 We hit a milestone today on the channel. A milestone that has been several years in the making, as a matter of fact. And I'm actually very excited about this. Every day, every hour, every minute that went by for the last two or three days, I'm sitting there hitting refresh on YouTube, waiting for the numbers to climb. And I can thankfully say with the utmost confidence that the channel has hit and surpassed 70,000 subscribers. Let me just give myself a quick, quick congratulatory, just take it from all angles. That's what she said. This is truly a big deal for me because some of you know that have been with me on this journey on YouTube for many years now. The channel was essentially dead a year and a half, two years back. Basically, it was one step away from being shot in the head and thrown in the dirt. By me, I was gonna start over. I was like, this is the end game. There's no coming back from this. I lost subscribers every single time I uploaded videos. And the reason for that was simple. I wasn't consistent. So if I could just pull up my, I guess I don't have a chair nearby where I can give you a little bit of a sermon or a lecture of sorts or a TED Talk, are those still a thing? Let me tell you how to ruin a channel and then how to bring it back from the brink. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes to be reborn anew. The first thing you wanna do to really ruin a channel is have a solid ass idea, have it do very well and then completely abandon it. For me, that was movie feuds. There are movie feuds episodes on this channel and people have no idea what it is because I've cultivated a whole bunch of new subs over the years and that's great. Movie feuds I've done a couple of times over the last couple of years, but not much because it's all but dead as well. YouTube doesn't like movie feuds. They don't push them out. They don't know how to get them in the algorithm. It's a whole mess. And I think people maybe are just sick of the versus shtick. But 10 or 11 years ago, when I came out with it on the platform, it was fresh and original and no one else was doing it in the movie space at least. So Spider-Man versus the amazing Spider-Man, Frozen versus Tangled, Ninja Turtles versus the Michael Bay produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These videos all have at least half a million if not multiple millions of views. Nothing I put out today can come even close to touching those levels of views again. And that's okay. I've made my peace with that. It's a different world. There's so much content now hitting those numbers on even the biggest of YouTube channels is nay impossible. But it was disheartening for a long time to see those numbers start to fall. And the reason they did is because I took my eye off the prize. You see YouTube, just like TikTok, just like Instagram, just like Facebook, just like every other social platform out there really wants you to do one thing well. Now, if you're a major celebrity or if you already have an established brand or you've been in the game a long time and built up a huge audience, sure, you can do whatever the hell you want basically. But for 99% of the people out there, that's very bad practice. If I had stuck with movie feuds and just taken that all the way to glory, this channel would have blown up, especially if I would have kept building it and modifying it and keeping up with the times as far as the video quality, the audio quality goes. It would have been great. And I pushed them out once or twice a week. But what I did instead is I foolishly thought I was creative and needed to share that creativity with the world. So I started coming out with non-related movie content like Adam Rantz or Car Side Reviews or Movie Boss or The Cringe or Nerds and Players or all these skits and different personas. And what happened was I confused the branding. I confused the audience I had and I really confused new people coming in. And doing that year after year at the time seemed like an okay idea. Okay, I'm pulling in people that like this, but then I upload something completely different and they hate that. So I turned them away. I put people in and then I push them out. It's not a good system. So after many years of doing that and then having kids and helping, obviously around the house and having a full-time job, YouTube was last priority. It still is last priority, but thankfully my life is at a place where I can comfortably manage everything. That could change tomorrow. We just have to roll with the dice. Roll with what we're given, right? But it was at a point where I was only putting out one or two videos a week. I'm sorry. One or two videos a month. And when I would put them out, I would see 10 to 20 subs just go away instantly. And I had to sit back and think from a viewer standpoint, which this is ridiculous, that it's taken me nine, 10 years to understand what people have grasped from day one, that people sub for one type of content. Full stop. You might be lucky and have a couple of things that people like. There will always be the core that watches everything. They get it. They like it all. But again, it's a huge swath of people just want that one thing. I do that. I sub to some channels. I don't watch a lot of YouTube, but when I sub to something, it's for one piece of content, one show type. Like, oh, I love this show. Not so big on all these other ones, but when he puts about this thing, I'll watch it. And so yeah, I alienated everyone. I pushed a lot of people away. That's what you don't do on a YouTube channel. So if you wanna start one, take it from me. Don't do the things that I've been doing this whole time. Now let's back up just a year or so back. I promise I'm almost done with this. I was at around 50-some-thousand subscribers when the channel was basically dead on arrival every time I uploaded. I was losing subs. And so I sat back and I said, all right, all the shit I like doing is gone. Movie Feuds takes too long, it's gone. The cringe, people love it, but they don't understand it a lot of times, it's gone. Movie Boss takes too long, it's gone. The things that I loved, I had to let go. Doesn't mean they can't come back later. If I ever hit a huge amount of people and I can experiment and there's funding and whatnot. But for the time being, I had to say, what can I do in a quick and efficient manner that keeps the things about me intact that gives people a reason to come back to this channel and watch? And for me, it was the comedy, it was the honesty, and it was just the consistency. And that was it. I know what I like, people know what I like, they know what I hate. And so that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do movie, content, almost daily if possible, at least four to five times a week. I'm just gonna shove my shit into the algorithm. Whether YouTube likes it or not, they're gonna be seeing my mug wherever I can be. Oh, there's a new Jeremy John's review. Look who's underneath, it's old Adam Bear. He's back, baby. He's reviewing the same movie. And all it takes is a couple of people to click. The next thing you know, those subs are coming up again. And they know that the next video I put out is gonna be about movies. They might not be interested, but they're not gonna turn away unless I crap on something too badly that they like and they take it personally, in which case, I don't want you anyway if you're that sensitive. So that's how I have managed to go from the 55, 56,000 a year ago to now 70,000. We have a 15 to 20,000 increase in just two years. For me, that is fantastic. That is massive. It's a big achievement. My goal is 100,000 by the end of the year. Do I think I'll hit it? I'm gonna lie to myself and say, yeah, I'm gonna convince myself that yes, I can. And I'll get there because of you guys. 11 years, and I got to 70,000. And now I know I can get to 100,000. I know I can, and I can have that stupid YouTube plaque on the shelf in the background. And I can say it was worth it. It was worth it, damn it. So yeah, just some advice for you, how to build up and how to stay motivated and keep going. There were several other YouTube channels a couple years back. I won't name them, but I love the guys. One of them stopped altogether. He couldn't do it anymore. He wasn't making money like he used to be. Was a full-time job for a very long time, but it just wasn't there anymore. The money wasn't there. Another one, they actually had more subs than I did. They hit 100,000 subs, but their views were less than mine. A big thing that happened on YouTube years back was they started flagging a lot of stuff. And if you had vulgar dialogue, if you're swearing a lot, or if there was any shock and awe in your videos, it was either demonetized or it was not showing up regularly in the feeds. You're almost blacklisted in a kind of, to a degree. And so a lot of people either bailed or they started over brand new. Another channel said, we're starting over, our channel is dead. And I said to them, listen, I don't know much, but that's a big ass mistake. You're going to go from 100,000 subs to zero? You're gonna retain maybe 10% of those. And maybe that's the 10% they wanted because they thought that that would be more true and honest to themselves. And of course, yes, I have 70,000. I don't have 70,000 people watching these videos. I'm lucky if I average four to 7,000 on a good week each video. So no, I'm not getting 70,000 views. But it's just the fact that over the course of time, at one point, these were real subs. These were real people that I hit at some point and connected with. And it's just a good feeling to know that there's still opportunity to grow on this platform. And we're seeing it. We're seeing it in real time. I wanna thank you guys. I wanna thank all the Patreon supporters, YouTube join supporters, people that have been active in chats and at the live streams that have been doing. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a little bit stressful. I don't like doing live streams. They scare the shit out of me because I can't edit myself. And I don't be an edit like, I'm gonna say something inappropriate. I mean edit because I make mistakes. And I like to fix the mistakes. That's all. I just wanted to say thank you very much. 70,000 subs. We're gonna go to 100,000 this year. We're gonna get there somehow. Whatever I have, whatever it takes.