Celebrating a Hundred Thousand YouTube Subscribers.

At the time of writing I am 99,945 subscribers on YouTube. It has been a long journey and I wanted to take a moment to look back at how I got here. I have had this channel since 2014. Initially it was just a place to post Vods from my streams on twitch. It was never something I took seriously because I always felt that I'd never have the time. I was working full time and attempting to stream as much as possible and I thought that would be the case forever. That would change in early May 2019, when the original trailer for bringing Dwarf Fortress to Steam was suddenly released, and viewed by everyone remotely involved with the game. At this point I had been streaming DF for over a year and decided to make a video about the news. When I posted that video I had just under 500 Subscribers. As I covered news posts my channel would grow slowly and steadily as the years passed. By the time of the December 2022 launch of Dwarf Fortress on Steam, I had amassed a grand total of 13,784 subscribers.. Most of these were from my speed talking over views of the weekly posts detailing the development of Dwarf Fortress. By February that number had grown to 41,000.

Before the release, I maintained a steady flow of news updates which were extremely short. I'd even describe them as low effort. I was never super happy with the quality and just hoped to hit the "good enough" line. The rest of the channel was directly exported Vods from my livestreams. Once dwarf fortress was out I shifted my focus to tutorials and eventually moved the Vods to a second channel by the following summer, due to dwindling interest in them. Eventually the views started slowing down. While tutorials still did well, I moved Vods to a second channel due to dwindling interest in them. In time, even tutorials weren't bringing much traffic, nor did the daily highlights format I introduced for a while. By 2024, the channel hit a low point.

I needed to shift focus. Since 2022 I have streamed 3-4 days per week with the rest of my time spent on editing for YouTube, but the channel was rapidly becoming sustainable. I either needed to fix it and find a new direction or shift to streaming more hours. I decided I would do the thing I saw time and time again in my YouTube comments. I'm paraphrasing but here is the gist.

Why don't you take a whole fort and make it into a highlight. - Dozens of people on YouTube

I always dismissed this idea because editing daily highlights already took up all of my time. It turns out I needed the state of the channel to get so low that It was going to stop sustaining me, in order for me to pull the trigger. I made a video that talked about my planned change in content style. I was going to make big hour plus videos detailing the events of specific forts. This video lost me dozens of subscribers but the response in the comments section was positive. If you are reading this you probably already know the result. I uploaded my now most viewed video of all time. "I played the worst map in df history.."

The graphs I'm showing are covering watch time. These are hours watched. They show the increase significantly more than the same period of time in views.

Before the shift in style I was still growing. I had seen some growth with the release of the adventure mode beta. But it was nothing compared to changing my entire concept of what my channel was. If anything, I think that video is what has cemented my ability to do this long term. I've been streaming and uploading to YouTube for thirteen years. Momentum is so important with YouTube that if you start to lose speed you have to figure out how to fix it. I would still have a long way to go if I stuck to what I was doing. I took a risk and people loved it and I have to say thank you to everyone who is still out there watching. I would not have been able to do this without you.

Thank you for the support.
Gregory.