Recently I was contacted by a blog reader – hi there! – who asked about how I got started, and what it entailed. How I built my following, that kind of stuff. What I told them at the time was that a lot of what I did was spend a large chunk of time trying things and watching as nothing happened.
It’s a real awkward thing to think about but as much as this blog readership isn’t large, it’s still much larger than it started. The economies of scale of blogging I learned about in university and examining Youtube suggest that attention needs to be in the order of thousands of people to be sustainable.
Back when Matt Lees started on Patreon, the Pivot To Video era was happening for gamer media, and that was when EuroGamer was doing videos in a lot of experimental ways. He said that the nature of that model relied on the idea that a video that got ten thousand positive reactions wasn’t good enough, wasn’t sustainable. That was always a thing that nagged at me, because that number was terrifying. I never had a problem with the thing I was making per se, as much as I had a problem with realising that even the best versions of the things I was making was simply never going to be interesting to ten thousand people.
As of right now, the most popular article I’ve ever written is Why Death Note Is Bad, which thanks to some people referencing it on forums, is high up on the list Google Hits for the phrase ‘is death note bad.’ Over six years, it has reached 8,000 views. My next most popular article is No Colour Is Transphobic, and then Amerimanga Covers. Those articles are much more recent, but they’re both sitting around 4,000 and 3,000 views. Now, one trend that’s promising there is that the more recent work is still capable of having high numbers of views!
What this means to me is that that number of ten thousand is simply not something I reach, or maybe ever can reach and that’s kind of okay? I’m alright with that (in part because I have to be). I’m also not saying that there aren’t ten thousand people interested in my kind of writing! I’m saying that my ability to find those people is pretty much just limited to randomly mentioning all the stuff I do.
This also queues into some predictable response things. Look, fact is, if you follow @FreyjaErlings, you’re more likely to click links she shares. That’s something about her audience that I just can’t replicate.
A few years ago I tried doing some Google Drive game development on a public document, where I sat down, and just wrote about things with complete strangers having the ability to comment on the doc as I worked on it. This scared the hell out of me because I was putting a google drive link on the open internet and was afraid that it was going to go weird or I’d wind up disclosing something that would go badly for me. Instead when I launched it, I worked on the doc for four hours and literally nobody ever looked at the document.
Similarly, my Long Live The Queen review scared me because I knew I was being exaggerated and silly (in a way I don’t really do well), and thought maybe it would become a meme and I’d feel humiliated by it. Instead I found that it’d been listened to twice – and by the way, in the intervening six years, it’s been listened to nineteen times.
This is a byproduct of how I try to think about working in public. There’s this idea that as an internet content creator, you’re looking for things you do that you can monetise. Alex Steacy has written about this – where for a lot of content creators, what they’re doing is trying to provide stuff they want to do that you can connect to and enjoy. That means that they play videogames as a job, and it changes the relationship to what they’re doing and that can sometimes mean that they’re left seeing game play as a very challenging task to get into emotionally.
Ever get so burned out on a game that even seeing the title screen annoys you?
That's how I've felt about Minecraft for the last couple years. Hard to want to make content when it takes so much energy to simply enjoy. I love making videos, but I can hardly stand the game…
— Jessassin (@Jessassin) October 8, 2018
I’m not sure I’m coming at this from the same place. In part because I don’t feel like what I do is in this same kind of attention driven, long engagement space – after all those beautiful people who are paying me to blog and make movies are doing it with no idea on what I’m going to do. Sometimes they get nine thousand words about how Magic The Gathering isn’t like Gacha and sometimes they get a shirt with a Shrek joke on it.
What I do, and what I think of myself as doing is working in public. I am doing things, making things, looking at things for my own benefit as a game designer and media critic, and trying to break down those elements to be workable and useful for me and for others. Oh sure, you might tune in for movie reviews (really? cool?), but largely what I’m doing here is thinking, and working out loud. I’m explaining to you things I’ve learned, and I’m trying to show you the process of how I develop things.
This is something that was important, to me, about working with this blogging space.
I want you to be able to learn from this, even if you are enjoying it.
That’s what works for me.
This isn’t to say that anyone else should be doing it! It’s just there’s this narrative that content creation is about turning love into work. It doesn’t have to be. Some of us, it’s a habit we keep up on as personal practice. Sometimes it’s journaling in private, sometimes it’s yeah, doing things for a sweet dopamine hit of approval!
There are lots of reasons to work out loud.