It’s a new year and with it comes many new beginnings and anniversaries… but today I wanted to focus on just one of those and share my thoughts with you about it. January 2026 marks the three year anniversary of my Youtube channel… though I didn’t go live until I published my first video in February 2023. Still… it has been three years since I took the plunge… or more accurately… did a cannonball into the deep end of the Youtube creator pool. To be honest, the entire endeavor has succeeded more than I thought it would, but not nearly as much as I had hoped… which is a complicated way of saying that I am pretty pleased with how it has all gone, but I think I can do better. You can’t work on something for three years without learning a thing or two and I have definitely learned a thing or two… or three.
One of the things I learned is that your channel needs to be focused, especially in the early stages. You can branch out later, but in the beginning, you need to establish yourself in a niche… or more likely… a niche of a niche… or even a niche of a niche of a niche. I think you get the idea… and once you get established, if you decide to change your niche then there are right ways and wrong ways to do all that. I know. I have done pretty much all the wrong ways… and in the process I have learned (through trial and error) the right way to do these things… and if I did not learn THE one and only right way… I at least learned how to do these better.
This is the point in a typical Youtube Creator’s career that most people throw up their hands in frustration and quit. That’s unfortunate… because those mistakes have prepared them (me) to succeed… or at least do a lot better than they (I) have been. Besides, being a creator is fun. In my personal case, I am also world-class stubborn and tenacious… so I am not going anywhere because quitting is not in my nature… at least not without a whole lot more pain and suffering to convince me it’s no longer worth it to keep going. So… to steal a line from Sonny and Cher… the beat goes on… but I am definitely going to tweak things a bit.
I have built my channel on Let’s Play series that I have essentially refined into what I call Let’s Build series as that is what I especially love and want to focus on. While my focus has largely been on open world survival games with a heavy emphasis on crafting and building, I have branched into automation and simulation games and I have had a very successful series on specific Minecraft mods. In fact, that mod series (which I spun up to kind of prevent “dead air” while I retooled my Let’s Build format after the problems with my Gryphon Hall and Gryphon Manor series) is by far, the most popular series I have and THAT is a major bit of the problem.
Most of my subscribers, views, likes, and watch time came from that series. In fact, it still accounts for the lion’s share of NEW subscribers, views, likes and watch time today. Unfortunately, that is not where my heart is. My heart is in the Let’s Build series and while I have completely stopped making the mod videos AND my Let’s Build series are finally starting to see some love from Youtube algorithm… I realize that I kind of have the same problem within the Let’s Build series themselves.
Two of my series are definitely in the Let’s Build bucket… but they are not open world survival games. One of those is based on the automation game Satisfactory and the other is based on the theme park simulator, Parkitect. Both of these games and their series bring me a lot of happiness, but both of them bring a lot of confusion to the data and throw off the algorithm. Very few people watch Parks o’ Plenty and so that confuses the algorithm… while Mostly Satisfactory is one of the better performers but Satisfactory is quite different from Minecraft, Vintage Story, and now… Hytale… and THAT confuses the algorithm. I think that retiring these two series make help the algorithm better define and quantify my remaining Let’s Build series and start serving them to the right potential audience.
So… for those of you who have actively followed these series (especially Mostly Satisfactory), I thank you and I apologize for pulling the plug. It’s not you. It’s me. Actually, it is the algorithm. So what’s next?
As for my existing mainline Let’s Build series, they will remain in production and they will still release once every three days. However, when there were seven series, that meant that you got a new episode of a given series once every three weeks. Now it will be once every 15 days… which is just a day more than every two weeks. These remaining series are New Londinium, Greifenhorst, From the Rubble, Rediscovered, and Near Mist. I currently have a Let’s Build(ish) series for Hytale called Into the Breach… but that is not on a regular schedule… at least not yet. I am exploring Hytale through that series and since the game is still in a semi-embryonic state… it will be changing and morphing constantly for quite a while. When it does settle down into something like a 1.0 release, I may start a new and quite proper Let’s Build series for Hytale. Dunno. We’ll just have to wait and see.
And what about the Mod Deep Dives? Well… that is a horse of another color. While I do not enjoy making those videos nearly as much as the Let’s Build series… I do enjoy them and perhaps more importantly, I think they are a valuable and necessary part of the modded Minecraft community. I would like to spin them back up… but I can’t put them on my existing channel… and eventually I would want to remove all of the existing mod videos from the channel as well. The obvious solution is to have a spin off channel for just the mod videos.
The thing is that I am still weighing whether I CAN do that. Yes… I know I CAN spin a second channel… but can I spin one up and be able to support it like it would need to be supported? That part I don’t know yet and with my daytime job status still in Limbo… I need to put a pin in this one until I know better (and for the long term) what my time commitments and availability will be. So… don’t be surprised if I spin up a separate channel for the mod videos… but don’t hold your breath waiting for it either.