2022 Year-in-Review (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Sorry for being missing in action for the past few weeks. I'm finally settled in my new apartment in Washington DC after 2 years abroad in Egypt. I thought I'd share a few stats from 2022! 

Subscriber Growth: 170K new subscribers! We officially passed half a million subscribers in 2022, which is so exciting. I feel like that officially makes RFB a "big" channel. I hope we can keep growing next year because I'll be releasing two important religious-literacy-boosting series on Hinduism and Islam respectively. 

Views: 18.6 Million total views

My favorite video: Why Humans Evolved to Play Music: I'm hopelessly in love with the cognitive scientific study of religion. The field is so fascinating. The research is so cutting edge. I produced this video in collaboration with my friend Dr. Connor Wood, who studies CogSci, and every moment of developing this video was a joy. It didn't go viral or anything...but I'm happy to have introduced a bit of CogSci to the audience. 

Daoism and Buddhism series: In 2022 we launched the Intro to Daoism series. Episodes 1 and 2 have already been released, with Episode 3 on its way next month! The Buddhism series continued with Buddhist Meditation, Pureland Buddhism, and Buddhist Hells. Intro to Tibetan Buddhism will be published early 2023.  

Highest performing videos: 

Buddhism Has a Lot of Hells: This surprised me. For whatever reason, I thought this video would be a niche addition to the Buddhism series. But the YouTube algorithm blasted it out to the world, and the video exploded in growth. Now over 1 Million views. The awesome side effect? It directed tons of views to the other Buddhism series episodes. The Pureland Buddhism video originally had reached a plateau, but suddenly started growing again after the success of the Buddhist hells video.  

Camel and the Eye of the Needle: This didn't surprise me. I had a hunch this video would perform well. I set out to debunk a very common myth about this passage from the Gospels, and I hope I did my little part debunking it!

Thank you all for your continued support. It means so much to me and really keeps the channel on a firm foundation. Here's to 2023!

Sincerely,

Andrew