More FATCA … and God I Hate Christmas | December 2014 Update

December is the worst. The Holiday season is a time for family, friends and good cheer! It’s not a time for watching videos about the state of the world. Unlike my likely disproved theory of the summer slump, I’ve got two years of empirical verification of the end of year crash in viewership. The graph of this month’s views is super depressing. A very strong start followed by a steady petering out.

December fail

I did know to expect this, however. The same thing happened to my usually robust initial FATCA video in December of 2013, so it wasn’t too depressing to see it happen. It was a fun month of videos though, featuring collaboration, new approaches, and new subject matter. Though I didn’t know it at the time December began my longest period without flying anywhere since the 1990s. Budgetary constraints brought a forcible end to my globe trotting, but I think it was great for the channel. I have spent most of the past six months in a very small room, building my skills and thinking about ways to broaden my reach. There are many worse places to be marooned than Istanbul.

December’s first video was produced in Connecticut at the tail end of my Thanksgiving trip home. Family friend and fellow Istanbul-ite Alev Scott (buy her book!), and my super talented brother (admire his works!) were kind enough to contribute to this long delayed return to the topic of FATCA. This vid on FATCA’s effect on the United States rather than the rest of the world was well received, and gave me my first day over 700 views since July. Next up I did a video on Mary Shelley and how odd it is that she is still viewed as less important than her husband. This was my first foray into literary criticism. I really like how the vid came out, but it took an incredibly frustrating 5 months to crest 100 views. At the time I usually hit that mark in days or weeks, and now occasionally hit it in a number of hours. I want to do more in this vein, but I will have to think harder about how to make the vids easier to discover.

I had long been toying with the idea of partnering with NGOs on videos, and this collaboration with The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform NGO, was my first effort. It’s also the last so far. As of this writing it is among the 8 of my 97 videos that have failed to crest 150 views. It may have been the curse of December, or the fact that it’s kind of a crap video (poorly lit, trying to accomplish too many things) but regardless I haven’t felt the need to repeat the experiment. Next up, improv buddy Andrew McCormick (Come See our Shows!) helped me produce a strongly libertarian take on what we should be learning from the Torture Report. My almost instant reaction to Obama’s announcement of a path towards regularization of relations with Cuba was the best viewed of my late December vids. I like to put more effort into my videos, but more timely reaction videos tend to open very well. Next up was a weird combination of a holiday thank you video and a sad reaction to Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to politicize the murders of two New York police officers. Finally I closed the year with a meditation on mass murder and how best to stop it. December was my most prolific month to that point.

The views were disappointing, as I mentioned above. They fell from 7,182 in November to 5,785. This was actually worse than it looks. Half of the month’s views came in the first week. Of the top 5 vids, only one, the new FATCA video, was produced in December. Only two of the seven videos broke 100 views in the first day, and two of them still haven’t broken 200 views six months later. In early December we did finally break 500 subscribers after hovering in the 400s for almost three months, which was nice. At the end of December we had 65 videos, all of which were watched at least 3 times, 51 of which were watched over 10 times, 13 of which were watched over 100 times, and one of which broke 1,000 views for the month (FATCA again). By the end of this month I had decided that if things didn’t change dramatically, and soon, it was time to give up and start looking for another legal job…

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