July 2014: Vietnam, Pompey the Great, and Other Disasters

I closed last month’s entry with a question. What happens when your most successful video peters out? In July I got to find out. That month saw an initial FATCA deadline pass without the disaster predicted in some of the internet’s more ridiculous quarters. My predictions of FATCA disaster were never immediate, but my video suffered as general interest in the topic slowed down. The effects were pretty dramatic.

That aside, it was a great month. I posted videos from Istanbul, Tuscany, Northern Michigan and the New York City suburbs. The constraints of travel and (very voluntary) homelessness helped hone my craft rather than slow things down. Whether people were watching or not, I was very pleased with the month’s production.

July is named after Julius Caesar, right? That’s fitting, because this month’s production was all about Empire, and American empire specifically. We started the month by looking at our two great wars of Imperial over-reach, Iraq and Vietnam, and the embarrassing parallels. Next we moved on to the Imperial Presidency and why we really don’t want Hillary Clinton to occupy it. After that, we made a brief departure from the theme for an installment of Notes From The Golden Age, debunking the overreaction to the recent European elections. After that, back to Empire, with a brief history of Rome, and what every American Founding Father knew about it. Then another break for a second installment of Ask A Libertarian. We closed the month with a return to the Imperial presidency, specifically its birth, with the ¨Worst President Ever¨.

The viewing statistics were depressing, but they were also very interesting. In June we got 18,123 views, and in July we got 8,617. Most of this drop can be traced to the drop in views for our FATCA video which fell from 13,903 views and 77% of the total to 5,611 views and 65% of the total. The effect on viewership of all the other videos could be clearly discerned as well. Despite there being another month’s worth of videos, viewing of all of these videos fell by more than a quarter. The fact that viral videos are important for traffic is not news, but it is interesting to see it laid out this clearly. My confidence in FATCA’s return to the headlines leads me to believe that the video will grow in strength again, but it hasn’t happened as of October. Since its decline I have not had a single new video approach the 1,000 hit mark. Interesting stuff.

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June 2014: Elections, Interventions, and Cat Videos.

Much like my physical location, the channel was everywhere in June. Due to a travel filled summer, and a lack of an income, I gave up my apartment halfway through the month. It certainly preserves the bank account, but we will see how it affects the videos.

In June we started off with a video critiquing the enthusiasm for the ¨Hip, New¨ Washington, DC. Next came our first cat video, in which Perspective Cat drops some historical knowledge. Hope to do more with that guy sometime soon. Trade policy, and the way that the Trans Atlantic Partnership betrays the spirit of the WTO were analyzed in our next one, with perhaps a little too much disco.

Our video on Eric Cantor’s primary loss was a bit of an experiment. I woke up, saw the news, wrote a reaction, and had produced a video five hours later. Does it show? The process is usually much more labored than that. All of this experimentation led to what remains one of my favorite videos ever. Little seen historical analysis, snark, and a mix of visual techniques combined to make a video of a quality I wish I could produce every week. Check out ¨Russia Will Join the EU Within 30 years…¨ here or above. We followed up with an inexplicably little watched video on why humanitarian intervention is dumb. Youtube provides detailed analytics of viewer behavior throughout the course of the video. This one has some of the best retention of any, but very few people showed up to watch. Not so easy to discover probably.

Our last video of the month was the first installment of ¨Ask a Libertarian¨, and our first attempt at interview programming. It taught me that I, like,umm, sort of, you know, really fricking need to work on my interviewing skills.

June saw a bit of falling off in viewing statistics. Views fell to 18,123 from 21,100 in May. The majority of views in both months were of the one FATCA view. A (sort of) viral video is an interesting thing. I owe the majority of my views to this one video. While it is raging, the channel is healthy, but when it falls off?

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