//NOTE// Initially, I didn’t intend for this to be so long, but once I got thinking back about the year, I thought I might as well document it as detailed as possible in case this YouTube thing becomes more significant in the future.
First of all, thank you to everyone who has continued to support this little endeavor of mine. It’s not my main job, but I’ve had a blast doing it and look forward to continuing on into 2022!
At this time of the year, you always see “The Year in Review” on television, the internet, magazines … mostly everywhere. So why not add one more to the list haha. Here is what has happened with my YouTube channel in the past year.
2021 in review
On this date one year ago, I had put out 24 videos, had 146 subscribers, and had 12,572 total views.
As of today, I have put out 80 videos, have 1155 subscribers, and have had 151,651 views.
Simple math means that in a year I did 56 videos, picked up 1009 subscribers, and had 139,079 views.
It’s not like this channel went crazy viral or anything, but the steady increase in people who find these videos interesting has continued to amaze me.
When I look back at one year ago, I still hadn’t figured out what I was doing. I was in the middle of releasing 9 consecutive videos about my road trip on Route 66, and that had followed two slushie reviews. Prior to that I had done a few day trips and weekend trips around Kansas and Oklahoma. Fortunately, at the end of my Route 66 videos, Route66news.com did an article about my videos and instantly gave my channel a 50% jump. After that it was a consistent growth the rest of the year.
I’ve always been into numbers and statistics since I was a little kid, and the YouTube analytics section is full of both to dive into. Early last year, someone asked me about what it took to be able to make money on YouTube (1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours). After I started looking into mine, it looked like if things were consistent, my channel would hit those marks by the end of 2021. It was pretty accurate as I hit those marks in early December.
I’m talking a lot about the numbers and stats behind monetization, but that’s not really what I wanted to write about today.
Before I talk about 2021, I feel like I need to talk about the end of 2020 to show you where I was at in regards to figuring out what I was doing.
End of 2020
The first video I published was at the end of July 2020. My only goal was to do a video each week. I didn’t have a goal of getting monetized, mostly I needed something to do because our track and field season had been cancelled and it was unclear what the upcoming months would look like. I had sort of documented my travels on social media previously, but only in short video clips or photos. Doing it on a more significant level was appealing.
But I had no idea how I was going to make a video each week. I had maybe 4 or 5 video ideas at the beginning and that was it. I talked to my buddy Brent Patton about doing a goofy review of slushies (might have been intoxicated at the time), based on the Pizza Reviews by Dave Portnoy. We awkwardly did the first video and putting that together was relatively easy compared to the travel videos, so I thought I would do one of those when I needed a video and didn’t have one about traveling. I did a couple trips that Fall, but 8 of the first 20 videos I published were slushie reviews with various friends and co-workers. They had a strong (and small) cult following haha. But it didn’t grow the channel much – in fact I would usually lose subscribers, because most people weren’t interested in inside jokes between me and my friends (go figure haha).
Covid caused our Fall academic semester to end in mid-November. We couldn’t have practice, I couldn’t go recruiting, basically I wasn’t able to do much of anything except have zoom meeting with coaches and athletes. That’s when I decided to take a two-week vacation on Route 66 and try to document my travels. Once I got back, the last month of 2020 was all videos from my trip on the Mother Road and that led into 2021 …
2021 month-by-month
January was filled with publishing the last half of my Route 66 trip. Those 9 videos carried my channel for most of the year. Currently they are 6 of the top-10 most popular videos I have released. Obviously, they got a head start on other more recent videos, but the Route 66 community was very supportive, and I’ve continued to make other videos about Route 66. Route 66 is a special place and there are lots of people who are REALLY into Route 66 and stumbled across my videos. I met a lot of them online and they were all great people. Doing the entire trip in one shot gave me a unique perspective, and I can talk about any part of the route with anyone. I had seen a lot of Route 66 videos before, and I wanted mine to be different, so I decided I was going to drive through every little town and show them for at least a few seconds. It turns out this would be the foundation for things I’d do later in the year.
February – This was when the article on Route66news.com came out and gave my channel (and me) some momentum to forge ahead. However, I still didn’t know what the “theme” of my channel was. I published the final Route 66 video on California, did 2 slushie reviews, and put out my first water tower video. I was struggling to figure out what to do so I could keep having a video each and every week. The track and field season (my real job) was beginning, and my time to go out and explore on my own was starting to become limited. The water tower video happened just by dumb luck. I was driving to Ohio for the holidays and decided to take US Route 50 for much of the trip instead of the expressway, basically just to mix it up and do something different. I had no intentions of making any videos over the break. I was driving at sunset near the tiny town of Bushong, Kansas, which is in the beautiful Flint Hills. Bushong has a population of 34 and the water tower in town was the most striking thing to see as I drove past. Like I said it was at sunset, so on a whim I went into Bushong, got out my drone, and took some video of the water tower during a beautiful Flint Hills sunset. I didn’t know if I’d ever use it for anything, but thought it looked cool. Little did I know this would be another moment that was key in what my channel would evolve into later in the year. The next morning, I drove through the town of Tipton, Missouri, and saw they had a water tower painted like a giant 8-ball. Once again, I got out my drone and took some video. At this point it clicked in my head that I had never really seen any videos on YouTube about water towers. The more I thought about it, I realized that little towns across America had water towers and rarely did anyone talk about them. I always thought they looked interesting, and some would have cool designs, but mostly it was just something in the background as you drove past or through a small town. So, as I left Tipton, I thought I’d look for some more water towers along the way and maybe I’d put together a video when I got back to Wichita. That’s how my first water tower video came to be. My buddy Curt Rierson passed that video along to a friend of his in the “water tower business”, and the rest is history. Currently, that video is around the 10th most popular video on the channel. I’ve made four of them all together and have filmed another that I will publish later in 2022.
March is when I figure out eventually I would need the channel to have more consistency in what I published. Basically, I decided that I wanted the channel to be about small towns, road trips, and things like that (water towers), with a possible random video here and there. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time or footage to do it how I wanted, because we were deep in the heart of the track and field season. If I was to continue to put out a video each week, I would have to get creative. I had wanted to document what it was like to travel with our track and field team, so I started the month with our team’s trip to Colorado Springs. When I was on Route 66, I drove through the ghost town of Picher, Oklahoma, and always wanted to go back and explore. I had a free weekend and Picher is only a couple hours from Wichita, so I drove down on a Saturday to check it out with plans to make one video. Exploring Picher was amazing, and a light bulb went off in my head that I wanted to travel to places like this more and more. I ended up getting a hotel and explored the area and made two more videos of Treece, Kansas, and four other Oklahoma “ghost towns” in the area. These were the first ghost town videos I ever did, and now it’s what most people know my channel for. If you watch those first three videos, they are much different from the ones I do now. Walking around Picher was very moving, and I wanted to express the feeling of loneliness and despair from the area. I did the same with the other two, but at the end of the third video I tried to make more of a positive spin, and I think that made me want to tell a more positive story of these towns. The story of Picher is incredible and hit home with a lot of people. It’s the 8th most popular video on my channel, and other video about Oklahoma ghost towns in the next most popular video of all the “ghost town” videos I’ve done.
April is the usually the busiest month of my life each year with track and field. I had previously taken a short weekend trip to visit the 10 smallest towns in Kansas. It was a quick trip and little did I know it would become the most popular video on my channel. I also took an afternoon to visit what was left of the abandoned Wichita amusement park Joyland (#4 most popular video). I learned two important things in April. Kansans are very proud of their small towns, and Wichitans are very proud of their city. I wanted to make an honest yet positive video about the smallest towns in Kansas, so I worked a little harder on that one in the editing process. I grew up in areas like this and can relate to the people who live there. If someone stumbled across the video, I wanted them to be proud that their town was generally shown in a positive way, finding beauty in old buildings and the simpler things in life. Curt told me to submit it to some film festivals, and to my surprise it was accepted into one. It has consistently been the most viewed video on the channel ever since and now has over 13,000 views. I’ve never had a video go “viral”, but I am amazed how many views this little video continues to get. I think what happens when people are on YouTube is they find a video that is interesting, eventually click on the channel, and look at what the most popular videos are on that channel. I think this Top-10 Smallest Towns in Kansas video will be the most popular video for quite a while – and I’m happy it’s the one most people would find if they were trying to figure out if they like my channel or not. The Joyland video was really the first one I made in the city of Wichita (where I live). The number of positive comments I received were incredible. So many people that I didn’t know would go off on a story about their experiences at Joyland. I knew it was a point of pride for a lot of people, but it didn’t hit me until I released that video. I also released two water tower videos and a track and field trip to Arkansas. I would like to make more videos about our track and field team, but most of the people who watch my channel aren’t interested. I’ve thought about starting a second channel to upload random videos that aren’t about small towns. Maybe next year.
May was another very busy month for me personally, and the videos I released were pretty random. I did a drone video of the city of Wichita, which people seemed to like. For a while I thought I would do more of these videos of other cities (look for one coming out Monday!), but I haven’t really done too much on that front. I also released my final slushie review, which I had been holding onto since February when we had record low temps. I was the only person who bought a slushie that day at Sonic haha. I did a video about crashing my drone on Route 66, and another track and field video of our trip to Florida. None of these videos were super successful, but they were fun to do.
June – The track season was winding down, so I was able to get out to make some videos. This is when the ghost town portion of my channel started to take form. I released three consecutive Kansas ghost town videos in a format that I continue to use today (a little different from the Picher and Treece videos). I got a lot of nice comments and wanted to do more of this kind of stuff. It was a lot of fun discovering these places that most people had forgotten about. They all have a story, and I enjoyed trying to tell a little bit of that story in a short video. The other one I released was a water tower video I shot while visiting some of these towns.
July – I started working ahead so I could release videos while I was on a two week road trip. I had one more Kansas ghost town video, then a video I had saved from the previous year about bridges on Route 66. The next week was my one year anniversary of doing videos, so I did a short video summarizing how the channel was doing and my thoughts on everything up to that point. I had gone to Ohio for a few days and shot some videos with my brother of Ohio ghost towns near where we grew up and I posted two of those to end the month. At this time I was on vacation and did something that would prove valuable in the future. Instead of just shooting videos of one trip or town at a time, I started doing multiple videos at the same time. For example, before I did my US 89 road trip from Canada to Mexico, I went to Colorado for a few days. While I was there, I did 3 videos in one day, including a hike up to the Wichita State Football plane crash site from 1970. While on the US 89 road trip, I also shot videos of side trips to several ghost towns. I ended having like 15 videos from one trip that I could release over time and not have to worry about traveling to do another video (unless I wanted to) to keep the weekly string of videos going. I still have videos from that trip I haven’t released yet.
August – The first video I released was of the WSU plane crash hike mentioned above. I got a ton of nice comments for how that video turned out, and one angry comment from a relative of someone who died in the crash. That goes with the territory I suppose. The rest of the month was rolling out videos from my trip on US 89 – going state by state. Basically, I did it the same way as the previous year on Route 66. US 89 isn’t nearly as popular, but it was an awesome trip! Also, those videos aren’t nearly as popular, but that was to be expected. There are very few YouTube videos about US 89 out there, and I can see that road trip becoming more popular in the future. I think there will eventually be an audience for it. Because it wasn’t a highly documented road trip, I received many messages about advice on how to do the trip. Eventually I wrote a travel guide of my experience on the road. During August I also experimented with releasing multiple videos on the same day. In fact, I released three videos on August 26th of US 89 in Wyoming, a Mormon ghost town, and a short hike. I wanted to see if this would yield more views or less. It turns out that each video got less views, but overall it was more. So, I decided in the future if I had multiple videos in a week, I wouldn’t release them on the same day. I’m not sure what the best strategy is, but I wouldn’t want someone getting tired of me releasing too many videos at once.
September – I finished up the US 89 series, released another Kansas ghost town video I filmed in the summer, and did a video about my experience at the No Coast Film Festival. That was certainly a video that strayed from the genre of the channel, but I figured it might be a once in a lifetime occurrence and wanted to document it. At this point I had shot enough videos to get me through December without doing anything more.
October – The 10 Smallest Towns in Kansas video had made me want to do other states. In my mind, I would like to do all 50, but that’s not realistic at this point, so I figured I would just do one here and there. So, I took a long weekend and explored Oklahoma for the smallest towns in that state. At the same time, I planned to visit several Oklahoma ghost towns along the way – I documented this in a previous blog. I ended up getting 7 videos out of those 3 days. As for releasing videos that month, I had the idea to change the geography each week now that I had a bunch of footage stockpiled. They went from Montana to Colorado (twice) to Utah. Maybe it would be better to put them out chronologically, but I figured some people might get tired of seeing five straight weeks of videos from Montana or something. This way no one really knows what’s coming next – is that good or bad? I don’t know. I’m definitely not an expert, but that’s what I’m doing for now. Most of my videos are stand alone types, meaning I’m not doing a VLOG where you are going along with me each day or week. These videos can be discovered at anytime and have about the same effect when someone finds it.
November is when I started rolling out the Oklahoma videos, including the Top-10 Smallest Towns of Oklahoma. People seem to be drawn to these videos, so maybe I have something there. I also teased that video with the smallest town in the world Hoot Owl, Oklahoma – population zero. I think every single person who lives near Hoot Owl sent me a message about that one (all good haha). Since then, I have found many other towns with a population of zero (I’m talking about you Missouri). Also, I continued to bounce around releasing videos about Arizona and Utah.
December – I drove back to Ohio for the holidays and shot a bunch of videos. It made the trip so much more enjoyable, and I also did a video with my brother and nephew once I got to Ohio. I released four more ghost town videos from Oklahoma, Kansas, and Montana, and ended the year with a video about signs on Route 66. That video was over a year old, but I kept it in my phone just in case I wanted to use it. I figured I would end the year with a different kind of video. The channel also became monetized early in the month. It’s only been a few weeks, but it’s interesting to see how that works now that the videos are earning some money. Without going into a lot of detail, it looks like the first month of being monetized will yield around $200. It definitely won’t pay my expenses for these trips yet, but it’s better than nothing and I’ll take it since YouTube and Google have plenty of money. I don’t plan to do much with other ways of earning money on the channel at this time. I want to give it some more time and see how it plays out.
On into 2022
I have to be very organized to keep track of all the different videos. So, I have a file on my phone where I have all the videos I’ve shot and planned release dates. This is an ever changing and very fluid list. I know the track season is about to get very busy, and I won’t have much time to go out and shoot videos, so I’ve shot enough video to release a new one each week until June. I know that sounds crazy right?
Well, if you’ve made it this far, and really enjoy this stuff, then here are the videos I have shot, but haven’t released yet:
-2 videos about Arizona ghost towns
-2 drone videos of small towns/cities in Kansas
-2 Kansas ghost town videos
-3 Oklahoma ghost town videos
-1 Ohio ghost town video
-1 video about shooting locations of the movie Hoosiers in Indiana
-1 video about a Kentucky road trip along the Ohio River
-Top-10 Smallest Towns in Missouri
-3 videos about unique small towns or abandoned places in Missouri
-6 Missouri ghost town videos
-1 water tower video from Kansas to Ohio
That’s 24 videos that would be released from now until June 16 (including releasing two in one week twice). I’ve only edited 3 of them, so I’ve got a lot of work to do! I imagine I will do SOMETHING between now and June to add to this list. I imagine doing some more Kansas towns at least. Once the summer rolls around, I have dozens of ideas and places I want to go.
Until then it’s mostly track and field for me! Thank you for being supportive of the channel! I appreciate it more than you realize!
