Battle plan, extended 21 July 2020 (Patreon)

None of this is normal, but what is normal anyway?

Not so long ago you could be assured that every week a few things would occur with reassuring reliability - a bit of the Transport Fever twice a week, a visit or two to the Soviet Republic, maybe something unusual for a couple of days, a nice train on Friday and baseball on Sunday. A formula, one might say.

Yeah, well that's all busted and pulled over to the side of the road. And it's on fire. And we didn't take out the optional insurance to cover us against such things.

I'm going to swerve into "The Colonel Reduced" territory here (not an ad) and unravel my thinking a little.

I'm a bit bored of playing Transport Fever in "the normal way". The normal way being haphazardly seizing on ideas and building them in short order while delivering some pithy, rambling commentary. There may be a plan for the series, but it's loose at best. It works pretty well, but my inspiration on that front has leaked out over the course of 600+ fever videos so it's time to adjust the direction.

Your Soviet Republic there, had very much the same lackadaisical approach and was overly reliant on pith to see us through to glory.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in The Colonel's Boutique Videoland and VHS Servicing experiments had been conducted that yielded some Better Stuff. Space Adventures (in space), MinstrelQuest Online (sort of), Farming Simulator... all had more effort applied to them, and ended up being better videos as a result.

"Let's Play", friends, is a dying format. This isn't to say that it is wholly unwatched, but it simply doesn't do the business like it used to, having been largely superseded by live streaming. With the number of streamers being higher than ever it means that for the humble let's play video manufacturer needs a stronger hook to maintain the interest of the viewing public. Episode 1, not a problem. By episode 3 however, the audience is emptying itself out of the bucket in search of other things.

Case study 1 - short series, let's play style

Railroad Corporation Civil War episode 1: 21,000 views

episode 3: 4,900 views

MMORPG Tycoon episode 1: 7,000 views

episode 3: 2,800

Rise of Industry episode 1: 10,600 views

episode 3: 4,700

Case study 2 - one shot videos only

Hardspace: Shipbreaker : 10,000 views

That thing with the beavers : 7,000 views

Doing the Cities Skylines speed run : 10,000 views

Case study 3 - episodes with no numbers

Derail Valley 1 : 14,500 views

Derail Valley 2 : 15,000 views

Derail Valley 3 : 9,000 views

Derail Valley 4 : 14,500 views

From these case studies a rule can be established.

Single shot videos generate a larger amount of interest than ongoing series.

Exception: videos that are part of an ongoing series that appear to be single shot are also valuable.

Ongoing series have diminishing returns.

The caveat zone! Derail Valley's big high scores, and Railroad Corp's first part are due to my regular subscribers' affinity for all things train related. This isn't the test being made, but worth calling out anyway - if I make a video that involves trains, it's going to perform more strongly.

The second caveat is that while one-shot videos are excellent for snagging passing interest, longer series are the engine that convert people into subscribing to this here channel... right? Let's take a look at the Dune Canyon series, episodes 1 - 10 and how many new subscribers jumped into the fray as a result of each one.

Episode 1 : 102 subs

Episode 2 : 16

Episode 3 : 24

Episode 4 : 11

Episode 5 : 8

Episode 6 : 7

Episode 7 : 10

Episode 8 : 18

Episode 9 : 29

Episode 10 : 11

Hardspace Shipbreaker : 25 subs

Railroad Corportation #1 : 24 subs

Derail Valley #1 : 19 subs

Okay, so part 1s do all the heavy lifting. They bring in more views, more subscribers. 

So here, then is what I'm going to transition to imminently.

2 videos that are heavily edited, one shot or serialised-standalone in approach per week.

A live stream every Saturday.

Baseball on a Sunday.

2 traditional Let's Play videos per week for backers.

That's the plan for the near-future. I'll run it for a bit and see what happens. Before that happens, I'm going to wrap up the Dwarves this week, and wrap up Soviet Republic over the following 2-3 weeks (multiple videos...) I may throw in a few odds and ends as well, but that's where I'm going.

Why does any of this matter?

Because onwards and upwards, friends! The engine of growth on this here channel has stalled in quite an enthusiastic way. Same ole, same ole, is not cutting any condiments at all, let alone mustard. Therefore we evolve or stagnate.

Yes there will be trains, but there'll be an increased emphasis on characters too. I've been experimenting with Electrosports (as some may have noticed) but that will need to wait until my current workload decreases before I dive in further. As a preview, baseball will evolve into Electrosports for 6 episodes. We'll see how that does before doing any more.

Here's what you can expect this week:

• Tue: not a sausage
• Wed: Dwarves
• Thu: more dwarves if they're not all deceased. If they have passed away, it'll be something else.
• Fri: see Thursday
• Sat: Bannerlord live
• Sun: Baseball

Next week will look similar except with Soviets rather than Dwarves - expect 4-5 episodes to land in your facebox.

Right then, back to work. It isn't going to do itself.

-CF