Progress on the next video, and initial results of the shorts experiment.

I'm 5 minutes into what should be a ~15 minute long video. This is a return to what I was scripting before I decided to make the map changes episode its own thing, since this one is all about unlisted patch changes:

I'm hoping I can finish it and have it ready Friday evening, but if not I have plans over the weekend and it'll have to wait until sometime early next week instead.

Thanks to everyone who voted, I heard you loud and clear that TikTok uploads should be double-posted to youtube, so I'll be sure to do that. I've still considered the possibility of more personal stuff eventually winding up on TikTok, so there's still the potential of *some* stuff being exclusive to there, but only if it's really inane/ unrelated stuff. Anything that's Soulsborne trivia like my first video will be posted to both.

Speaking of which, how's this whole experiment shaping up?

Revenue

In terms of revenue, shorts simply aren't worth it. It's on track to make ~$19 dollars around 450k views. Thankfully, this was my expectation going into it and the hope was to simply reach new viewers who either haven't run into my stuff yet or who've otherwise passed over my videos because of their length.

Am I actually reaching a new/ different audience?

In this regard, the results are promising! Over 90% of its viewers were people who weren't subscribed to me. Compare this to the Map Changes video, where unsubscribed viewers made up 75% of viewers instead.

I can also see a breakdown of traffic sources, and this might be a kind of apples and oranges thing since this option literally doesn't exist for my normal videos, but I can see that roughly 85% of views of my short came from the youtube shorts feed. This means the vast majority of views are almost certainly coming from mobile devices, people who are scrolling through the youtube app and probably didn't have the time to set aside for a longer video at the moment.

New Subscribers Rate

Youtube also tries to estimate how many new subscribers a given video earned me. The Map Changes video has resulted in 1.3k new subscribers so far, while my first short has gained a little over 250 new subs. So while that's only 1/5th, when you consider that the amount of work that goes into a short isn't remotely close to 1/5th the effort of a full length video, that's actually very good.

Conclusion

This is all to say that it's been a very encouraging experiment. I'm still minded about how my channel appears and it's unlikely I'll do a lot of shorts in-between full episodes, and I'm certainly not going to bother with another one before the video I'm working on now. But the basic idea of "try to reach some new viewers with simpler content" seems to be working well enough, so I'm definitely interested in making more every now and again.