 Okay, welcome to vlog Thursday. Hi. Hello. It's January 18th this time, you know, you need to know. And we're going to change that. Oh, okay, never mind, forget I said anything. No, no, we're not gonna change date. I do not have such powers. Maybe you would develop something. Yeah, well, I actually did invent a time machine, but then I thought it was a bad idea, so I went back and not invented it, and now it's all over. No? Okay, welcome to vlog Thursday. We're gonna quit using dates and start using episode numbers. Someone suggested that. That was a great idea. And it's an idea we should have had from the beginning. And the reason why is because my podcast has episode numbers, not dates. Yeah. And like everything has episode numbers. Then we can someone say, hey, an episode blah, blah, blah, you mentioned, and they have to mention in dates. And of course the people outside of America have different date formats. So yeah, I'm going to try to make an effort to maybe rename them and give them all because I got to go backwards and do it. Yeah, I'm really lazy. But at least going forward, I can because it's easy to count how many because there's tools, right? A playlist that has all of our blogs in it. I can count how many we did. What episode would be at? We're coming up on a year of doing this, right? Oh, over a year of doing it. This would be like, it's 50 something right now. Can't be over a year because I've been here a year. I know. And we've been doing it for... I thought we did the first one like at my month, right? Wasn't the first vlog. There's like Mars. Okay, so right around either way. So yeah, but either way, it's close. Yeah. Close and things like that. That is, that's all the changes that... Oh, lights. We're still learning and improving. How about these, huh? How about this? I actually recorded it before I recorded this and cleared the table. A video on the lights themselves, which I have to now edit and make happen. So there's that. I have... Well, let's just jump into the topic of the business of YouTube. The business of YouTube. The business of YouTube. Let's do it. So YouTube made changes. I did a video where I just kind of ramble out about the changes and talked about them. And me and Marvin were discussing them as well because of how we want to do this channel and how we do things. And the problem that some of the changes create that I didn't really address, but I thought about later, is fixing toilets. So in the past the way monetization worked, I know, we're gonna bring it back to you on topic here. This is not Tuesday. Nothing to say to that. So shout out to the guy who uses his cell phone and doesn't drop it in a toilet to make a video about how to fix a toilet. And there's a lot of YouTubers and I really thought about that where they... There's not a reason to subscribe to your channel. And I realized that was exactly how my early days were on YouTube. I just made videos on how to do and how to fix a few things. I never thought about creating audience and having, you know, this back and forth conversation that we have. And even some of our videos aren't as much subscriber-worthy because we're just doing things like talking about firewalls and stuff like that. And in general, there's a lot of people like that. They don't create a channel that creates a lot of content like we do. They just create a video to help you with a thing. They may monetize it with that thing and then they make a few dollars off it. Now, granted in the U.S., the money you make off of there compared to the cost of living here isn't wonderful. But it is a few dollars. You can make hundreds. You can figure for every million views. You may make $1,500 off that. And it's not bad, but not many things. The total of her videos don't usually get a million views. But you may see 20 or 30,000 views. It may make the guy, you know, 100 bucks on that video. And the way the monetization works, because you need a certain number of subscribers and consistent views to keep your monetization in there slapping people who already monetize as well. So it's not just new tubers. New tubers. It's the existing tubers that do it. So this is causing a lot of controversy and strife. And people who are in other countries where the cost of living is lower, the money is technically higher because of the exchange rate. So I guess it is disproportionately affecting them. And it's something that people talk about, you know, U.S. exceptionalism and things like that. It really is kind of funny when you think about it because there's two, over a billion people on YouTube. But there's only 329 million roughly Americans at the last census. And they're not all on YouTube. So we absolutely make up far less than one quarter of the YouTube audience, like people from the U.S. Sure. So what is it that YouTube changed in their, in their, like, are they, so are they changing that you do or don't need more subscribers? You need a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and then you need 4,000 watched hours. That's kind of a steep requirement. So one of my friends, before they'll start paying. Right. Okay. Yeah. And what was it before? It was just 10,000 minutes, I believe it was. So they substantially changed it. So 10,000 minutes. And I don't remember what, I think it's just 100 subscribers. Okay. And this is part of YouTube. And one thing that's come, even after the first change that they made last year, which was the so many minutes. And now that they've come into here, I know the problem's gone away. And I thank you for everyone who's done this. And I mentioned this in my video, plagiarism. And what people were doing on YouTube is just constantly plagiarizing someone else's popular content and re-uploading it. And a lot of people who are just viewing, they look for the thing that they want to see. They're like, hey, check this video out on XYZ. So because it has the same title, you may find it before you find the other video because someone plays in monkeys with the keyword searches a little bit. So all they did was take the content, duplicate the content, download, re-upload, and they start making money off of that exact same content with no originality. So they have fixed a lot of that. Now that will not do anything to address the Logan Paul issue, because that's just YouTube. Yeah. They basically said they're going to put humans back on how that crap gets to the top of the page. I hope so. I certainly hope so. Yeah. But as far as us for the channel, I look at it from a business standpoint, and this is what I talk about in my video. I mean, I'm thankful for the money I get from YouTube, but it's not a significant part and it would not pay for everything we have here. And I also find it interesting, you look at people like Rhett and Link and Philip DeFranco, you're talking about a couple of people there, or even the Green Brothers, John and Hank. They produce videos since 2006. Yeah. There was no monetization platform. You know why they produced them? Passion. Yeah. And a lot of that is where I come from. I mean, this is not the end all, I make money in IT. That pays really well. This is fun. We enjoy doing it. We enjoy sharing it with you. We love the audience interaction. That's really why I do it. I mean, granted, yes, it's great to make a few dollars on sites. I'm taking time away from my business where I make money. And what I was just saying, I ended up before we make unblock Thursdays. We are losing, we are, money is flying out our butt right now. Because it costs more. We pay more in wages to you than we made on all the videos. I'm sorry. It's just back. We don't, it just, I'm like, look, we made two dollars on Vlog Thursday. Thank you, YouTube. Well, but that's directly from YouTube, though. Right. I still think you have to roll in, though. I mean. The bigger picture in a popular area. Of course. It still gets business, right? People see a video that Tom did or, you know, whatever. And then that gets them to call us and say, oh, I see that you know all there is to know about PF Sense. I need you to help me set up my PF Sense. Yeah. And there is, there is a, that is another side of our business model. I'm not shy about where we will set up your networks and things like that. That's something absolutely we offer as services. I, you know, I try to be as detailed as possible. I'm not like, and this is, this is one of the things that I noticed that some people who try to use this marketing and I had a discussion with a, another tech company yesterday on the phone and they don't like giving it all away. They want to give you the teasers. I'm like, no, I literally, you can follow my videos. And I've gotten so many emails and thank you very much. I love the feedback where I'm, I try to be as detailed as possible. I don't say, here's almost how to set it up. And for $29.95, buy the full thing. And I see so many people using YouTube as that way. They use it just as a teaser and a lead to get you to buy, subscribe to their mailing list and buy their $29.95 book that gives you the full details and courses. I mean, maybe I'm not the best business person because I don't do that. And that's why some of them are, there's that one. I know a couple people and they have a high-end car collection. I mean, that is a good strategy where they, they do some of the videos, but they give you really in-depth training courses for a fee. And I get it. I guess if it's your only income, you kind of have to do it that way. I don't know, I'm always torn out. I like, I love sharing knowledge. I spoke at conferences and not asked for any compensation. I just go there and- I think from a user standpoint though, I know myself, if I, if I look up how to do something on YouTube and I get the, for the rest of it, you know, buy my thing, I'm just going to look for it elsewhere. I'm not, I'm probably not going to pay you $29.95 to get the rest of it. I mean, if I don't find it anywhere, then maybe I got to come back. But I think too, if you do lay out all that detail, people who are going to try to fix it themselves are going to try to fix it themselves. Yeah. But you can also lay out all the detail and it's happened to me, it has happened to me a couple of times. I go, oh, that's complicated. I'm not going to do that. That too. I'm going to call them and say, how about you fix this for me? Yeah. So I always go back and forth because, you know, what should I monetize on? What shouldn't I, I like giving a lot of way. It's finding a happy balance. I would love to, but it requires more funding, so to speak. And, you know, we've got a Patreon set up. I haven't really done much promoting with it. We set it up because I'm trying to figure out where we're going to go with it. Because if I, as I get money for it, I'm willing to give even more things away, because I can only put so much time into YouTube, because if I don't run the business at some point, the business has to make money and move forward. So that still involves me a little bit. More is the pity. I know that I'm sure people are like, shut up, just shut up. Oh, you got your business and you have to run it. I'm so sad for you. Also related for other people who are on YouTube. If you think YouTube is your own, any, anytime, your only source of revenue is one single place you can have a problem. That's a life rule. That doesn't mean that's not just from a business perspective. That's a, think about that. If you completely rely and then the company you work for goes out of business, there's a problem, which is unfortunate, but it can happen. So it's why you should have savings and why you, as best possible, not live check to check and think about those financial decisions all the time. Those are just things that should be considered all the time. And you'll notice, you even take a big channel, and I'm going to talk like Linus or any of the other big tech channels, almost, I don't think they run a video at all that they don't have a sponsored post as in they're being sponsored by, there's like TunnelBear and a few other companies, or especially tech channels, they only get sponsored by the product company. So they'll have an intro and check out XYZ products and blah, blah, blah. I'll follow the link below and then they roll into their video and things like that. I'm trying to avoid some of that because I come to really understand the advertisement agreement and I know you have to watch ads on YouTube unless you sign up for YouTube red, which I think is really cool. But the other side of it is we have to find a way to monetize it. I just wish there was more variety because when you start watching three different YouTubers, but they're in a similar thing because I want to get reviews on things, sometimes they'll all have the same thing. You're like, oh, they all are sponsored by XYZ company. They're just like the podcasts I listen to. They're all sponsored by Blue Apron. Yeah, or Stamps.com. Stamps.com and Blue Apron. Just like, I'm familiar with the Blue Apron product and I'm familiar with Stamps.com. We don't really ship anything. So it doesn't apply to me. I get it. I know the offer code for everybody now. And there's like nine different podcasters all doing that. So we're trying to avoid some of those things. We just need to get somebody that is not tech related so it's not like a sellout kind of thing. You know, we need to be sponsored by Kraft macaroni and cheese or something. Kraft macaroni and cheese, if you're listening. I guess some kind of hot sauce. We are not sponsored, but I will give a shout out to Bigby over in Southgate on Dixieleta Road. Yes, Hyrule. Hyrule, he listens to us sometimes. He likes to see the Bigby cups and the things. He's sort of, I'm sorry, man. I say fueled by Bigby, not sponsored by Bigby. That's right. That's right. All right, back on to other business topics. So besides the shenanigans that we do post on theirs, someone did ask if we ever get any work done because and I think the reality is of working here, we try to keep it lighthearted and fun because I've said this before, no one calls because everything's so hunky-dory and happy. They call it because there's a problem and they want to address the problem. So we definitely have to keep it lighthearted. We're full of just any time we can make horrible puns, we do. We are very punny. Oh yeah, it gets bad. It's always some type of how to make fun. But a lot of the time too is spent communicating with customers, waiting for things to happen. And we end up with like little bits of free time because if nothing's broke and all of our management tools that we use that automate all of the deployment processes are working swimmingly like our backups. Chairman leaders never ever a problem. And then with some of the updates, there was a problem and it caused one of the backups not to work. Well, now we have something to do. You know, because for some reason it failed on one piece of it. So back with the files and because we monitor this stuff very actively, this is what happens. And then we jump into action where there's something to do. We've had a big project with the school even working on. So that's kept us really busy working and putting all the quotes together. And I haven't done as many videos on site because it's been really tough to wander around with a camera at some of the clients and put this together. And also I did a video that's coming on site, but I have to do... I screwed it up a little bit. Oh no. Yeah. I was playing with the card, flipping the camera on and off and I popped the card while it was on. Turns out I corrupted the video I shot. So I knew, I was seeing what would happen and now I completely know what would happen. This was a test. This was a test. This was... Can I do something done with this? I was just playing around with it and I don't know. Whenever what you're about to do starts with, I wonder what will happen if I do this. It's rarely going to go well. Yeah, that happens. Though I will say this quick aside though, that works well at Home Depot though. If you're not getting any help, if you just say I wonder if this will break if I do this. Five people will come out of the woodwork. Yeah, absolutely. Out of the woodworking department. See what I did there? Tom got it. I got it. Told you we're punny. Yeah, I was talking a little about the PC repair business. We've been... Now we talked about this before and other people, I know we have a few people who have MSPs, they asked about running a retail store. We don't plan on closing a retail store. So the benefit of the retail store is we have established hours, people can bring their computers in, and that has led to a lot of business leads for us. We actually just got a good social media lead and a website lead off of a guy who came in and we fixed a broken screen. He happens to own a business and he brought it in. We like doing the repair side. Don't have any problems with that. That's still a lesser than it was because we usually repair tons of screens. Screen repairs have really plummeted and the reason why is even our inexpensive price for screen repairs, people go, I guess I just want to buy a new laptop. And the other thing about... Now the hardware sales, that has been going down dramatically. And I like this guy that came in. He was obnoxious. He walks in. We want $7 for an HDMI cable. Best Buy wants $29. And he even said that. Best Buy wanted $29. You guys want $7 for the same cable. I said, yeah, that's reasonable. Well, I can get it on Amazon for $2.99. And I'm like, yeah, that's where we bought it from for $2.99. Why don't you sell it for that price? Because I wouldn't make any money. Right. So I did. I paid $3 or $2.50, I think it was, because we bought it in bulk and marked it up to $7. And he told me I was ridiculously overpriced. I'm like, I don't get it. Dude, it's the overpriced compared to $29.99 at Best Buy. Yeah. Because I guarantee you, they paid less than $2.50 for it. Yeah, because they bought it. Because they bought 100,000 of them. Yeah. So this is the part that always confused me. People want that Amazon price. They want the convenience. But they want it now. And it's funny, the guy left, and then he came back and gave us $7 for it. I'm like, really, it's... This is why we don't have a lot of retail is because the general public, not that I have a problem with, I'm not picking on them, but there's a lot of people hunting deals. Great, I hunt deals too. That's also why I generally buy online or do some other price comparisons. And I get that. That's where the market has moved to. I watch these people struggling because if you're not adding any value, then why would you sell the product? And then the products are all MSRP with no margin or low margin or small percentages. You know, we talked about this before. This is why Best Buy spends all their time singing and dancing about warranties. Now, the other side of that is Best Buy has... I think they sell the policy of 14 days to return to anything. And after that, they tell you to call the manufacturer. Now, Best Buy is a big corporate company that just hands you a phone number versus they go, oh, you're a small business. I'll bring it back. And we've had people do this two years after they bought something and expect some type of warranty with it. And I'm like, look, we sold it in writing, 90-day warranty, you know? And people are like, well, I brought it in a shop and you're no more. And I'm like, this is one of the reasons that we've just seen products because the margin was so small on it to begin with trying to replace it for free two years later. And yeah. So we pretty much have focused only on service. If you think about running a retail place, the service side's good. The market for product, selling a couple of convenience items, that's all we really have in there. Most of the stuff in our front area is our stuff that we use. Like we got switches and a few other things there. And people rarely ever come in looking for that because other IT people... And at least I have... We have sold to some other IT people because they're understanding. They're like, I know I can get it on Amazon. It's probably where you bought it. But I have a problem. So we have relationship with our IT companies and they don't mind paying the market. But they have an understanding and those are our favorite customers has been other IT people. Yeah. We don't have any laptops up there right now. I don't think we're going to do any more, are we? No. It's been... We try to find used ones. When you can go buy, and I know they're crappy laptops, but you can go buy at Best Buy right now. We've seen some for $2.49. We've even seen some nice ones at Best of Decent ones between Amazon and Best Buy. Nice and Lovo's in the $5, $600 range. And I'm like, great. The used ones don't match the speed, don't have Windows 10, which a lot of people are now asking for. So we're paying a lot for them. Then the labor... You know how many times we bought laptops? And this includes from what seemed to be reputable sellers and had to send them back because they shipped them with bad hard drives to us. So I have all this labor sunk cost into them just to try and make a product sellable. So by the time I had up all the labor costs and the cost of the product, I'm like, the margin was this big. And then if the problems... Because I can't give a long warranties on or if I do give a long warranties, any problem means I'm going to be in the negative on that product. So we've just kind of gone to where it's just the margin's real small on it. Buy a new one. Matter of fact, we started publishing Amazon links with Amazon affiliate links right on our blog. And I did a video on it because people could have asked me deals for Christmas. So I did a deals for Christmas list. We read a list of some laptops. Matter of fact, the Acer Gaming laptop was really impressive. It was a really nice high-end laptop that you could buy for a very reasonable price. And I'm like, this is a good price. I can't beat the price. I can't even find any order that sells it for cheaper. And I got this guy. He kept calling me. I kind of laughed. Well, we sell with other MSPs like you and we help provide product and things like that. And I said, oh, great. And so when I've called him for pricing, he's been able to beat Amazon by $1 and $2 on 800 and $900 dollar products. That's worth it. Yeah. Because people just buy you order for Amazon. Remember the Lenovo reseller incident? Yeah. Well, Lenovo wants more money as a reseller. And we haven't figured out the methodology. We found a couple of vendors on Amazon again that are selling the Lenovo. The cheaper the Lenovo will sell them to me. Now, they're new, not refurbished with the SSDs, with all the same features you want. And this is what we buy for our clients. And we're not secretive about our pricing for this stuff. And if the client wants us to buy it, there's a certain amount of markup. It's just the management fee for us getting them and dealing with them. And mostly we roll it all into a bigger project because we're replacing, for example, we have a project where we're putting new computers in an office and we're going to be replacing them and they need wiring. So it's just one big project. I mean, they're a client that trusts us and they're, you know, we'll just go in and take care of it for them. So we just order all the stuff. We get them here. They all come with warranty. Matter of fact, they come with a two-year warranty online because that was the other thing you got. Well, if you buy them in Amazon, they don't come with a warranty. I'm like, they do. Yeah. And matter of fact, even some of the Dell's have come with the Dell onsite warranty when we order Dell's online. We don't know why Amazon can sell Dell's cheaper than Dell can. I contact Dell directly. Now there's tricks to dealing with Dell directly where you put it in the cart but then you call a sales person and then really that generally gives you a three-year warranty or a five-year warranty. Just let you guys know. Yeah. So we play games with the system as much as we can for margin but it makes it hard to put product in here because a lot of people, other than the businesses who just want a turnkey solution for the retail market, they who are already looking at the deal, if they get time to haggle with someone online, they go do it. Yeah. So short of it, we're keeping a retail store. Long of it, we aren't doing much product sale because the value isn't truly there. Matter of fact, retail in general, they keep calling it the retail apocalypse. They said it last year, we're seeing it but we are seeing a big shrinking of stores. Oh yeah. There's really not a lot of places. I mean, there's a lot of areas, especially down river here, that just don't have stores anymore. There's so many vacant buildings used to sell things that are commoditized now that you can go buy and do it online and that's what people want to do. Yeah. So it's been... I'm guilty of it myself. Yeah, it's not even... That part's not always about price. You're paying for the convenience. I know something may be a little bit more expensive but the retail experience is less than stellar to me. So I don't like going to stores. I don't like standing in lines. I don't... There's nothing about that experience that I enjoy. Sure. Yeah. So when I can just go, send me three boxes of pop tarts. Quantity four because I'm feeling hungry right now. Wait, do we get new pop parts? And Amazon entices you with things like subscription to pop tarts. Right, yeah. We need the pop tart button. We need a pop tart button. As well as, you know, people who bought pop tarts also bought ho-hos and we're like, oh yeah, we totally should get ho-hos. Yeah, there's their algorithmic suggestion engines. And it's a good one. Yeah. And I don't mind it. I do see some innovation. We have our local Kroger's, as they have their click it thing, which is pretty cool. They're doing each job of that. What you can do is you shop online, put everything in the cart, and they will walk it to your car. I think that's pretty cool. Sure. You just pull up. You... I don't think it's an app. And on my wife uses it. I don't... I think it's an app too. I haven't used it, but... But it's kind of cool. They got a little area you pull up to it and they put the groceries. You just pop the trunk, they put the grocery and the trunk. Done. They do all the shopping for you. They pull it. That's actually really great because now we've avoided the part that drives me nuts with things like blue apron or plated or all those. It's the amount of waste involved. That is a problem I see and I'm very... I try to be very conscious of packaging and they pack in all these stupid... What are those things? The coolers, the stuff. You throw away so much crap. I don't know. I haven't used it, but I've talked to people who have and they've said the exact same thing. My wife did and it's just like... There's so many boxes and everything and I know there's the whole problem with plastic bags and things like that, but if you get paper bags, it's not that bad comparatively and you can recycle those easier. And there's much less waste overall compared to the amount of plastic and effort that went into it. You just drive to the store and you can get things now. So you can go on your computer. I need 10 boxes of optart please and they will walk them out to your car. You don't even have to do your car. Then hire a task rabbit to go actually pick up the food. You can get a task rabbit. And they'll bring it home and put it away for you too if that's what you've hired them to do. That's true. That's true. I mean I'm just... I was thinking about that, is I don't have one of those fancy... Because I don't put IoT things at my house but I do have a Marcus. I realize I use a Marcus a lot. If you haven't heard of this device, it's taken years of training, a loving to be precise. And I can be like, hey Marcus, turn the lights off. Hey Marcus, I need some water. That's the main reason to have children. I mean back... I mean we kind of grew up when they were kind of coming in but like at first you didn't have remote controls for the TV. I was the TV remote. We were the remote control. We were the remote control. We had the clicker thing. Yeah. Turn it and Dad's like, nope. Channel 4. Nope. Channel 7. And something you get from a Marcus that you don't get from some of these other assistants is snarkiness. Right? I can't remember if I mentioned this before but I was like, hey Marcus, grab me a beer out of the fridge. He says, Dad, that would make me a minor in possession. No. I was like, he's not wrong. You can't argue that logic. Kids gotten... He is now too advanced. The AI has gotten too advanced. Yeah, now we... Yeah, so... Do you yell like, okay Marcus? Like an okay Marcus. Okay Marcus. Yeah, no. It's fun getting your kids to do stuff. Sure. And my daughter now that she's 16... Oh, she can drive you places? She can drive me places? So this is like self-driving car. Yeah, exactly. Who needs a test live in Amica? That's right. Okay, Amica, take me to Kroger where they're going to load stuff in our car. Yep, drive me to Kroger. It is my best... It's my favorite way to text and drive. It keeps me distracted from whatever it is she's like. I'm like, I want to reach over to Sherman like, we need to go this... Yeah, you're a little closer to Kroger. Though she says I am better to drive with the mom. And apparently mom has panic attacks. Oh, yeah. Well, I remember when I had my permit, it was a perfect example of the difference between my mom and dad. I kind of... I totally should have stopped at the yellow light, but I didn't. I went on through it. Yeah. Mom in the back seat, freaking out. Oh my god, you're going to kill us. And my dad was finally just like, okay, you should have stopped at that. Yep. That was the difference, right? Oh, okay. I get the point. Yeah, pretty simple. All right, we've rambled on for long enough. Thank you for watching. If you liked the content here, like and subscribe. If you've lasted this long, like and subscribe. We always get a little slap happy towards the end. Make sure you always watch to the end of the show. We're having fun with Off Topic Tuesday. That's been great. We actually, we're working more on... I think we did a good job with the content. We're working on it because we've been curing the content during the week. We start building it all up so we actually can talk more in depth about it and reading it. So, and sometimes people send us suggestions. We have a fun one. Kyle sent me. Oh, really? Yes, apparently you can threaten the Google Assistant. So that'll be... Yes. All right. We're going to cover Easter eggs and assistants because we're going to see how many we can find. At least the one, the or else one is fun with Google. We'll talk about that in prior to it. So once again, thank you for watching. Thank you for rambling on with us. I do have a Patreon if you want to throw money at us. Thank you very much. We really, really appreciate it. Sure. If you don't have any money, don't. Don't spend money you don't have ever done that. All right. Thanks. See you.