January Round-up!

Friends and Patrons and both,

I've decided to start a new end of month summary of the channel to better inform you guys about what you've help support for this month, and to help lay it out in black and white for you all to decide if supporting for another month is right for you, plus it'll also be a nice way of comparing the performance of the channel on a monthly basis.

For the month of January 2019:

- 69 videos.

- Which is around 2415 minutes, or 40.25 hours, of content.

- In January, my content was watched for a total of 5,226,782 minutes, which is a whopping 9 years 342 days! (Yes, I've double checked it!)

- Revenue was horrible, and yes, I promise to be fully transparent with this, if we have good months, I will let you all know. Unfortunately, I can't give specifics because of Youtube policy.

- 2 sponsorship offers, both of which I declined for not aligning with the channel!

And I'll try and end these with my own personal retrospective views on the strengths and weaknesses of January for the month!

We had a very Game of Thrones heavy month, which was a double-edged sword in a lot of respects. The actual content of the series I thought was fairly good, most of which is provided by the mod, but the characters and stories we got out of it was definitely more than the usual CK2 campaign, the starting locations and goal for the series definitely helped a lot.

From an analytical perspective, there were three bonuses to having a three-part long-campaign set in a specific world. 

Firstly, it meant that we could have returning audiences from the first Game of Thrones campaign that we played several months ago. I've found from experience that groups tend to gravitate into two camps with Crusader Kings, a realism camp, and a fantasy camp, with the fantasy camp being much more prominent - look at Paradox's weird DLC additions (animal kingdoms, immortality, dark magic etc). As strange as it sounds we've erred on the side of realism as of late. Between the first Game of Thrones series and this one, we've had Julius Nepos, the Holy Fury Throog Campaign, After the End, etc, all of which have been fairly magic free, and fairly grounded in a realistic background.

The second strength was definitely the retention that it bought around; once someone was hooked on the fable of Topbog Spoff, seeing him return of the course of several series would have been an attraction to the series itself, regardless of whether or not Topbog was the main star of the show. 

Finally, and in my opinion the best reason, the soft reboots meant a spike in new people being interested in watching the campaign, whereas before they may have not cared. Interested in Game of Thrones but not interested in Asshai? Well good news, in a couple of weeks we'll launch a part two series about Corsairs, which might be more interesting. It's true of Youtube that whenever I launch a new series, the first few episodes are always the most popular, with a sharp decline after that. So logically, and I've sort of proven it to myself with this series, having lots of shorter series would see more of those spikes of new people interested in the content. The change in branding and art definitely help attract new people (and maybe the tags too?)

I've learned a couple of things with some of these series, things which I am planning on doing differently in the future. 

The Gogossos series I felt was the weakest of the Topbog Trilogy, even taking into account that there have been very few episodes of the Valyria playthrough. This I blame on a fairly weak and uninteresting start, coupled with my own attempt to reinvigorate it by adding my own mods into the mix. Whilst the modding itself isn't necessarily a bad idea, CK2 is very, very fragile when it comes to adding new mods to a preexisting game, and I ended up spending a lot of time and effort trying to make things compatible rather than focusing on making the series more engaging. 

The Rimworld Medieval series was also fairly weak at the start. The unfortunate truth of it is simply going from a series of unlimited power and resources (Genetic Rim) to a completely barebones fight for survival with Bonnet Bigly was probably unappealing to those who were just interested in the strange and weird mods out there that really let you push the boundaries of Rimworld. I've toyed around with the idea of having a prebuilt, albeit very small, village so that we can dive straight into the mods rather than having to dedicate a significant amount of time to generic Rimworld setup.

Overall, I feel January was a fairly successful month for the channel. The smaller, but interconnected, series format might become a regular of the channel The higher audience retention rates tell me that the viewers enjoy it too, and it's good for channel growth so it seems beneficial all round! The revenue was crappy, and the channel is still far from self-sustaining (with the lion's share of revenue still coming from Patreon) but I've heard from many, many other creators that January is terrible for ad-revenue, so hopefully we'll have a better measure of things next month.

If you read all of that you're a true superfan, or just want to get your money's worth. Either way, thank you for your time, and thank you for your support, without which we'd have shut down a long long time ago.

Deus Vult,

Sam