 Ahoy-Hoy and welcome to the channel. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we're going to talk about a video the SCP Illustrated did yesterday, which really is something that a lot of us SCP YouTubers have been thinking about, but not saying out loud for quite some time, which is how the SCP animation channels are destroying the rest of us, which, to be fair, that's a great title for the metrics. But I feel like it maybe overstates things a little, but only a little. I could go into the metrics of other channels to show that this is a similar trend, but the important part I can say is that it is a similar trend for other channels. I'm going to go over some of my own metrics, so you have an idea of what I'm looking at, and I'll probably put some of the graphs up on the screen as best as I can. So, when we talk about, let's just talk about what the results have been. SCP animation channels on YouTube really got started about, they started in early parts of last year, but they really started ramping up around, I'd say, September, October-ish, little August, September, October, roughly in that general area, is when not just, there were channels that were doing it up to that point, but that's when more channels started to pick up on it, and then more channels started to pick up on it. And now we've got a glut of SCP animation channels, and these SCP animation channels are able to create long enough content to drive, you know, watch times on the SCP YouTube channel, which for a lot of SCP YouTubers is difficult. I mean, if you're the Vulcan or SCP Illustrated and you're committed to covering the SCP in its entirety from start to finish, you could spend 30-40 minutes on it. I've seen this before, and people will be like, well, people watch television, or people watch movies, yeah, but most people don't go to YouTube to watch long-form content. And the few people that are watching long-form content on YouTube are watching very specific things that they're big fans of. I guarantee you if, say, confinement put out like a 30-minute long video, people would probably watch it. And I should mention, when we talk about SCP animated channels, I don't think it's fair to lump confinement in with them, because what we're talking about are people who are doing videos that are very unoriginal. There's no really other way to put it, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. And a lot, and the other half of this is this, if you ask the average site author about what SCP YouTube channels do, they'll tell you it's the same thing. They take other people's, and I'm not saying I agree with this, this is just a general opinion, that they take other people's content and make money off of it. The problem is that that approach and that view is a little bit simplistic. And then, so you might say to yourself, okay, well, if that view and approach is simplistic, is it fair to say that the SCP animation channels are doing the same thing? And I don't know that it's completely fair. The SCP animation channels have found a formula that works. And if I found a formula that worked as well as they have found, I would do it too, right? I mean, there's a certain, personally, I like to think that there's a minimum level of quality that I would guarantee before I would like, you know, there's a certain level that I won't stoop to, but like, if I could make the kind of money they're going to be making off of these channels, I would do the same thing. But that doesn't change the reality that SCP YouTube channels, the original SCP YouTube channels are facing. And I'm going to go over my metrics in a way, and the easiest number to look at is subscriber growth. Because subscriber growth is the driver of all things YouTube. If your subscriber growth stagnates, your views will slowly go down as the people who are currently subscribed to you either lose interest or just never unsubscribe or just become dead accounts. Over time, if you don't grow, you don't keep viewers. Period. So I just crossed 70,000 subscribers yesterday, and that was a milestone that I had been expecting to hit. I don't know mid to late last year, not mid last year, but late late last year. I figured I'd hit that in November ish, and it's taken an extra three months to get there. So when we talk about the metrics, this, and I'll put it up on the screen right here, hold on. So this is my subscriber growth starting in September, and this is when everything started to go downhill. And you can even look at the metrics itself and see how it's gone downhill towards the end of that month. Yeah. Worse yet, actually, and this is something I found interesting. My YouTube videos, when I put a new video out, it doesn't matter what the content is about, it doesn't matter what I'm doing. My subscriber growth actually goes down. And that's to be expected. When you put out a new video, you're reminding people who are subscribed and who don't watch your content that you exist. So those people unsubscribe. The problem is that my videos are not reaching new viewers to make up for it. It's natural to lose a subscriber when you upload a video, and it may sound counterintuitive. But when you look at the net numbers combined together, you never notice that normally. However, since my videos are not hitting any kind of, and their search engine optimization being what it is, maybe I need to work on that a little bit. But because they're not reaching anybody, then I'm not getting new subscribers. So you can actually see here, and this was a pretty good, it was pretty okay month. I gained 3,000 subscribers in September of 2020. And this was my last good month. And you can even see when you look at the chart here that somewhere around around the first week and a half, things started to trend downward. Now, this is a chart of every month starting in October 2020 to the end of February 2021. You'll see big dips. Some of these dips are somewhat more understandable. Like, for example, there's a dip of about 55 subscribers. And when I did your wrong about Trump, there's a dip of, you know, 1717 on two different days. When I did my is 2% of the wikis content about to be deleted. And then yeah, I mean, so those are the two, to me, those are the two important days that I actually lost, but they're the more understandable of days. But as you can see on here, there's not a whole lot of like subscriber growth. Like the best I got was the new copyright strikes on SCP content was the best day. And that's the worst part. The best day in this five month period was only a subscriber growth of 89 subscribers. And if you look, I don't know if I've got it up here depends on I don't want to be I can't show all of the data because YouTube's weird about that. It's a little bit like not talking about how much you get paid. They don't want individual creators comparing with other individual creators how much money they're making per click per everything. But the five months following September of last year, my subscriber growth was a total of 3.1,000 subscribers compared to just September, which was the month that things tended downward the month before that was like 4.7 September alone got me 3000 subscribers. August was 4.7 subscribers and so on and so on. When we talk about this as like an existential threat, we're not kidding. It's a huge deal. I thought honest to God, before the September came, I thought by now, I didn't think it'd be like, what's the best way to put it? I didn't think it'd be at 100,000 subscribers by now. I thought I would be in the 85,000 range, like closing in on it before the end of this year. At the current rate I'm going, let's say the average of my growth over the last five months is going to hold true. Like right now, on average, I'm getting about 600 subscribers or not, which is anemic growth. If we multiply that times 12, then we get a total of only 7,200 subscribers. So I shouldn't expect to even get over 80,000 by the end of this year, unless some video of mine goes particularly viral, which sometimes happens or something changes. I, hmm, what's the best way to put this? I am slightly more insulated against this problem because what we're talking about here is also, we talk about the subscription numbers because those are the numbers I can actually talk about. Those are public facing numbers. When we talk about the money that we're making behind the scenes, like a major, I'd say 25 to 40% of the money that we make on a particular year comes from ads being run in December. So it's important, really important, that a video of yours gets popular in December. Because the end of last year was so anemic, and I'm only speaking for myself, and I guess this reflects on other people as well, money that last year was probably down for everybody by a lot, I should say by a significant percentage. And a lot of these people are less insulated against this problem because they upload less frequently. I upload a video every, two every week. That's what I expect on average between five and 20,000 views on any video I do. That's not a lot, but because I upload so frequently, it's sufficient to maintain a minimum amount of ad revenue. It's not a lot, by the way, but it's enough. That combined with my Patreon, which is also down during this time not attracting new subscribers, the only way for me to get Patreon backers are always going to eventually go away. There's nothing I can do about that. The important way of dealing, well, not everyone. Sometimes you have true fans that stick around for forever. But they're going to go away eventually. People's situations change, so on and so forth. So what happens is, without new subscriber growth, without strong new subscriber growth, even Patreon numbers will start to slowly sag over time. And there's not a whole lot that can be done about it, other than re-approaching how I look at the content that I produce. So I feel as opposed to other people who create SCP content that I am probably in one of the better positions, maybe, who knows. But probably in one of the better positions to make a go at it else-wise to fix this problem. What I do for you, generally, is cover news and deep dives and opinions on the fictional content that exists in the SCP wiki. I could do that with other content. I think the other creators could probably do that with other content too, but the SCP content is what's really driving their fan base. I could start working on other content. I could start talking about Marvel movies, or DC movies, or film in general. I have a lot of strong opinions about these things. Start talking about whatever popular television shows are coming out at the particular time. These are things I could probably do. I've considered in the past, but with the SCP content doing as poorly as it is, I am strongly reconsidering the idea of refocusing my content. Maybe it's still doing SCP content from time to time, but refocusing on a more general sort of thing, like picking out what's popular media at the particular time. I don't know how well that will go over, and I'm sure that there will be growing pains to switch. Because all 70,000 of my current subscribers subscribed for SCP content. How many of those people are going to follow me to other types of content? Some, not all. The other solution, and this is something I've also strongly considered, I'm probably going to put up a community poll today to cover this. It's not going to be binding what I'm going to decide, but I'm curious what the community, my community thinks. Because I have another solution as well, and that's invest a lot of money in reusable animation assets, and learn how to animate myself. Write my own episodes of an ongoing SCP-based animated series. There will be more adult focus than the current kids content, I think. And this is doable, especially when the US finally issues those newest... I think if I invested, say, $1,000 in reusable animation assets, I could get started. It wouldn't be enough to sustain me for forever, but it's enough to give me some basic models that I could then animate myself. Not going to be great, I think. And the important part is to myself to find out if investing $1,000 in something like that is going to work or not. Because the guy could end up doing that and get nothing out of it. But something's got to change. Either the content's got to start doing better on its own, or I've got to do something different. There is no middle ground. And it really, really sucks to say that, but it's true. I think I'm going to put up a poll after this video goes live sometime and just kind of get an idea. I mean, you know, put up a community post, put up a poll and find out what you guys think I should do. It's got to be one of those two, I think. It really does have to be one of those two. And I don't know when I'll start working on it. Actually, I do know when I will start working on the animation thing. I've got ideas for that as a project. And it's something that I have been probably going to work on before this problem, but now it's like redoubled my interest in doing it. Yeah. Let me know what you think in the comments down below and then in the poll that I'm going to put up after this video is live. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, please hit the subscribe button. I mean, I just broke 70,000 subscribers. And the funny part is like I'm posting a video today and I feel like I'm going to go below 70,000 for posting a video, which would be really disheartening because I've been waiting for that for a while. That's like a fun milestone. 70,000 just feels more significant than 69,000. Anyway, please hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos. And then head on over to patreon.com. Again, if you can pledge at any level, like everybody here on the screen already has, including Dr. J Redacted and Synderiki, who independently are basically keeping me afloat at this point. I think they represent 60% of my income from Patreon. It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here and I will see you all again on Tuesday.