It is very hard to succeed at something if you don’t know what the goals are.
I started a YouTube channel in April 2022. At first, the focus was pretty simple: I played American Truck Simulator/Euro Truck Simulator 2 a ton, and would record and upload my game sessions. My biggest influences were Jeff Favignano and my friend Zilla Blitz. There were some challenges with my hardware at the time: The Mac wasn’t great for recording video game content and my PC was ancient. But, I was able to soldier on.
Then in May I got a gaming PC and now it was very easy to record. At the time life got really chaotic and it is hard to grow a YouTube channel with an infrequent posting schedule.
In December, my gaming really got upended when I switched to Microsoft Flight Simulator. The sim looks fantastic, but creating content is harder. There is the first the technical challenge of learning to fly the damn airplane. Using some replay utilities it is possible to create cinematic videos.
For a cacophony of reasons my channel has not been successful. After a year, I have 22 subscribers. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t post because it’s all just pissing into the wind, and it’s all just pissing into the wind because I don’t post a lot. The YouTube algorithm is a harsh master.
The real reason I haven’t been posting is I don’t know the story I want to tell. I am a story teller. Even in my work documentation, it’s sort of ok, we are going to tell a story about how we are going to implement this system.
”He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium; a master.” – Ralphie.
I am a writer. I enjoy writing. The whole process — an idea for a story I want to tell, how I want to phrase something, fussing over the details. With writing, I know the story I want to tell, how I want to create it, and best of all I don’t need to be sitting at my desk to do it. Words are my medium.
“Saying ‘no’ is actually saying ‘yes’ to other things.” – Patrick Rhone.
It’s not the end of my YouTube channel. I will still poke at it. But maybe the story of my YouTube channel is there just isn’t a story for me to tell there. By taking the focus away from worrying about my channel, I can tell stories in a medium that works for me.
Mark Crump 