October Production Update

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TL;DR I've got enough individual clips to make 2 more 50W2DiM vids for November and December, but I want to make a few more clips before I start working on Part 8 and 9. 125 out of 120 clips recorded and edited. I'm also still working on my 50 dollar Patron's reward animation, so I haven't continued work on the 100K subs vid yet.

Here's a more detailed explanation for why I haven't started work on the main edits of Part 8 and 9 yet.

I finished editing a little over 120 50W2DiM Clips this month, but I checked the combined length of the 100 I picked to be in the videos, and it was less than 12 minutes, which means that, with the clips I have, both videos are likely to be less than 10 minutes long.

Up to this point, I've mostly ignored the fact that 10 minute long videos make more ad revenue unless the first draft of the video I was working on was already almost 10 minutes long to begin with. For example, the Christmas video was originally 9 minutes and 53 seconds long. All I had to do was add a third verse to the dreidel song (originally, the wood verse wasn't in the song) and the video was 10 minutes long. If that video had been 7 minutes long like Part 6, I wouldn't have added 3 whole minutes of filler just to bring it up to 10.

This time though, I think I'm going to try to make at least one of the next two parts 10 minutes long because I'm worried that I won't make more ad revenue than I did last year. You see, in order to justify continuing this dream job to my financial shoulder angel, I need to either  

a) make enough money to pay all my expenses (rent, food, med insurance, etc.)

or

b) at least make more money than I did last year to prove to myself that I'm still growing

If I don't reach either of these goals, I'm going to find it very difficult to justify continuing to spend all my time on my YouTube videos instead of looking for a regular job.

Fortunately, so far, I've been doing much better than I was doing last year. I've made almost twice as much in 2018 as I made up to the end of September in 2017. Based on that, I should have no problem with at least obtaining goal b, right? Well, no, not necessarily. 

The reason I'm worried is that last year, I made 1/3 of the whole year's revenue in just December alone. 50W2DiM Christmas made more ad revenue than anything I had ever made. That was great for last year, but for this year, it means that I've got to do even better or I won't be able to justify spending so much time on my videos.  

And that's why I'm so worried about Part 9 being less than 10 minutes long. It's going to have to make as much or more than the Christmas part did and it isn't likely to succeed if it's only 6 minutes long. I'd be wasting the highest view-to-revenue month of the year on a video that only has one ad on it. So from now on, I'm going to make sure that the December 50WtDiM video is at least ten minutes long each year.

Don't worry, though. I'm not going to just put a bunch of filler into Part 9. Instead, I'm going to replace the shortest clips of Part 9 with longer clips I haven't recorded and edited yet. I'm not going to make these clips extra long on purpose. The long clips are just ideas I already had in my idea list and just hadn't recorded/edited because I stopped once I reached 120. They just happen to be longer because they require more dialogue to set up the jokes, like the Summon TNT joke at the end of Part 6.

Once I've finished recording/editing these longer clips, I'll start working on the main edits of Parts 8 and 9. Since I'm so far ahead of schedule, I may even make part 9 first because it's more important to the survival of the channel than part 8.