 So today's video is mainly me showing you guys the silver play button you guys saw me unbox the silver play button it was actually just delivered by UPS and if I can get the camera to focus there it says presented to distro tube for passing 100,000 subscribers and this little plaque here is actually surprisingly well built I'm actually pretty impressed by the quality of that thing I actually thought it would be a rather cheap thing because YouTube has to send out so many of them one of the things many people realize just how big YouTube is at last count it's there's no real hard statistics I don't think that YouTube really shares to people but there's like 50 60 million channels on YouTube and while the 100,000 subscriber mark seems like it's a big mark and it is you know probably 300,000 400,000 people have have achieved that mark so it's not like it's you know some impossible test they have to send out a lot of these plaques and of course it costs money and I thought they would cheap out on the thing but it's actually well built and of course you guys saw in the unboxing I get this letter as well from Susan W. who is the CEO of YouTube now that obviously it's not personally written right it's just the same copy of a letter that they send out to everybody but I understand that again you've got to send out hundreds of thousands of these things you know it can't be a personalized note they just can't do that but I do appreciate this from YouTube and I wanted to share this with you guys I thought about not even bothering with any kind of unboxing video but really it's not about me because this is mainly for you guys because you guys are as much a part of this channel and the success of this channel as I am maybe more so really I mean I really depend on you guys for a lot of what I do and I thought it would be unfair if I actually didn't share this milestone with you guys now one interesting thing about me just receiving the silver play button as I actually passed the hundred thousand subscriber mark about a year ago like right at a year ago so it took me nearly a year to finally get a notification from YouTube that they're sending me this button now a lot of people don't wait that long because a lot of people you know there's this thing on YouTube if you search how to get your silver play button they'll tell you you need to go contact YouTube as soon as you pass the hundred K mark contact YouTube and tell them send your dang button right and there's no guarantee they'll send you one because they do sometimes refuse to send people buttons because just because you pass a hundred K you know if your channel is questionable you're one of those channels that gets flagged all the time because of crazy content misbehavior you know they may just not send you a button at all because they really don't want to endorse your channel maybe your channel gets enough views that they make money off of you but I guess they don't want to reward you in any way my channel of course I've never had any issues with YouTube as far strikes and flags and things like that so I'm in the good but I didn't want to jump in line for my button right I didn't want to contact them and say hey send me my button right away I wanted to see how long it took about a year right and that seems to be the case with a lot of creators because I've seen other creators also mentioned they waited about a year to finally get notified so for those of you that are new to the channel haven't been around that long I've been doing this YouTube channel for a little over four years now I started in October of 2017 and of course we're early in 2022 so for maybe four and a half years and when I started the channel of course I had no clue what I was doing I'd never done any kind of video content audio content I didn't know anything about video and audio back then it was just I've seen people post on YouTube and I thought hey I'll try it out I'll just post something on YouTube for fun and I wasn't sure what kind of videos to make I've been a long time Linux user so I know a little bit about Linux let me do some Linux videos and people started watching them but mainly it was just me doing something for fun I remember those first few weeks of the channel you know I started getting a few views and a few subscribers and I jokingly told one of my sisters that hey you know what maybe one day it'd be funny if I had like 10,000 subscribers you know I think I could grow this thing to one day I'm gonna have 10k subs and she laughed right she basically said no way there's no way you'll ever have 10,000 subscribers watching this crap that you're making right and I remember turning to her and say watch I'm gonna have 20,000 and then you know within a year you know I had more than 10,000 subs I maybe even I got to 20k in a year I'm not exactly sure how the numbers worked out but we got there and I remember being blown away because obviously she didn't think I'd get to 10k I thought well if I worked really hard I'd get to 20k but Linux on YouTube wasn't that big of a place four years ago there weren't that many Linux content creators there weren't that many people watching this kind of content either the idea of building a big channel based on Linux content seemed a little ridiculous because and not just Linux on YouTube wasn't as popular or Linux in general wasn't as popular Linux is exploded in popularity in recent years and I think that's part of the reason for my success and other Linux channel success is more people are interested in this content I think that's a great thing I think that's a sign that we're winning right we're winning that battle as far as spreading the message of free and open source software but I've really been blown away by the growth of the channel within a couple of years we passed no the 50k mark and I remember at 50k you know we got there kind of quickly and like I said within a couple of years and at that point you know I really had no idea how big the channel could possibly become because obviously the idea of the ceiling being 10k or 20k was a gross underestimation right because we got to 50k and it just kept growing growing so I then I decided I don't know where this is going I'm just going to keep making the videos I want to make about Linux free and open source software and you know it just keeps on keeping on right we we still get new subscribers every month I'm still growing as far as views I have had my videos watched now more than 31 million views on my videos at this point and that seems crazy when you think about that kind of a number because at the end of the day it's all about views right what's the point of making videos it's for people to watch your videos and if you're trying to monetize your videos make money of course you want people to watch your videos if you're trying to change hearts and minds trying to spread a message for example about Linux and free and open source software it's all about views subscribers is a number but in a lot of ways it's kind of a meaningless number because there's channels that have a lot of subscribers they get no views and you know they have hardly any activity on their channel because subscribers you know especially you get channels where they make one video it goes viral people subscribe but that person never really makes any other content similar to that again so you got all these people subscribe to a channel but they're not really interested in any new content or there's no new content coming in so the subscriber mark well it's a nice achievement and much more proud of the views and not just the views the community the comments we get on the videos right we've really built a nice community around this channel and i'm really proud of that now obviously a lot has changed in the four years since i started the channel right the channel has changed i've changed right the videos themselves have changed and because again i had no idea what i was doing when i started this and obviously i've i've tried to take this seriously and learn a lot about video and audio and you know making better content i'm constantly trying to improve things trying new things out one of the interesting things is over the four and a half years of doing this channel is the content you know when i started this channel if you look at some of the early videos i did most of my videos really there were three main topics that i was focused on back then it was distro reviews you know doing my first look and impressions of various phoenix distros i did a lot of that in the early days of the channel i did command line tutorials showing you know the basics of the terminal and the command line you know i still do that kind of content occasionally as well and then i really focused on window managers both floating window managers and tiling window managers of sparse floating window managers i focused heavily on open box did some open box videos that got tons of views back then still get a lot of views on those videos and i focused on tiling window managers especially in the early days of the channel cutile was a big one and then later i started doing a lot more window manager reviews because people seem to like it when i would window manager hop so after about a year i really kind of got burned out on distro reviews because i was making videos every day like seriously every single day i'd try to put out a video most of them were taking a look at various linux distributions and after you take a look at 200 plus linux distributions different linux distributions you realize they're all the same right it becomes extremely boring to me you know maybe not to the viewers because people watch those videos but to me it's like every single linux distribution practically is the same fundamentally under the hood obviously they look a little different you know different desktop environments different themes different wallpapers but the nuts and bolts you know what really makes the thing work you know the underlying core utils the linux kernel and the init system for the most part it's all the same in every linux distribution so i really got burned out and for a long time i decided i wasn't going to do any more distro reviews and that's when i really started focusing heavily on window manager content especially tiling window manager content we started hopping to a lot of different tiling window managers such as awesome window manager dwm x monad and various other things and then you know the channel kind of got known for me being the tiling window manager guy right i was window manager hopping all the time rather than distro hopping and that was cool that was fun i really enjoyed that because you know hopping between especially the various tiling window managers introduced me to a lot of different programming languages because every tiling window managers written in you know a different programming language and it's configured in a different programming language and that really exposed me to a lot of stuff that i didn't know at the time and to be honest i found interesting around that time too early in the channel i started messing with vim i knew a little bit about vim being a long time linux user like when i ended up in vi or vim i knew some of the basic commands but i made a commitment to actually use vim full-time so i learned vim stuck in vim and then i started making some vim content which a lot of those videos got a lot of views then a couple of years later after you know switching to vim i switched to emacs and then emacs became a big focus of the channel so some of the main topics of the videos have changed you know over the years right went from distro reviews to doing more tiling window manager stuff to vim emacs you know more scripting stuff command line tutorial stuff here lately i've actually gone back to doing some distro reviews i don't do them that often but i do try to do a couple of months because sometimes i do find distributions i've never taken a look at and they genuinely interest me and if it genuinely interests me yeah i want to take a look at that and i want to capture it on camera for you guys but what i've learned over the years is always make the videos that interest me right if it's something i know i'm not going to enjoy making as a content creator trust me don't make that video because it comes across on camera if you don't enjoy doing what you you do and you see so many content creators on youtube they're making these videos and they look miserable and you can tell they're miserable and their community knows they're miserable usually their community is also miserable if you look at you know some of the crazy comments they get and one of the biggest things i can say for those of you that ever want to get into video content creation you know don't chase views don't chase subscribers don't chase money ultimately what you want to do make sure you do something that you enjoy doing and then the success will come because if you try to do something strictly for money and for views for fame and for fortune right trust me you're setting yourself up for failure you never really know how many views a video is going to get anyway you'll make a video and think it's going to get a bajillion views nobody watches it you'll make a video that you're sure nobody's going to want it'll get that bajillion views right and sometimes i purposely make videos i know are not going to get any views on youtube or you know they'll get much fewer views than a typical video but i make it because either a i think the topic is fun and interesting for me and or b i think the topic is fun and interesting for a small group of people that are going to watch the video and it will really help those people you know i'm not trying to just make videos to be famous right i'm trying to actually help people like the video i did yesterday the video right before this one is a command line tutorial about using the cat command that video that's not a sexy topic right that is absolutely not going to go viral right it's not going to get a million views but i made that video knowing it's not going to get a lot of views but the people that actually watch that video and learn from that video really appreciate that kind of content they appreciate it enough that those are the kind of people that donate to your channel that will go and subscribe to your patreon you know too many people focus on views and getting ad revenue on youtube as a model of success for me it's about it's about being loyal you know that's about gaining trust from viewers and this video i'm making right now it's not going to get a lot of views this video about a unboxing of the silver play button and the history of the channel that's when that comes up in the youtube algorithms most people not going to know who the hell i am so they're not going to watch it right this is really for people that have been long time followers of the channel and have been supportive of the channel so briefly i do want to talk about the future of the channel where the channel is going because i'm constantly reevaluating things seeing what needs to be changed what needs to be tweaked and one of the things is i've made 1141 videos as of today right there's a ton of videos in four years so i've put in a ton of time doing all of these videos i've covered so many topics and one of the things is i might start revisiting some of the older topics that i've already covered especially the ones that i made in the first year or so of the channel back when i didn't have good camera equipment good audio equipment the video quality wasn't great or maybe i feel like i know a lot more about some of these topics now so don't be surprised if in the coming months i revisit some of those older videos but most of you guys probably have never seen the videos i would be talking about anyway because again the first year of the channel we're talking about you know 10 20 000 subs so if you're somebody that subbed in the last couple of years you never watch those older videos anyway because they typically are not going to come up in the search algorithms most people are not going to dive really deep in the back catalog of a youtube creator this created so many videos right you'd have to dive really deep to go back four years one of the things i know i have not done a good job of as a content creator and i promise to get better at this as i need to organize the channel better as far as playlists i need to start adding a lot more playlists organizing my videos so people that are searching for specific content you know if you only want the the vim tutorials or the emacs tutorials the command line tutorials the distro reviews i need to have that in playlists so people can actually find the content that they're looking for because right now it's kind of a mess another thing is the individual videos themselves i need to start adding more timestamps i don't timestamp very many of my videos the only videos i really timestamp are the ones that i know are lengthy and they cover a lot of topics because those are obvious hey i should timestamp that but most of my videos my average length of time my runtime for my videos i probably average 14 15 minutes a video and those are lengthy enough videos that unless i'm just rambling on and on about just one single topic for the whole video i could probably use timestamps and all of those videos and you guys really help me out with that sometimes too because sometimes i'll make a lengthy video covering a lot of topics and i'll forget to timestamp it and then somebody in the comments will actually post the timestamps they'll create the timestamps for me and when you guys do that i really appreciate it and i usually i'll give you a pin and a hard but really you guys shouldn't have to do that right i'm shirking my responsibilities by not adding those timestamps and by not creating those playlists and my goal is if i can get the all these videos organized better is this now becomes more of an education hub where people that want to learn about Linux for an open source software can come here and better find the information they're looking for because that's really what i'm focused on these days is more of being a source of knowledge being an educational channel right not necessarily i'm not interested in entertaining people although we like to have fun occasionally too but really i want this to actually be something where people they're looking for a specific piece of information that will help them in life at work you know whatever it happens to be at school and they can come here and quickly find that information that's what i i want this channel to be but enough of the channel's past and the channel's future again i do want to thank each and every one of you guys every one of the subscribers and every one of the viewers again 31 million views and counting you guys are as much a part of that award that i got as i am and i do want to sincerely thank you you guys that have helped support me financially over the years honestly without you guys i couldn't do this because this is my job right for the last two years since the start of covid the pandemic you guys know i have been strictly a content creator for the last two years and without your guys helping me with paypal donations and patreon subscriptions donations of lbc on odyssey i could not have made it right i could not be standing here or sitting here in this case without you guys so a sincere thank you to each and every one of you guys and of course let me thank the producers of the show before i go i'm talking about devon gave james matt and michael michael paul scott wiss alan armored trek and chuck commander angry die okay dylan george lee linux ninja max and michael yon alexander peace archon fedora polytech rip profits even in willy they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys me making 1141 videos would not have been possible over the last four years i also want to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen i wish i could read out every single one of these names it's just too many of you guys now but really sincere thank you to each and every one of you guys if you guys want to see more great videos about linux free and open source software subscribe to distro tube over on patreon all right guys peace now i gotta find a spot for the play button