August 2023 Production Update

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I’m currently working on 50 Ways to Die in Minecraft Parts 17 and 18, which are going to be themed on the RL Craft and Create+ modpacks respectively. Last month, I said that I was in the brainstorming part of the process and was hoping to have come up with enough good clip ideas before August. Just this morning, I tallied up my good-enough ideas and discovered that I’ve just barely reached my goal today, so I did indeed manage to finish preproduction before August after all.

I wish I could have finished the brainstorming a week or so earlier so that I could have started production by now, but both of these modpacks are huge and complicated. It took me longer than expected to research them enough to make decent jokes about them. Even now, I still feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface of both of them, but I don’t feel I can spare any more time experimenting on them further at this point. August is almost here, which means December is getting closer. Now that I’ve got enough ideas for the next two 50 Ways videos, I’m going to spend August producing clips out of them. There’s no way I'll finish making them by September, but I’ll try to get as many done as I can.

Alongside the clips, I’m also going to be making kid-friendly (or at least, slightly more kid-friendly) versions of my previous 50 Ways videos so that I can post them to another channel aimed specifically at kids. The reason I want to do this is that my channel hasn’t been getting as many views as it used to before 2020, and I’m still trying to figure out why. One of the things that changed around that time is that YouTube started requiring creators to specify whether their content was aimed at either kids or teens and adults. At the time, my analytics said that my highest viewing demographic was 18-24 year olds, so I set my videos to Not-For-Kids.

However, I’ve seen a lot of comments from people saying that they discovered my videos when they were kids, and my 35-44 year old demographics have always been strangely high, which lead me to suspect that the viewers in that demographic were actually the children of the 35-44 year-olds who registered the account, so I have a hunch that I actually had a significant portion of viewers under the age of 13 that YouTube wasn’t telling me about. Therefore, one of my theories for my drop in viewership in 2020 is that it was the result of YouTube removing the kids from my viewer base.

Since my videos are all pretty tame, I could potentially fix this by setting all my videos to Made-For-Kids, but then those videos would lose their comment sections and getting feedback from people is one of the most rewarding parts of making them. Plus, I experimented with setting one of my videos to Kid Mode and I got a lot of complaints from viewers about the comment section being gone. So instead of setting my videos to Made-For-Kids, I’m planning on making slightly altered versions of them and uploading them to a new kid-friendly version of my channel. It shouldn’t be too difficult, because, like I said, most of my videos are already pretty tame, so I probably won’t need to change much to make them kid-friendly.

Part 17 Progress

47/40 Good Clip Ideas

0/60 Clips Recorded or Edited

Part 18 Progress

40/40 Good Clip Ideas

1/60 Clips Recorded and Edited