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.
It took one year and one month to grow from 100 subscribers to 1,000 subscribers.
It then took 40 days to grow from 1,000 to 10,000.
Not really much time to have any great content epiphanies since the last milestone, but what this quick growth did show was some damn nice snowballing.
I put out two more videos during this period. Two videos that were both Red Dead. The Aberdeen Marathons which was another form of a map crossing adventure that absolutely erupted. In the first week it pulled in 81,400 views. Absolutely unheard of numbers compared to anything I’ve ever done in my six years of YouTubing.
And then I posted my first foray into region locked challenges which pulled 61,000 views in the first week.
Momentum was looking good. There was a solid steady growth and no signs of plateauing since hitting 1000 subscribers.
But what I really want to talk about in this milestone is the effect that blowing up like this had on the content I had created leading up to the August 25th explosion.
When one reaches that point in life where they consider creating a gaming YouTube channel there are many kinds of videos they can make. But I think some of the broadest categorizations boils down to either Trend Following and Evergreen.
Trend Following
Maybe short term is a better term? I don’t care. But what I mean here is basically videos that due to the nature of the content might have a very strong interest if released in a timely fashion, but then will sharply taper off.
Think things like reviewing patch notes for a certain game. Players will want those changes distilled down to an easy summary immediately, but once the next version hits that content probably isn’t relative any more and won’t keep pulling views.
To an extent covering game strategy and weapon metas would be similar depending how owned the game gets updates to change the sandbox.
Evergreen
Something that once made is relevant forever. These videos should be able to pull views and be worthwhile to watch until the end of time.
The evergreen genre of gaming content is pretty much what I’ve explicitly been interested in creating. Patches can come and change stuff about the games, but that will have no effect if the video is enjoyable because nothing about it is trying to teach a strategy or something to a player. I set forth with the goal of making pure entertainment. Think more like a good movie. A movie that someone enjoys they will revisit and rewatch many times over their life. And someone discovering the movie many years, decades later can still enjoy it like it was brand new.
So during that first year and a half I knew that everything I was making would fall under the evergreen classification and even if it was doing shit views then, it might some day have its days in the sun.
And this is exactly what happened. Here are a few lifetime view graphs of those summer 2024 Red Dead Videos. Guess where August 25th 2024 is on these graphs.
It is very satisfying to know that the efforts done during the days of being unmonetized weren't just wasted effort. Had I been making a gaming news, or a "New Destiny 2 weapons reviews" channel I doubt I would have eventually seen such growth on those early videos.