So, What's Going On?

It's been quite an eventful year for me and my YouTubing adventures, and with a final lull now in effect between release seasons, let me take a step back and let you know where my head is at and how things have been going in general.  The good news is, I still like LEGO, a lot.  I'm also a lot happier with my work today than I was a year ago, with a more positive outlook on the future of my various content publishing channels.  Let me take you through the key points of interest.

The real-time Pure Builds channel has been my favorite pet project in a long time and the number of experiments & changes I've made with it since the first video in April has been immense.  Not until just the past few weeks, though, have I gotten the picture and, more importantly, the sound to where I'm really ready to set it free to roam and seek its place in the world while representing me and the quality of work I want to share.  That means it's finally time for me to take a stab at some branding in the form of a channel icon and a banner.

Meanwhile, JANG Builds It! has benefited from all visual improvements in Studio B and I've gotten a better handle on how to prepare & present the time lapse style videos.  For a channel that's been active for just over 9 months in an intensely competitive and yet specific niche, it's getting strongly positive feedback and excellent watch time numbers.

Speaking of watch time, it's still regarded as one of the most important metrics of successful video content and very important for YouTube's cold, dark, mysterious algorithms, and I've finally made great strides with it on the main JANGBRiCKS channel.  After about 1 & 1/2 years of trials & misses, I've gotten a handle on what I need to do to retain viewer interest for a longer time without a) resorting to cheap/annoying trickery, b) alienating one viewer segment to benefit another, or c) shifting to a format that I, personally, don't feel comfortable using.  I'm seeing "average view duration" numbers dramatically higher than my previous average.  This is fantastic not just "because stonks," but as an indication that I'm making content that more people want to see more of.

This year I've been catching up on a lot of important, overdue maintenance tasks that nobody but me cares about.  These include updating & unifying tags, descriptions, and other metadata across thousands of videos and trimming my video editing template files, followed by expanding the latter in smarter ways to reduce future repetitive work.  After roughly a decade of working exclusively in 1080-line HD at 30fps, I've started doing most reviews in 4K/30, city updates & builds at HD/60P while tripling to quadrupling the bitrate of files I upload compared to 2018. I made four more big changes to how I light & film things in the white void.  Two rooms worth of assembled sets which had spread themselves about an entire floor of my house like Tribbles were finally dealt with.  New Jang City was fully dusted, I finished expanding overhead lighting, my first attempt at a complete "skybox" was installed, and I wired up the entire underside of the main layout with 5V power for in-layout lighting and other future uses.  Just this week I arrived at a simple new setup for recording the complete process of creating MOCs in my building space as well.  During some gaps of time between videos it may have seemed to the outside world like I was slacking off or losing motivation, but I can assure you, reality has not matched perception!

Not everything's rosy, though.  Video view numbers are far less important & meaningful than they were, say, 3 years ago, but they still count for something, and they still don't look to hot, either for me or a fair number of other LEGO-focused YouTubers.  One thing affecting most of us is a worldwide contraction in interest in the subject.  Google Trends shows a drop of 66% in Web searches for the word "lego" in the important US market after the LEGO Movie-fueled 2014 peak. Worldwide numbers have trended decisively downwards as well.  Slightly closer to home, YouTube searches for "lego" are on a perfectly linear downward slope, and popularity of term "lego review" hit a historic low one year ago and remained very weak in 2019, down 70% from non-peak numbers in 2015.  Ignoring unpredictable outliers, the only LEGO-related video sub-niches that are performing consistently well presently are stop motion animations for kids (some now possibly in danger, as discussed in my last post) and aggregations or re-presentations of existing work.

All of this does give me cause for concern, even escalating into fear a few times in the past, but all of my recent positive progress is keeping me thoroughly upbeat in the near term.  I really want to see how this upcoming holiday & New Year release season goes with the combination of my ASMR-tuned Pure Builds, well-sorted & visually distinctive speed builds, and longer-watched reviews, plus a consistent trickle of shorter-form content to my audiences on QUiCKBRiCKS and Facebook.  Before that big rush even hits, I should have some long (LONG) overdue New Jang City overview-type content making the rounds.

Ultimately, to be blunt, much of my work of the past year has been dedicated to striking back against a slew of forces beyond my control that have pulled me down. During this process, I've laid some new foundations and reworked existing ones to attempt to build upward again over the coming 12 months.