I was planning to make a video tonight about Andy Burnham's first day as Prime Minister, but then I thought back to how hilariously off-beam some of the reactions to Liz Truss and Keir Starmer were at the very start (Caitlin Moran infamously said that Keir Starmer was so competent it was making her feel "fruity"), and I reckoned it might be wiser to take an extra day or two to process the significance of events. One thing is for sure - if Andy Burnham actually delivers on his promise to overturn the political and economic model of the last 40 years, he'll end up as one of the three most important Prime Ministers since World War II, alongside Thatcher and Attlee. That does seem rather unlikely somehow.
Instead I'll just take a moment to bring you an update on the progress of the Scot Goes Pop channel on YouTube as we enter this new political era of uncertain significance. The building of my YouTube subscriber base has been steady but also frustratingly slow - I hit the all-important 1000 subscriber threshold just before Christmas, but several months later I still haven't quite managed to double that. However, it's views for the videos themselves that are the most important thing, and those numbers have been consistently pretty decent - it looks like weekly views for the channel now either exceed or at least match each of the other main Scottish political channels that I'm aware of, with the obvious exception of Craig Houston (who has the 'advantage' of being able to appeal to far-right extremists well outside the borders of Scotland).
Perhaps the most significant metric available to me in YouTube Analytics is what is blandly referred to as the "monthly audience", which I eventually realised is exactly the same thing as what used to be called "absolute uniques" - ie. it's the number of actual people who have viewed at least one video on the channel within the last month. Every individual is counted only once no matter how many videos they viewed over the course of the month, and no matter how many times they viewed the same video. In recent times, the monthly audience has hovered at around 14,000 people, which is equivalent to about 1 in 300 of the adult population of Scotland. That may not sound like very much, but all you'd have to do is multiply that by ten, and suddenly the channel would be reaching one person in every thirty, and that would be making a genuine contribution to building an alternative to our underwhelming mainstream media. That has to be the medium-term aim, I think.
However, if it's going to work, the channel has to become financially sustainable, and as I've noted before, that is proving very challenging. If my direct earnings from YouTube were simply hitting the average per 1000 views for all UK creators, there would be no major problem, but for whatever reason Scottish politics is a distinctly non-lucrative topic for videos, and I'm falling way below that average revenue per 1000 views. To try and breach the shortfall, I set up a Ko-Fi page a few weeks ago, which accepts both one-off donations of any amount and small recurring monthly subscriptions, with the option of using a variety of popular payment platforms. The aim with that is to build up reliable monthly funding of a few hundred pounds to support the channel. That could happen if, say, there were 100 regular Ko-Fi subscribers at £5 per month, or 50 subscribers at £10 a month.
So far the number is nowhere near that. Based on my past experience of fundraising I do still think it's a perfectly feasible target, but unfortunately I'm beginning to realise I'm going to have to start promoting the Ko-Fi page in a much more full-on way (and potentially a more intrusive and irritating way) if I'm ever going to get anywhere with it. I may have to start plugging it at the end of each video or something like that - up until now I've only been mentioning it in the text description section of the videos and at the bottom of each blogpost.
Before I start going that far, though, I have a question for readers / viewers. When I initially set up the Ko-Fi page, I had to specify a minimum amount for donations and monthly subscriptions, and I opted for £3. I could have made it as low as £1, but at the time I thought that would be a mistake. I'm now beginning to wonder if I've missed a trick, because obviously if there happened to be several hundred people out there willing to chip in £1 a month, that would do the job just as well. So let me know in the comments section if reducing the minimum amount to £1 would make any difference to your willingness and/or ability to donate.
My YouTube channel is HERE, and my Ko-Fi page for one-off donations and recurring monthly subscriptions is HERE. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed already.
