100proofnewshound

Hi everyone, it's been a couple months since I posted about my efforts to start a YouTube history channel. Things have been progressing about as I expected. We have been posting one 30+ minute episode each week, and have seen steady but unspectacular growth in viewers. You need 1,000 hours of views in order to even think of monetizing: I stand at 110. However, I actually think I will get there in about 6 months, as the weekly views of the back catalogue of existing posts now exceeds the views I get on new content. You sort of build up momentum.

The harder metric is going to be subscriptions: they require 1,000, I stand at 27. Youngsters will subscribe to anything, even a cannibal cookbook site. Older folk are highly suspicious of technology and are loath to interact. My demographic is the 85 to 140 crowd. I may need some assistance.

However, I've got the production of content down pat. It takes about 4 hours to research the topic. I can organize and write the script in about two hours – with most of the script, such as it is, being improvised. It takes two hours to record and review the episode and about three hours to edit and post. I do everything except editing, which is done by my daughter, Olivia.

The one thing that has surprised me is the abundance of content. It's limitless. You open the paper and potential stories just leap out at you. I did an episode on pages 6 and 7 of the June 21, 1876 edition of the St. Louis paper. Not the whole paper, just pages 6-7. Here we learn that one of the world's greatest opera singers will be performing in town and that baseball is being played across the country including by all-Black teams. Also, that there was a skeet shooting tournament in St. Louis but that the skeet were not clay, but actual live pigeons (more than 200 fatalities). Finally, we get to view the monthly tables of mortality and learn that nobody over the age of 80 died in St. Louis that month, because nobody lived to see 80!

The most recent episode is the absolutely true and totally American history of the modern roller coaster. We learn, without fear or doubt, that the roller coaster was invented and patented in 1883 in Toledo, Ohio, which brings us full circle to the present capital of roller coasters, Cedar Point, located a mere 45 miles down State Hwy 2.

Well, thanks for your time, and remember to subscribe if you're so inclined.