So it’s come to this. My very own WEB SITE. I thought these died off years ago…
…and yet, here we are. You, dear reader, have left the comforting clutches of one of our many Silicon Valley overlords to come, here – and you’re probably wondering why this place exists.
I’ve been producing content online for a while now. As of this year, I now spent over half of my life uploading videos to YouTube. Perceptive viewers of mine may have noticed that in the past few months, I have reached a pretty coveted milestone:
The million sub barrier. The second comma. The big one-sextuple bagel. A meaningless, arbitrary string of digits? Perhaps…but you’d be hard pressed to find any creator on YouTube who doesn’t want to see that number beside their channel name. For YouTubers, the million sub mark is the final frontier. After you pass that magic number, the credits start to roll. You’ve beaten the game; earned the keys to the kingdom. There are no more beasts left to slay. For YouTubers such as myself, the honor reads like a lifetime achievement award. A congratulations for all that time and dedication you sunk into your craft. It’s the moment that every content creator dreams of when they first go to create their account.
What they don’t tell you, however, is how you start to feel once that moment has passed. I’m sure that everyone experiences it differently, but following my crowning achievement I was left with an overwhelming feeling of “now what?”.
I still like making videos. I have many more planned for years to come. But I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that a big part of my motivation has always lied in the chase and not the trophy. When I was a kid, I would pick up a video game and play it relentlessly until I beat the final objective. Then, once it was all over, I would put the game down and never touch it again. I’ve always had a hard time staying motivated after reaching the proverbial mountain-top of whatever I’m pursuing.
Needless to say, I feel like I have made it to the “post game” of YouTube. There’s still plenty more to do; high scores, trophy hunting, etc… But my initial drive to grab the proverbial brass ring has been, for the most part, satiated. For the longest time, I’ve been motivated to work on videos from the simple desire to prove that I could contend with the best creators in the world. The critics and nay-sayers of my past left me with this huge chip on my shoulder. I was never supposed to get here. My content was too loud, too abrasive, too pretentious and too opinionated to ever amount to anything. Even if my videos were worthy of attention, the draconian bureaucracy YouTube platform was gonna stop me in my tracks. I would be copyright striked, demonetized, shadow-banned and suspended long before I even caught a glimpse of the promised land.
I welcomed the challenge. Looking at the type of content that YouTube prefers to promote, the odds of success were not in my favor. It was the unlikelihood of victory which made me want it that much more. Ever since I passed a million, that powerful motivating force ceased to exist. Being an underdog was all I’d ever known, but I think it’s fair to say that anyone in my position no longer has the right to call themselves a “small channel”. I began to realize that I was now in the midst of an entirely different stage of my career. After spending so long being utterly fixated on the mountain-top, I finally turned around to gaze at just how much ground lay behind me – how much farther I now had to fall.
I may have been bracing for impact for longer than I’ve realized. It’s no secret; my videos are not exactly as edgy as they used to be. A few longtime viewers of mine have expressed dismay at how I, too, was seemingly unable to avoid this same tired trend that pretty much every other growing channel falls into. To offer a rebuttal, all I can say is that circumstances change once your audience becomes as big as mine has. Five years ago, I could afford to make my content much more brazen for the simple reason that I felt like I had much less to lose. Back then, I was still in school. I had options if this whole YouTube thing didn’t quite pan out. However, over the years, the success of my channel led me to structure my life around it. I chose not to enter the workforce and devote my time instead to growing my audience. I sacrificed a lot of safety and security to get my career to where it is today. I now have a long list of financial dependencies that would really appreciate that my channel does not disappear tomorrow. I will always admire ambitious, risky content. I understand that for many viewers, that was once a major appeal of my videos; but at some point, there comes a time when every YouTuber has to switch from playing offense to playing defense.
That’s where I’m at now, and it’s honestly where I’ve been for the past couple years. I will always try to make my videos as interesting as I can, but the sheer flexibility of making absolutely anything I want is no longer an option. To speak pragmatically, I don’t have the same liberty that I used to, at least not on YouTube.
For these reasons, among others, I’ve spent much of the past year-or-so searching for a new outlet; one that provides me with the same freedom and experimentation that I used to have earlier in my career. I have tried messing around with different little pet projects on YouTube, but nothing I tried would last. It all just felt like I was repeating the same old story that I already knew. I ended up wanting to explore a completely new frontier – or I guess in this case, an old one.
When I was younger, I recall that many of my favorite artists online would have their own blog pages. It was always fun to gain that little extra bit of insight about them, to capture a glimpse of their personality beyond what was portrayed through their work alone. As the years went on, the personal blog pretty much went the way of the dodo. Any mention of blogging today usually pertains to a meager method of generating passive income, where struggling white-collar workers desperately try to cheese some ad revenue whilst having nothing of interest to offer.
Today, the role of the blog has mostly been replaced by monolithic mega-sites like Twitter – which shifts focus away from the individual and towards the omni-present hive mind. The miopic nature of the platform leaves much to be desired. Posts are restricted to being brief and temporary; not exactly conducive for leaving your followers with any sort of food for thought. Whereas the blogs of the past provided a cozy intimate dwelling for fan engagement, the prevailing sentiment of Twitter is downright hostile. I have tried, for years, to use Twitter as a place to make intriguing posts for my audience, and it simply isn’t worth the trouble. It’s an experience so frustrating and unfulfilling that I hardly post there anymore.
For a while now, I figured that there had to be a better place to post stuff longer than three sentences. Twitlonger, Google Docs and screenshots of the Notes app weren’t really cutting it for me. I wanted something a bit more personable, a place where everything I wrote could be compiled in the same location. After I couldn’t find any existing site that satisfied my vision, I decided to create my own…or at least pay some guy on Fiverr to do it for me.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how this place came to be. The only thing to do now was to figure out what to do with it.
At first, I wanted the site to be just another blog, but then I thought, “why stop there?” I had this big open sandbox in front of me. It would be foolish to restrict myself to any one type of content. My intentions with this site are numerous at the moment. I currently would like to use it to post topics of interest that weren’t quite robust enough to become full-fledged videos. I’d also like to share my opinions on contemporary events that affect content creators specifically. Aside from what I end up posting, I have invited a few of my YouTube buddies to contribute some of their own articles as well.
I have no idea what this place is gonna turn into even a year from now, but at the very least, it’s refreshing to be trying out something new.
So with all that out of the way, welcome to DNN. We hope you enjoy your stay.
