A Less Than Stellar Year

I've always done something different with the channel in November and December. Last year I did "Open Source Appreciation Month" and it was a really fun experiment.

This year, I cooked up a couple of new series', like Distro Delves, as well as working with new sponsors such as NordVPN.

The general reception to Distro Delves has been rather mixed. For the amount of effort required to produce an episode, the viewership is rather poor and the number of dislikes on each video has been rather unfortunate (which contributed to me disabling them entirely ).

The reception to working with NordVPN was generally negative with a few comments being so negative that I removed them from the video.

I'm happy that I tried different video formats but ultimately I'm rather disappointed with the results. As time goes on, audience engagement has become more negative, significantly more so than 2 or 3 years ago.

I put quite a bit more effort into these videos than I typically do and given the results from the community, I'll be changing things a bit in future episodes so that I don't spend time on content that people don't care about. I'll detail this in a blog post on the Egee.io website.

And the last thing to touch upon in this post is Patreon. 

I haven't gained a new Patron since June and I actually lost one in December, despite promoting Patreon in videos, Twitter, and etc. I'm going to be changing the end-card for videos to feature Ko-fi instead of Patreon since I get significantly more traffic on these blog posts than the Patreon ones.

I will say that I'm generally unhappy with the performance of the channel and the general state of YouTube and the community at large.

I plan to continue to produce high-quality videos and possibly and hopefully attract a larger & more diverse audience.

Let's cheers for a better 2020! 🥂