Yeah so this post was actually written in April 2026. I just backdated it to keep the milestone posts in step with when they actually happened.
There is a certain genre of comments on YouTube that I love. It’s the genre when a very new channel puts out a very high quality video and people are like “Wow! This is really good for a new creator!”
I remember this happening when that Red Dead video by Girlfriend Reviews came out of nowhere in 2018. I recall seeing comments on Reddit claiming they had to be industry plants or something because surely a new channel can’t know what they’re doing! But then it was soon revealed that Matt (the boyfriend) had been editing professionally for a long time. So it all made sense.
I’ve never been called an industry plant, nor have I been editing professionally for a long time; or ever. But I still got some similar comments early on in the same vein.
But surprise! The Polka Cowboy channel wasn’t my first rodeo on YouTube. So I did start with some experience. New channel? Yes. But a new creator? Nah. A whole new genre of videos to figure out? Oh yeah.
The before times
Up until 2018 just going to YouTube to find some entertainment wasn’t exactly something I did, or something that was on my mind. The platform for me at the time was really just where people would send links for viral videos. Or where I’d end up from a search engine trying to find a howto guide to replace the wax seal on a toilet or something.
I had my YouTube account where I would upload random videos from my phone to share with friends. And at the time any old channel could be monetized so I’d see a few pennies come in here from that account and was like “Neat!”.
Then January 2018 rolls around and I get the e-mail from YouTube stating that monetization would now require a 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch time before it could be enabled. And with that, my pennies per month disappeared. Oh well. YouTube was just a place to share videos with friends. It didn't matter.
Then a few months later I met a girl and we started to hang out. When we needed something to watch with dinner or whenever, she’d just turn on YouTube and get to browsing. This was something you could just do?! Incredible. Over the next few months I myself became a convert and started just going to YouTube to see what it had for me to watch today. It didn’t take too long to start thinking about that 1000 subscriber barrier that put an end to my pennies. And to start wondering if I should make an attempt at climbing that wall.
Before the before times
I have a soft spot for those videos where someone who has made it big on YouTube talks about their past and how they got there. A lot of the younger people who get there often say something along the lines of “I was recording everything when I was kid. I wanted to be a YouTuber like (someone popular in 2008, I dunno names) so bad!”
I was also one of those kids who would record everything with the family VHS camcorder and make dumb skits with myself and my friends. But this was before the existence of YouTube. Before the existence of JenniCam. Hell, before any of us even had internet access. We just did it to have fun and watch the tapes back to have a laugh later.
But that interest in video fell by the wayside by the time I reached high school. And outside a class or two that dealt with video arts in college, video making wasn’t something I did for fun since.
Back to 2018
For years I had been thinking about the olden days of running around with that camcorder and occasionally wondered if I could find an angle to get back into it, but always failed. Starting a channel seemed like the thing to do. I already had a decent mirrorless camera that could take capable video, but I still didn’t know what to actually make content about.
One of those channels that could just post whatever and can get away with it was obviously the dream, but if one doesn’t have the audience already established to support doing that, there is a lot of dumb strategy that needs to be considered to even grow an audience. One of the important ones being niche.
I owned a lot of analog photography equipment at this time so I figured “Fuck it. Old camera channel.” I figured whatever I created wouldn't get recommended en masse right out of the gate, but I bet there were plenty of people out there making searches for these camera models that will hit the videos via search results.
So I made a few dry videos about how to use some of these cameras hoping to bag some sweet search engine results. Honestly they pulled in more views than I expected, but something was off.
I was raised watching Saturday Night Live every weekend. Watching David Letterman and later Conan O'Brien. Mad magazine was a staple monthly buy. Absurdist shitpost humor is a huge part of my DNA, and it was fighting to make itself seen in these dry, search engine friendly videos.
So I let the beast out and a little bit in some of these videos.
It could have gone better.
Alas
I did eventually figure out the formula better. It still took two and a half years but I did eventually reach that monetization goal. But then? Meh.
Like the majority of people who undertake a YouTube channel, I wanted to see some decent side income in exchange for the effort I was putting in to create the things I loved. But it wasn’t happening. Two years of monetization and I don’t think I ever made more than $30 in a single month.
But here is the thing that took me a long time to realize. I think there is an audience out there for whatever creative endeavor someone might undertake. But for a lot of these endeavors; the potential audience availability might just not be there if you’re trying to make any semblance of an income off it.
I believe I was making good, authentic videos. I had plenty of fans who really enjoyed my style. But there just wasn’t enough of them to sustain.
In 2023 I took a good look at the situation. I took some time looking at the big channels in the niche and something dawned on me. The big players in the niche, the ones that would get mentioned in every “Who should I watch on YouTube?” thread on reddit just weren’t really pulling numbers. It seemed like there was a plateau around 80,000 views on their channels with an occasional outlier going to 100k and above.
And this was for the most wide-net general interest content in the niche. Me trying to slice that pie thinner by chasing the absurdist humor shitpost sub niche wasn’t doing me any favors.
I then looked at the gaming channels I had been watching and saw how the views ceiling was off the charts comparatively.
So about gaming
Between 2018 and 2023 I got exposed to plenty of gaming content on YouTube. And every so often I’d watch something that stuck with me more than any others. These videos in particular slowly started to make me have itches about possibly trying my hand at my own gaming content.
Here are a few that I remember that moved the needle.
No specific video, but I’m just linking to a 2018 Red Dead video that I recall watching. I watched a few of his stuff early on in my journey of casually watching YouTube and at first it was like “Wait? People just play games without actually being experts and that's ok? Whattt?!” Because up to that point I only really consumed gaming content for guides on how to do stuff by “Good players” or to watch a viral feat if someone set a new speed record in Mario Brothers or something. The idea one could just have fun and still pull a sizable audience was kind of revolutionary at the moment.
However, It wasn’t until March 28th 2020 when I clicked on a recommended video that shook my foundations.
Let's Game It Out - I Abducted My Entire Neighborhood in The Sims 4
This was my first introduction to LGIO, and it was perfect. I think it might have been the first gaming comedy video I watched that wasn’t just a chopped up live stream. It was edited. It was voiced over. It wasn’t about shitting on other players. And best of all, it was absolutely unhinged. It fed into everything my absurduist hunger craved for and oh my fucking god did I love it. Maybe it wasn’t the first produced video I watched? I dunno. But it was definitely the first that just stuck with me for months.
Haunted Oath - I Defeated All 5 Valheim Bosses as a Pacifist
A simple video at its core. Simple editing. Simple narration. And at the time a video sucking me in for an entire 50 minute watch time felt absurd! (I say this now having created videos myself in excess of 90 minutes.)
But what really got me was just the quest of someone suffering so much, purely driven to accomplish something that no one had ever done before (to the best of my knowledge).
Taking a large game and restricting one’s self to a tiny piece of it to see what happens was kind of something special that hit just right. But I’ll explain more in a moment.
As I discovered the videos, and definitely more that I’ve listed between 2018-2023 the urge to make my own gaming videos grew stronger. But thanks to that pesky niche it never felt appropriate to slap them onto the channel I had been building. The Red Dead Photography videos I originally created in 2018-2019 did have some precedent, so I went live with those. But it always kind of felt like a stretch.
All this kept bubbling up as the metrics from photography remained stagnant and my own interest in the hobby waned. I’ve been a life long gamer, and I really thought my humor would land better in a gaming context and have access to a much larger potential audience. But dammit, I didn’t want to mix it in with my original channel and confuse the audience. But it also was so much time and effort getting that channel monetized that I didn’t want to start anew and possibly miss out on some income.
But finally in early 2023 the “Make a new channel you fool.” thoughts won. I figured I could at least give it a shot and if I hate the process or something, nothing lost.
But once again, I knew I wanted to make something, but didn’t quite know exactly what to make. But I had ideas to explore.
A few months earlier there was a moment after Bannerlord released and I was talking to a friend about my playthrough which was a sort of catalyst.
See, I’ve always enjoyed deep games with a lot of complexity. City builders (Not looking at you SimCity 2013), Grand strategy games, Total War, cRPGs. But something I’ve been aware of with myself is that I enjoy them real hard, but only for a while. At some point whatever I’m building and have to manage tends to get too much for my brain to keep track of and I just can’t keep up with the complexities. Then I get exhausted trying to manage it all and give up.
So for years I’ve been often playing them in a peculiar way. I’ll learn it to the point of collapse, and then I’d go back and crank up the difficulty and give myself a few limitations to make the early game a beast to get past without having to worry about the late game complexities.
This is the part of my brain where the Joov stuff struck a good nerve. What is a region locked challenge if not taking a large complex machine and just hammering away at a smaller less complex part of it?
But as for this Bannerlord playthrough I said I was playing it where I wasn’t allowing myself to hire troops. I could only use prisoners that I turned to my side. The reaction I received was a hybrid of “You’re insane. Tell me about it.” In that moment I think it hit me that maybe people outside of my immediate circle would enjoy these dumb ideas.
That resulted in my first idea of the what was. Just the experience of games where I limit myself in some way to make the early game a new challenge.
On May 8th 2023 I created a new channel. Gave it a silly name and took a picture with Grandfather’s old Melodeon and a Power Glove to use as a cover photo, and then got to work creating a video.
