Poll: Viewer Contributions

Happy Halloween Supporters!

The "John Titor" video from supporter early access a few weeks ago went live today and is going well, currently #2 of the last 10 videos by this point in time.

Under that and other videos I am extremely flattered to sometimes get comments like this:

For those from outside the UK, Blue Peter is a wholesome long running Children's BBC program, that to this day often features a dog (and occasionally a cat) sitting with the hosts:

I used to watch this all the time as a kid (image above from 1978) and I think every child in the UK did (maybe it was the law!) I can certainly see the similarity either way.

And the Broom Cupboard was Children's BBC's equivalent of a radio DJ announcing the next show between programmes. The presenter was often accompanied by a puppet:

Perifabric anyone? ;-) And finally, there are comments like this:

Morph was a "claymation" animated character with a high pitched funny voice (like my component voices) in the art show "Take Hart" where Tony Hart was basically the BBC's equivalent of a very relaxing Bob Ross. 

Tony would feature viewer contributions of artwork in "The Gallery" segments.

Also:

I've even had this, which is just humbling and astonishing. I guess the shows above are similar to Mr Rogers:

I haven't consciously used any of the above ideas, but somehow it's come around to that, and I'm sure it's likely I was inspired by my childhood as we all are.

Okay, enough screenshots and examples! But it's obvious and lovely that people are getting some sort of kids' TV relaxing vibe from the channel. So on to my question.

Question: "Should I feature viewer contributions for 1-2 mins in every recipode?"

Viewer Contributions:

• On occasion I feature little videos from viewers/supporters and their kids. I find these really fun to edit into the videos, and you may remember recent ones from Adiefractic and Julia. I have more pending kindly sent in, waiting for the right video. (Feel free to send some in if you want!)
• These don't have to be video clips, they could be art, homebrew programs, photos of parent and child time bonding over playing Little Computer People, or whatever!
• To me this is similar to how those shows featured "viewer contributions". 

Unboxings:

• The "established convention" with channels is to do separate unboxing videos every few months.
• It occurs to me that I don't have to save my pile of boxes up for every 3 months... if I unboxed 1 item in every video, I'd have enough to keep that going pretty consistently.

Pros:

• From a channel perspective it not only keeps that viewer engaged, but it shows new viewers that there's a fun established fan base here to join.
• It's just a nice thing and makes it not "all about me". It becomes a 2 way mirror, in a way.

Cons:

• Viewership of each new video is about two-thirds newcomers, one-third subscribers. Could showing content not related to the video title alienate/switch off those viewers?
• Maybe I should place the viewer contributions at the end...
• The more I steer it towards kids there is the business risk that YouTube deem it a kids' channel, which as of 2020 means I wouldn't be eligible for targeted advertising revenue (though it's very unlikely and I believe I could successfully argue the channel is not aimed at children as my demographic is much older. And it's not all about revenue.)

So there it is! Thanks for listening. What do you think?

Your friend in retro, Perifractic