I’m Destroying My Channel…

Our Channel Undergoes Major Overhaul Following Viewership Decline and Stress

We’re making significant changes to our YouTube channel and live stream after experiencing a dramatic drop in views and subscribers, leading to immense personal stress and anxiety. We’ve been working tirelessly to understand what’s been happening, talking to our YouTube representative and other creators, and have developed a comprehensive action plan starting this Monday.

For the first time in three or four years, we’ve seen videos that typically garnered 50,000 to 80,000 views plummet to just 10,000 or 15,000, with some even hitting as low as 5,000 to 7,000 views. This downturn, alongside losing hundreds, even thousands of subscribers daily, caused great panic, especially given that our YouTube channel supports our entire staff, including video editors and a thumbnail person. We’ve been under immense stress, grappling with near-daily anxiety and recognizing that if we continued on our previous path, our channel would have been completely destroyed.

Through direct engagement with our viewers and internal reflection, we’ve identified several key issues that contributed to this decline:

• Excessive Ads: The loudest feedback was complaints about “too many ads,” causing viewers to tune out.
• Deleting Underperforming Videos: In a panic, we were deleting videos with low click-through rates, thinking it would benefit the channel. However, our YouTube representative confirmed this was “very bad” and detrimental.
• Lack of In-Depth Content: Viewers felt we weren’t providing enough additional value, often just reading articles and reacting instead of offering deeper insights.
• Boring Video Production: Our videos became less engaging due to the absence of elements like meme intros, B-roll, memes, and factoids.
• Apathy and Burnout: The pressure of consistently hitting view goals to support our large staff led to us covering topics we weren’t passionate about, causing burnout and making us feel robotic.
• Poor Content Sourcing: We were spending too much time on X (formerly Twitter) for story ideas, often pulling from “Pakistani bots,” rather than engaging directly with our viewers for topics.
• Accuracy Issues: There’s been an increase in instances where we were wrong.

To address these critical issues and deliver a better, more entertaining product, we are implementing several significant changes, all kicking off this Monday:

• Ad Limits: We will now limit all ad reads to a maximum of one per day, which has involved cancelling lucrative sponsorships. This also includes promotions for QuarterCast or Trump cookbooks, which now count towards this limit.
• No More Video Deletions: Any video we upload, regardless of its performance, will now remain on the channel.
• Enhanced Content Quality:
  • We’ve hired a full-time researcher whose job is to help formulate videos, add more information, teach, and provide corrections when we are wrong.
  • Our full-time video editor, Stephen, will now focus on making videos better by incorporating B-roll, memes, factoids, and other on-screen elements to increase engagement. The era of simply reading articles is over.
• Staff Restructuring: We’ve trimmed our staff from approximately 10 people down to about 3, retaining key individuals who demonstrated incredible loyalty by offering to work for free and take on extra duties during this rough patch. These include Stephen (graphics), and our live stream co-hosts Luke, Hannah Clair, and Melanie Mack, who will now take on additional responsibilities, including helping to promote live streams and find guests/topics.
• Viewer-Centric Content Sourcing: We will shift our focus from X to our Discord community, spending more time there to source topics directly from our viewers.
• Live Stream Enhancements: Our live stream, QuarterCast, which airs Monday-Thursday at 2 PM Eastern and Friday at 1 PM Eastern, will also undergo similar improvements. Our co-hosts will actively work to bring in more guests to inject new life and quality into the show.

We appreciate all the feedback from our viewers, recognizing its vital importance. This weekend, we’ll be relaxing and playing video games to prepare for the massive changes starting Monday. Our promise is simple: more quality, better videos, and a more entertaining live stream. We sincerely hope that those who tuned out will return and give us another chance to prove that we can deliver the content you deserve. We’ll know in a couple of weeks if these changes resonate, and we are hopeful our channel will thrive again.