This post was actually written in April 2026. I just backdated it to keep the milestone timeline accurate and in step with when they actually happened.
Many people say that a channel's subscriber count doesn't really matter. Which I’ll agree with it to a point. I’ve seen channels grow to a big subscriber count, and then for various reasons the view count per video absolutely collapses making it obvious that the subscribers are there in body, but not in soul.
But along the YouTube journey there are a few subscriber numbers that actually mean something. 10,000,000 subscribers, 1,000,000 subscribers, and 100,000 subscribers. These are the milestones needed to receive those fancy play button plaques you often see in the background of talking head videos.
And then there is the 1000 subscribers milestone. The one so many hunger for because achieving it, and 4000 watch hours is how a channel gets to join the partner program which allows it to share revenue from ad income.
Well. The requirements are different if you make shorts. I don’t deal with shorts, so 4000 hours was my goal.
The other part about that 4000 hours thing is that it is a rolling number of the last 365 days. So if you have a good run and rack up some hours, and then just flounder in the water for the next year those hours from the good run go away.
In September 2023 I posted a Project Zomboid video which kicked off a good run. After uploading that video I got the nice rise in views that a new video brings, but unlike any previous video, they didn’t plummet in the next two days. This new incredible amount of views (at the time) held steady for a month. I thought that this was it. I had broken through. The next video will bring even more, then the next more than that. Hell, being monetized by the end of the year seemed likely if this keeps up!
It didn’t keep up.
At the end of October the view wave I was riding dried up and things crashed hard. Going from 300-500 views a day to a range of 10-30 wasn’t a good feeling. And this wasn’t momentary. Outside of a spike whenever a new video got posted, it would reset back to these levels and just stay there.
And it stayed there for almost a full year. Subscriber growth also felt like a trickle that plateaued during the summer
- June 10th: 400 Subs.
- July 10th: 444 Subs
- August 10th: 442 Subs
As I was approaching September/October I started to worry that I was about to lose all those watch hours I had accumulated a year earlier. Probably something silly to worry about as I also still wasn’t half way to the subscriber count I needed for those hours to matter.
During the year since hitting 100 subscribers I mostly focused on smaller games to make content from. Going Medieval and Medieval Dynasty mainly. Both pretty small games without a huge fanbase to explode from. I knew this and that was fine. This whole period was really an exploratory period to try and figure out what kind of content and workflows feels good to me. And dammit, small fanbases need to be served too!
But while I was honing some skills on these smaller market games that I really was enjoying playing, I was also telling myself I needed to do some videos in big pond games if I really wanted to see things grow.
Enter Red Dead Redemption
The first new Red Dead Redemption 2 video I posted on the channel wouldn’t be until a year after I created the channel. But the RDR2 content journey started immediately as channel conception. Well, 10 days after channel creation if you want to be a pedant. For that was the day I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC specifically for the purpose of making videos.
I knew from the get go that I wanted to do a lot of stuff with John in the epilogue so I got to work doing a playthrough on PC to actually have an epilogue save to play with.
But I guess might as well do this playthrough in an atypical way and turn it into a video essay, right? So I came up with a few different rulesets.
First Person, No Reticle, No Map, No HUD, Free Aim playthrough
- Exactly as it sounds. Playing the game exactly the opposite than I had on my first few playthroughs. The fun in it is having to rely on the iron sights on each gun model instead of the reticle. And with free aim, I couldn’t just auto snap the gun onto the enemies. Actual aiming would be required. Which was much worse as I was still using a controller at this time.
Feral Arthur
- A playthrough where Arthur wasn’t allowed to loot anything, and could only earn money by hunting animals. Anything awarded through missions had to be immediately donated to the camp funds.
I wanted to do both but settled on the first person playthrough first and immediately started my first PC playthrough using those changes.
During my brainstorming sessions on future content to make in RDR2, I also had a memory of a video I had seen years earlier which I really enjoyed. Sonny Evans - Can you walk a bowl of stew across the map in Red Dead Redemption 2?
I absolutely loved this video the first time I saw it. Just someone trying to complete a stupid idea that offered no in-game incentive. Hitting roadblock after roadblock. Figuring out how to get around that road block. And ultimately completing the stupid idea. This genre of video really resonated with me.
Then when I researched more in the genre of “Crossing the map in RDR2”, I found other videos in it that also were doing very good numbers. Adichu - Crossing Red Dead Redemption 2's entire map without taking a step for example with millions of views.
From this my first idea for a cross continent adventure was born. The idea that would eventually be named Cowboy Golf. And once again, thanks to the magic of version history, I see that that was written down the day after I purchased RDR2 on PC on May 19th 2023.
It wasn’t until October/November that I actually finished the first person playthrough. It was an on and off again type playthrough interwoven between playing the other videos I was working on that summer. But once it was completed I pretty quickly turned my focus on attempting my first rounds of Cowboy Golf.
It was fun, but I got side tracked from both the golfing, and the writing of the first person playthought script in November.
It wasn’t until March that those distractions were wrapped up and I returned to working on my pending Red Dead videos.
I had written seven pages of script for the RDR2 first person playthrough video when I started to realize my heart just wasn’t in that one. As I was putting the script together it just felt so … not weird enough. It felt dry, like writing a book report for a high school class. I still think that if I had completed the video it would have been fine, and probably would have done decent numbers as these kinds of essays do well when I see them. But the tone just didn't feel like me or what I wanted to accomplish with the channel.
So I dropped the script and told myself maybe I’ll finish it later. (I never did and have since deleted the footage) But in the here and now, it was Cowboy Golf that I wanted to complete.
So I reacquainted myself with that playthrough after a five month hiatus and finished the challenge. The completed video was posted on May 4th, 2024, almost a year after hatching the idea.
It did big numbers right out of the gate. 2000 views in the first week! Surely such a banger will carry me to monetization!
It didn’t.
The views returned to the paltry numbers after that spike. But it still felt good it have a video finally do so good! Good once again being relative to what I had posted in the previous six months. So I pressed on with a second RDR2 video a few weeks later. Surely the subs I picked up from that last video would snowball into this one!
They didn’t.
90 views in the first week was all the second RDR2 video pulled. Kind of disappointing. But still I absolutely loved making these and knew this was a long game I was playing. I had total faith that these videos had an audience out there, it just hadn’t found them yet. So on to another RDR2 video.
The next Red Dead video got a nice little push earning it 1500 views in the first three days before readjusting back down into the land of single digits per day.
That video was a series of silly speedrun challenges of trying to haul dead alligators across the map before they rotted. A video inspired by a very short sight gag used in the Cowboy Golf video. It involved several different modes of locomotions to try and move the alligators. Before starting the playthrough I wrote many possible ways I could try to succeed at this challenge. One of those ideas I had written in my notes was to try and cross the water with the dead alligator.
At this point the idea of making a 40 minute or longer video still felt like a delusional idea straight from crazy land, so I called this challenge good after finishing it on foot and with a wagon and didn’t even attempt the other methods I had theorized.
I was still interested in testing the boat idea so I figured I’d explore it for the next video. And, I’m glad I didn’t waste any time futzing with that idea for the first alligator video. Little did I know the amount of suffering I was about to experience.
I started playing my idea of getting an alligator across the map without using a horse, and having to use a boat on July 16th, 2024. On July 29th, 2024, after throwing myself at this stupid idea that offered no in-game incentive nearly every single night, I hadn’t completed the challenge yet. So I took a break and started working on the script and editing the first part of the story from what I had done so far.
On August 15th I took up the torch once again and completed the challenge the very next day. The video edit was completed and posted on August 22nd 2024.
The first three days saw a total of 300 views. So much effort went into making that video, and here we were again just stumbling.
Then, by the 4th day: 1,300 views. Day 6: 3,600. Day 7: 10,000
Two weeks after posting the video it had accumulated 36,000 views, and it alone had racked up 4000 watch hours. And it also had brought in all the new subscribers I needed to hit 1000 and enable monetization.
It is kind of funny to think that one video pretty much took care of all the requirements. But really everything I’ve done over the year and a half previous had a big part in figuring out the system, and honing the skills needed to create such a work of art.
The views and subscribers kept going up after this, and I kept waiting for the moment where it would all crash and plateau again.