I wasn’t always big on watching Youtube, but during the pandemic lockdown, it became one of the things I enjoyed doing, along with making candles and miniature houses. I don’t remember what I first really started watching, but I do know that having my nth viewing of J. Lo and Shakira’s Superbowl halftime show interrupted by an ad was what made me decide to get Youtube Premium. Super worth it.
I wandered into the video essay and commentary space somehow, watching the works of Contrapoints, Jessie Gender, Princess Weekes, and Alice Cappelle, among others, eventually adding Swell Entertainment and münecat to my subscriptions. I also became heavily into drama channels and could recount in exhaustive detail what happened between Gabbie Hanna and Jessi Smiles, and Colleen Ballinger and Adam McIntyre. I was there when Hbomberguy eviscerated plagiarists and witnessed the rise and fall of iilluminaughtii. I also watched the Try Guys drama unfold. I’d known about them for years, but tuning into the drama made me a regular Try Guys viewer and now a Second Try subscriber.
As I got deeper into Youtube, I started entertaining the thought of having my own channel containing video essays on various topics. I’d joke about it every time Miss Universe season came around. I’m very interested in beauty pageants and a few years ago, I felt like I had plenty to say about it from a feminist and sociological perspective.
Then in January 2023, I just decided I was gonna go for it.
I’m terrible at naming stuff, but I ended up going with “late-night chips” to refer to my habit of late-night snacking. And maybe as a nod to chewing on a memory, an idea late into the night.
My first video was about the movie The First Slam Dunk, which I wrote, recorded, and edited in a hurry the moment I got home from the movie theater. Afterwards, I made videos about probably quite niche topics, like the long-gone Manang’s Chicken, the 1980s young adult horror book series Twilight: Where Darkness Begins, and the 1990s movie Baby Love. My most popular video is the one about the Miss Universe 1994 semifinalists and what happened to them after the pageant. It has more than 52,200 views so far, which should tell me that I found a potentially popular niche to work with, but I absolutely insist on posting about other things 😀
I’ve written a bunch of stuff I want to make videos about, but I’ve unfortunately not gotten around to recording them. I do everything for my channel: research, writing, narrating and recording, and video editing. It’s a lot of work, but I get a lot of satisfaction doing it.
Have I achieved Youtube fame and made tons of money from my channel? Heck no. I need 1,000 subscribers and I’m not even halfway there, and thousands of watch hours, which I definitely do not have.
Recently, I started making videos about SB19, a group I love and admire. None of the videos have cracked 1,000 views, but it’s all good; the channel has been idle for months, and even having a few hundred people watch my work and listen to me talk is already huge. It’s been fun because it’s testing my ability to write quickly and produce a video mere hours after a bit of SB19 news came out. And it’s bringing my channel back to life. I’ve even gotten started writing something I’ve put off for half a year.
This project is pretty big for me because I’m painfully averse to being perceived, but perhaps there’s a part of me that’s not because I’m perfectly willing to put my writing out there and use my actual voice.
I have to admit that my ultimate goal here is to have a modest following and to earn a bit of money too. For now, though, I’ll settle for having 100 views per video.
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