Review Nerves

We/ve been working on a product review that has dragged on and on since December.  I could have just ignored the whole thing and not bothered with it, but I said I was going to do it and over time we filmed it not once, but twice.  Then there was a third time that had camera problems. 

I canned it for a while but then the manufacturer announced a price increase and I vowed to get the review out prior to the increase in case people were thinking about purchasing one.  I think I may have scarred my husband from the sheer volume of editing in all the B roll cuts of other shots into the video but it's finally done. 

I don't even want to know what people think of it because while it's okay, I don't think it's our best work, and that largely lands on me, because I had to explain it all.  I'm the one who knows the product and wanted to buy the new version.   The product has a lot of negative feedback from people, many of whom I think don't understand how to use it.  I had one filament producer who got it and told me offhandedly that his was broken.  He'd never even bothered to tune it so that it was able to work with the filament he was putting in it, and without doing that one, key and absolutely required step, it can't do its job.   

This product takes a lot of blame.  There are people who say they have broken units that don't work.  I wouldn't doubt that that's the case: it's a very complicated product and I know from experience with the last version that it can very easily not work well.   

But it's done.   And I'm going to sleep.  But only after a little crazy additional information.  We have an actual real person at YouTube now that we can talk to about questions we have for our channel and content.  We hit a threshold that put us in the YouTube Shorts Partner program.   We even got $100 last month for our video performance.  

I thought that was rather exciting, until I heard on the partner call today (in which there were 105 other content creators) that there were three tiers of performance rewards each month.  $100 was the first tier, with $1000 and $10,000 being the next two higher levels.  I can't imagine how many views you'd need to get $10,000 from YouTube in a month.  There are very few channels that would get that much, but it's better than the option from before, which was no money was possible at all from short-format YouTube videos like we're producing.  I'm just excited we got the $100 and made it into the program. 

And on the subscribers front, something we struggled with for a long time that is completely typical for new channels.   We finally got five thousand followers and I was just thrilled, because I thought YouTube didn't like us and wasn't suggesting our content to people who were interested in 3D printing.   

Apparently, YouTube really likes us now because we're gaining three thousand subscribers every day.  Today, we gained over 4200 subscribers.   It is crazy, or at least it feels crazy to have over a million views of our content every day, which is the current view rate.   I continue to think this upswing is going to end, and I'm sure it will because everything I hear from other channel owners is that that's what happens.  I'm still trying to not picture that many people watching me stand there behind a slab of wood we got at the hardware store and talk about filament and 3D printing. 

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Excited Arrival Update:  My children were so excited Mimi and Gramps were coming to town today.  My daughter even said to me in the car she was so excited she could hardly wait.  It's been a long time since we've seen them.   I didn't have much chance to catch up today but I hope tomorrow we can have some time to say a proper hello.