It’s pretty mild – nothing a Lemsip placebo won’t deal with - but still...

On our to-do list at the minute (not necessarily in order of importance):

• Restarting BYAMPOD
• Recording Writer’s Club
• Sorting out the last bits of filming for Digi Level 2
• Editing Digi Level 2
• Planning for the little live show we’re doing in November with Cheapshow.
• Earning enough money to survive (obviously).
• Loads of other things I can’t think of right now, including the filming of the regular Digi videos.
• Making the leftover Digi Live merch available for purchase for everyone. 
• Editing the Digi Live Weekend.

Current plan is this: tonight at 7.30pm it’s Biffo’s Brain, we’re recording BYAMPOD, Writer’s Club and some other Patreon exclusive stuff tomorrow, and Thursday we’re filming. That’ll mean you’ll probably get a new regular video over the weekend, but it’ll be out for everyone else next week. I’m loathe to force a weekly schedule if it means the videos end up feeling rushed. We fell into that trap too many times in the past.

SHEDDING

Talking of regular Digi videos… we’ve noticed that over the past few months we seemed to have finally stopped shedding subscribers.

For the past couple of years, every time we uploaded a video we lost a ton – presumably people from the retro gamer/Gannon era, who didn’t like the manic variety of what we do these days, or wanted something different from us. We’d always put on some as well, and the two more or less balanced each other out, meaning we just stagnated.

Initially it frustrated me, but I long ago I accepted it was obviously going to happen after we so dramatically changed what we were doing.

But… that seems to have stopped – or, at least, become less pronounced - at last. We may have finally found our audience, and I’m glad I stuck to my guns, and found different measures of success.

I also did a little experiment with the latest video by listing its category as ‘travel’, rather than the usual ‘comedy’. And… it seems to have helped find us some new people.

Our views are nothing like we used to get of course – though I’m happy with what we generally get over time – but I’d always rather have a smaller bunch of people who really like us, and things like Patreon and Digi Live are the best signifiers of that. We know our variety will always count against us in terms of growth, but because the people who do follow us seem really passionate about it, we’ve got so much more creative freedom than most other YouTubers.

Admittedly, it makes no sense whatsoever that we’re still called Digitiser, but whatevs. Go back to teletext-era Digi, and I was always finding ways to make it about anything other than video games.

Anyhow. We’ve had lots of suggestions as to where we can go for GBDI, and most of them were already on our list of places to visit I don’t think we’re in any danger of becoming a full-time travel channel, but at the moment it’s nice to be outside, and we feel like we’re on a roll. Obviously the further we travel the more it costs - hotels, fuel etc. - but we do want to break away from videos that are always within spitting distance of London. Whitby seems to be calling us for some reason... 

Righty. Monday update done. Speak to some of you tonight.

Paul