Vito's 2022 Year in Review

I have an unfortunate tendency to focus on the negative events of my life, a tendency I’m trying to overcome in this New Year. So while I wasn’t able to accomplish everything I wanted to in 2022, the lessons I learned and the strides I’ve made should help empower 2023 to be an awesome year for the Vito channel and beyond.

Part of my problem has always been unchecked ambition, my belief that I am some sort of Italian-American Superman capable of endlessly producing content without even a moment to breathe. What I learned this year is that I have obvious limits, and I need to narrow down my focus in order to achieve my goals.

My content plan was simply too much for me to handle. Bi-monthly video essays on the main channel, daily commentary on the secondary channel, two weekly podcasts, regular gaming streams, writing and storyboarding an entire comic book, while also somehow staying on top of my personal health and wellbeing. Quite a workload!

I found myself in a constant tug-of-war between all these different projects, unable to find any sort of real balance. When the secondary channel was doing well, I found myself without time for the video essays. When I dove into a video essay, I had no time to stream or podcast. When I focused on podcasting, my channels went barren. And as for my personal health… well, that unfortunately never became the priority it should be and I’m currently paying the price for that.

But again, I want to make this a positive thing. I’ve learned my limitations, and I’m working on a content plan for 2023 that won’t drive me into the grave. And again, there was some great success in 2022 that I would be a fool to ignore.

The Biggest Problem in the Universe podcast is doing incredibly well, with over 1,400 paid listeners. I’m hoping we can get to the point where we can afford to pay to fly in guests and really bring the show to the next level.

The Vito 2 channel also performed surprisingly well. Moving forward, I need to decide whether I can afford to continue with my original plan of only posting commentary to the secondary channel. Obviously I broke with that plan in the latter half of 2022, as I needed the extra ad revenue I could get from posting on my main channel. However, I’m still not sure that was the right decision, and I may revisit it.

Meanwhile, my Superkiller comic book is coming along well. It’s been a far more complicated process than I’d anticipated, which is why the launch date of my Kickstarter has slipped so much. I don’t want to launch a crowdfunding campaign until I feel at least half the book is ready to go, so I hope all of you following along will bear with me! I’m hoping to set up a website sometime soon so people can track the progress of the book in real time.

Lastly, I will admit that my biggest disappointment this year was in my video essays, or lack of them. My biggest setback was sinking so much time and effort into my “How Disney Ruined Boba Fett” video only for it to barely crack 100k views. It’s hard to judge what audiences will be interested in but I think ultimately, most people did not care about the Boba Fett show or character.

The ultimate challenge of YouTube is trying to effectively budget your time, and spending two months writing and editing a video only to get 130k views is not effective when I could pump out a few silly videos about the Starcruiser or something else for the same exact return. HOWEVER, I know the essays are my speciality and are what get people invested in the channel. I still just need to figure out how to streamline the process and find topics that deliver.

Anyhow, moving forward I have some big plans. But I also don’t want to lock into some ambitious announcement for what to expect from me just yet. I hope you guys trust me to continue entertaining you, and I will try my best to keep you in the loop. If there’s anything in particular you hope to see from me this year, do let me know in the comments.

I love you all, and again, I hope to be announcing some exciting new content very soon. I’m very excited for this new year, and I think we’re going to have a lot of fun.