 Hey, just wanted to give you a quick update video on where things are headed in 2022. First off, we made it. Let's give ourselves a celebratory round of applause. That's good stuff. First off, I wanna give a hearty thank you to people that have been watching me for a multitude of years. I've been doing this channel now for 11. Off and on, of course. If it was 11 straight, this would be depressing, honestly, that I haven't achieved more success. But as things stand, when I look back on the channel, I do see some of the great things that have come out of it. First off, I had a show with the Property Brothers that went 15 episodes. It was called Working Title. You can find a playlist of all those episodes. They were fun. They were a good time. That project ultimately failed because their whole platform, their whole site and everything went under right away. I mean, if you can't make something work with iJustine on it, what are you doing? Right? I was a contractor for Screen Ranch for a year. I put out a couple of short documentaries that I researched, scripted, voice-overed, edited. I mean, the whole nine yards. Those were a ton of work, but I really am proud of the results that came from them. I also had a show called Real Rivalries with them that went, I don't know, for 30, 40 episodes. It was over the span of eight months for that series. It was basically the successor of Movie Feuds. And if you're wondering why that show hasn't been going on, I don't know. I don't think YouTube likes Versus videos anymore. There was a time when I would put out Movie Feuds and it was just like easy views, man. I would get 30,000, no problem in a couple of weeks. Some of them have a million views, some have half a million. That was like the flavor for a couple of years. But I don't know if it got just too oversaturated or YouTube's algorithm changed, but they hate that shit now. Rotten Tomatoes has a Versus thing, which I also collabed with them recently on a podcast. Their numbers are pretty embarrassing over there for that channel. And that's hosted by Mark Ellis, who fun fact, when I went on there, didn't know who I was, even though he's been on my channel and I've been on his as a guest. So that was fun. That's always fun to hear. Adam, I don't think I've met you before. Ah, okay, yeah, that stings a little, but okay, let's keep going. Speaking of collaborations, that's another thing I used to do quite a bit in my second or third year on the channel. I had a lot of people that were popular in the YouTube movie critic space. Even some that didn't do movie reviews, I reached out to have on, because why not? Why not put yourself out there? And this is just a tip for people that have your own YouTube channel or are trying to start something. Just ask, just ask. It doesn't hurt. They usually have their emails that you can find or you can hit them on Twitter or even in their YouTube comments, although that's harder. But there's ways to get in contact with people and just say, hey, we're doing a video on this. Do you have time in your schedule to come on? I mean, what's the worst they say? No? Piss off? Who cares? I've made some great connections with people over the years because of YouTube. Jonathan Paula from Jogwheel slash Movie Night. I still regularly talk to him. Tony from Hack the Movies checks in once or twice a week and we usually have a couple of jokes to tell each other. And then of course there's a relationship's forwards just from doing this channel. There's guys and gals that have been watching this since episode one. All those years back. And I mean, what a roller coaster to watch this channel completely shift. It's just nothing like it used to be. So again, thank you old and new subscribers that have stuck with me over this just rocky terrain that I've been going on. When I started the show, I had zero kids and I didn't have gray in my hair. Now I have two, they're 13 and nine. I didn't sleep for a couple of those years and you can tell on camera. There was years where I didn't put out videos for six months at a time. So I was rebuilding my show from scratch all over again. And sometime in 2021 when my contract was expired with ScreenRant, I had to look at this channel and make some tough decisions. The first goal of mine was to consistently put out content every week two or three times at a bare minimum. I have been hitting that regularly and I'm very proud of that fact. Two, cut out a ton of my shows. That one hurt. It hurt my ego because I liked doing these shows but I realized and I recognize as people coming in old and new, variety can be a turn off. You don't want all this noise. You just wanna hear one unique voice. So shows like The Cringe, Movie Boss, Car Side Reviews. There's seriously like half a dozen shows that I have assets for and I took the time to kind of build up that I had to just let go. And I found that that was the right decision overall because thankfully after making all these changes, the consistent putting out of videos, removing all the different show types and focusing on one or two specific shows has really made a huge difference. We saw a growth last year of 7.1,000 subscribers. The previous year, I lost 1,000. The year before that, I lost 1,000. So I was actually going backwards. I was in the hole and now we climbed out of it. Thanks to people like you watching, sharing it, talking to your friends and me actually figuring YouTube out for the first time. It's sad that it took me to almost 40 to get to that point. Last year, the channel also had 1.1 million views. That's freaking awesome. It's insane to me. And obviously that's nothing compared to the bigger YouTube channels out there. They might get that in a video. But for me, the growth has been phenomenal. So I have some bullets. I have some things in the back of my mind for this year that I wanna hit. The biggest, most lofty goal is to get to 100,000 subs. Seems bonkers. It seems completely insane. Probably impossible, but you gotta aim high. Now we have to figure out how to get there. And the first way is to collab more often. I barely did any collaboration the last couple of years. I've already done a few in 2022 and I plan to do a lot more. So reaching out to fellow movie critics, even going to their places, flying out there, whatever I have to do to get on their shows, get my face in front of more people and see if they like me. And if so, that's gonna bring up those sub numbers. The third thing, which is kind of a separate goal altogether is to get more sponsorships on the channel. I know that sounds bad, but I'm talking like minimal sponsorships. You've already seen them. They're at the beginning of the video. It's, hey, this video's sponsored by so-and-so. Check them out and that's it. It's five to 10 seconds long in and out. If it is gonna be a longer one, where I spend like a minute talking about a company, they're gonna have to pay for it. They're gonna have to pay a decent amount. So that's gonna scare away a lot of them right out of the gate. So don't expect that very often. I set up a Fiverr page with three tiers. You can check it out at Adam Does Movies. I'm only offering one service and there's three different packages to choose from. I genuinely put the pricing structure where it's at because I think it's beneficial to both parties involved and it's not gonna bring in a bunch of like snake oil salesman or con artists or whatever. Basically, it's if you're a legit business, you might think about doing this. The reason I want more sponsorship on this channel is because I wanna keep doing this show and YouTube payout is still embarrassingly low. My video viewership has gone up a few thousand of video on average and the revenue I've brought in doesn't reflect those numbers hardly at all. It's barely gone up because of it. That's just puzzling and kind of bullshit. So I need to find ways to make this channel more profitable and the Patreon numbers are pretty pathetic and so are the YouTube join members. I don't even have 20 YouTube join members. I don't even have 60 Patreons or maybe I have 60 but there's a dollar tier. So whatever. I don't expect viewers to pay for my hobby or for my hobby slash job but I do expect to get paid for doing the job somehow. So I gotta bring in other forms of revenue where I see fit. Another goal of mine and this one's actually really important to me is to just simply talk about an older movie I love once a week. I know the numbers aren't gonna be impressive on those videos. People like what's new and what's hot and what's trending. But for my own sanity and honestly for my image, I gotta talk about movies I love because the new stuff isn't wowing me. It's not impressing me like the older stuff did. Especially in the 80s and 90s where it felt like Hollywood was willing to take more risks and do more creative things. The Gremlins, Indiana Jones, the Goonies, the Spielbergian era of cinema. That's where I love to fit in. That's where I love to live. So I gotta talk about that stuff more even if it's at the detriment of views or the algorithm I guess. But once a week that's a goal is to get back to that whether it's like a Tuesday throwback or whatever which brings me to another goal. I already put out a weekly type of to-do list for you guys where it's like, hey, here's what I plan to do this week. I know people get confused and sometimes annoyed because I don't hit all those. That's more for me than it is for you. It's like, what can I potentially get out? I'll usually put a couple evergreen type videos on there like my top 10 comedies of all time which is still in my mind. I'm still thinking it through. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna come out when they do. So I would like to even not necessarily whittle that down more, make it more specific to each day because that's just not the nature of how I work. Especially when I'm also trying to do more newsy type content as things trend on Twitter that are movie related. I'd like to do four, five minute videos which I have been doing recently. I think those help drive in new traffic even if they're not interesting for people sometimes just hearing a different perspective on it is. So since I kind of consider myself a voice of rational people in the world, I think it's got some benefit. And I like to throw some comedy in there as well. I think that helps. People need to laugh. But yeah, as far as that schedule's concerned just kind of letting people know I can specify in the graphic, say these are what I'm going to get done this week and these are things that are ahead. These are things to look forward to. I think just being a little bit more honest and open with the viewer is always helpful. The last thing I wanna figure out for this year is a big one and I honestly don't know where I'm gonna go with it and I would love your support and your help with this. I have a second channel and I also have a Twitch channel. I don't think I'm gonna do anything with Twitch unfortunately because we live in a world where you have to go all in on something and I don't have time to stream video games four or five nights a week for like six or seven hours and that's honestly how you have to grow on Twitch. You really have to be full time streaming to get noticed, to get those numbers. Anyway, I love doing that too, which sucks but maybe someday, right? I still have it there. I'm not getting rid of it. Thank you for those that watched in the past. But anyway, I have a second channel, Adam Olinger. It's got a couple thousand subscrubs. Some of the loyal people here went over there. They watched, they liked the rants but it's just a hodgepodge, an amalgamation of different brain things coming out of my head and I need to focus there too. One show, maybe two. Right now, it's just got everything from video game rants to food feuds to music feuds. We got Let's Plays on there. We got the cringe on there that was taken from this main channel and put there because I love those videos but I couldn't keep them on the main channel because it was turning people off. It's a nightmare. It's a mess. I don't know what to do. Part of me says, pull all the cringe videos off again. Make another channel that's just the cringe that's like a placeholder for a future time when I can actually do those. Another part of me says, leave it all there and then just rebrand as rants only. Another part of me says, I love playing video games and talking video games. Let's make that Adam does games. And so really, I just wanna know what you want because I like doing all of it but YouTube punishes you for doing all of it. This is a kind of time sensitive. I got an email from YouTube a couple of weeks ago that said, hey, you're gonna be out of the creator program if you don't do some shit on your channel. Your views are now low enough where you're not meeting the threshold to continue. They have a specific criteria and if you don't hit it, you don't get paid anything. Right now that channel makes me like 30 bucks a month or something, pathetic, but it could certainly do well if I actually put the time into it. I just needed to know the focus. All right, I rambled and rambled and rambled. This will be fun to edit. Thank you guys very much for watching. This has been a roller coaster. I'm so happy to see the channel growing. You have no idea, it's awesome. If I could make enough revenue on YouTube to keep my wife from having to go to a shitty job that she hates and comes home miserable at, that would be amazing. We're not there yet, but that's the dream. The dream is that all my family is just happy because we only have one life here, so let's make it count. Let's have fun with it. Thank you for watching the video. Make sure to share it around with people. Tell your friends and family. If you can become a Patreon or a YouTube join member, that would be awesome. I'm trying to get perks out where I can. I'm now following people that join me there on Letterbox. That's just a little thing I'm doing. We're working at it. The interns are back this year. We're gonna be yelling at them. We're gonna be fighting. The show's gonna get a little goofier because I am a little goofier, okay? So expect a little bit of Khaleesi Grimes to come out more often than not. We gotta get those strong female leads represented this year. And honestly, it's about time. See you soon.