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We LOVE making videos and sharing content. When we started however, it was a whole different ballgame. The landscaper has certainly changed. The terms YouTuber’ and ‘Content Creator’ were not commonly used phrases when we started blogging back in 2012. These days, nearly everyone knows what a content creator is. And YouTuber? The more famous the YouTuber, or the more popular the channel, chances are you’ve heard of them, and maybe you’re even subscribed.

Recently, I’ve taken quite good look at the YouTube analytics. For people who are subscribed and watching, nearly all of you watch the entire upload from beginning to end. Subscribers are here for our content! That’s exciting!! For nonsubscribers, it’s such a different story that it’s not even funny. People drop by for whatever reason, click on the video, watch for a moment, and click off. Most nonsubscribers won’t even watch for thirty seconds.

At the time of writing this, truthfully, we have more than 33,000 subscribers. Nevertheless, there’s actually less than about a 1000 of you that look forward to, and want the content we are creating and uploading. And, the amount of subscribers on our channel hasn’t grown since about the middle of 2017. All of this isn’t just disappointing, it’s outright discouraging.

I even said to Stephanie not long ago that, back in the heyday of HallyuBack, before BTS was invited on all the award shows and known throughout the world, the two of us were so busy creating content seven days a week on YouTube for two channels daily, AND Stephanie sinking her heart into artwork day after day, that I never had additional time to myself to just sit with the YouTube analytics and study it. That was a fantasy.

When we started, not only were there not many channels that were legit uploading content, amongst those channels, nobody had quit. People who had ideas were all jumping in, and working their asses off on it. You either created content and your channel was growing, or you were an end user who consumed content. Maybe you had a dream of one day also being a YouTuber, but in reality, we can all agree that met everyone is cut out for this type of work.

In 2023, I come across channel after channel that has started making content, built their channel up to maybe 150k or 250k subscribers, but it’s been more than a year since their last upload. This status was nonexistent when we started. Nowadays, such a high percentage of channels have been started, grown significantly, but can no longer be sustained. And Stephanie and I, we are at this crossroads too.

Stephanie and I have worked our asses off to get to this point in our life. When you start off on YouTube, and your channel starts to grow, you cannot see an end in sight. People who start channels and develop any sort of fan base become filled with ides for future videos. Much of your day becomes this sort of quasi brainstorming activity, complete with dress and aspirations built right in. It’s exciting. As time goes by, you hone it, improve it, and nuture it. You never see the end, because you’re not imagining it.

On YouTube, if we are doing it simply for memories alone, I can make videos all day long like this, and just upload them to YouTube unlisted. And there they will sit forever. These days, professional YouTube is mostly a young person’s game. It’s either a young person’s game, or big business. The audience has also changed so much since we started; people are so much more likely to watch a reel or short. I’m sure if you’re still reading this, then you’re well aware that we haven’t uploaded a short, reel, story or snap in quite a while. That fact hurts our channel’s growth. Even when we did, those didn’t appear the way popular channels are making them now. For heaven’s sake, TikTok didn’t even exist when we started. Not even SnapChat.

You did expect all this of course, right?