Keeping Up With KL ✦ December 2022 (Patreon)

Hello everyone and Happy 2023! How was your Christmas and New Years? Please let me know all the details in the comments or in my Discord server, if you are in it! I'd love to know how you spent your time and how you rang in the new year. Do you have any goals this year? Share those with me too!

First, welcome in to all the new patrons that joined during the month of December (and the start of this month)! This is my monthly newsletter that I write at the start of every single month where I share a ton of information and insight into things! I hope that you find these valuable, as many folks love to be involved in all these nitty-gritty details. It also provides some different content here on Patreon to sprinkle in between everything else that I share. I really enjoy writing these posts, sharing my progress, and being transparent with you all about how things are going, as you are all such a big part of the journey and the success! Thank you for being here.

Newsletter Adjustments For 2023

New Name!

I wasn't happy with the Trail Thoughts name for my newsletter because I am not really following the outdoors-y style of branding for the Patreon anymore like I was in the past with the tier names. So this newsletter is now called Keeping Up With KL! Thank you to my best friend Yed for the name suggestion.

No More Twitch Data

I am still going to talk about what I did on my Twitch stream in the previous month and what is planned for the month ahead, but I won't share the charts and numbers anymore. I'm choosing to omit this because my goals with Twitch changed drastically in 2022 as a result of how well my YouTube channel and this Patreon have been going for me. And by changed, I mean basically gone away. I love that my Twitch space has become my place to just chill out and play video games, and not care about the "numbers" with it.

A Newsletter Video

In my feedback form that went out yesterday, I asked about these newsletter posts and if any of you would find value in being able to watch/listen to me go over all of this information instead of always having to read them. While a lot of you said it's fine to read these, there were many of you who indicated that you would appreciate a video to accompany these posts so that you can choose how to consume the information. And I'm happy to do both! I know these posts are long and not everyone out there are big readers. I won't have a video for this current newsletter, but I will start doing these videos with the next post!

Alright, let's get into it!

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It was another casual and fun month on Twitch for me that kicked off with the conclusion of my first playthrough Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II! I can't believe I played the KOTOR games for over a year. I had so much fun with them and the full playthroughs are available to watch at any time if you're interested. First KOTOR is here, and KOTOR II is here.

With the wrap-up of KOTOR, I had decided that my next big RPG on Wednesdays was going to be Fallout 3, a first playthrough. I have played Fallout: New Vegas in the past and absolutely loved it and I am really enjoying Fallout 3 so far! It feels good to be back in the American Wasteland and I'm slowly remembering how VATS and the Pip-Boy and all of those things work again. This playthrough will be on the channel for quite a few months, as I will be playing all of the DLC content as well.

In December, I also played a new game to me called Insurmountable. This is a hexagonal mountain climbing/survival type of game and I really enjoyed it. And on Mondays, I continued plugging away through my ruthless run of Dragon Age: Origins. 

Nothing wild is happening with streams this month! I will continue through Fallout 3 on Wednesdays and for my Friday streams, I want to play Insurmountable again and possibly pull out some other games from my library to dive into as I made a huge purchase of games during the Steam winter sale. One of which is Disney's Dreamlight Valley that I'm eager to fire up and see what that is all about.

As for Dragon Age, I will be finishing the Origins ruthless run this month and then moving on to Dragon Age II, which I am super excited for! I know lots of folks have mixed feelings about that game. For me it has a super rich story, a wonderful character to play, and the most fun combat out of all the Dragon Age games. I'm very excited to get back into it and experience mean Hawke.

• # of Videos: 29 total ⬇ - 9 public videos ⬆, 0 shorts ⬇, 1 live stream ⬆, and 19 for Patreon ⬇
• Impressions: 4,467,874 ⬆
• Total Views: 168,483 ⬆
• Views on December's Videos: 104,576 ⬆
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): 2.5% ⬇
• Watch Time: 46,047.30 hours ⬆
• Average % Viewed*: 35.5% ⬆
• Unique Viewers: 77,036 ⬆
• Net New Subscribers: 1,405 ⬇

The symbols beside each data point indicate if the figures are up or down relative to the previous month. If there is an equal sign, there is no change.

* This data point tells me how long a viewer spent watching a particular video. If a viewer watches 10 minutes of a 20 minute long video, then that is 50%. Because my videos are long, I like my percentage to be around 30% but it is typically between 16-21%. Most viewers will skip the intro's and thoughts/review portions of my reactions and I've noticed with a lot of my movie reactions they like to watch particular scenes and skip to those instead of watching the whole video. It's just the nature of doing YouTube!

I don't know that I could have wrapped up the year any better than what happened in December for the channel. While I didn't get to everything that I had set out to do because of the holidays and New Year, I am super pleased with the stats for the channel. It was very similar to how March was for me (when I released my reaction to Revenge of the Sith). It was also the highest earned ad revenue month for the channel so far, thank you Christmas RPM's and thank you to everyone for the views! 😅 I'm super grateful for how things went in December.

The Last Samurai (from November) continued to get a wild amount of views in December and WALL-E was incredibly successful on the channel and performed way better than I could have expected. And naturally, the MCU reactions were a hit. Splitting The Avengers reaction into two parts was a bit of a daunting task for me, but it worked out! And now I'm not so nervous about doing that for future movies if I find myself needing to.

The Star Wars Holiday Special reaction also did way better than I expected it to. I honestly wasn't expecting that one to go past 1,000 views because of how disliked it is. 😅 So I am pleasantly surprised that it is sitting at 2.4k views right now. The comments tell me that people enjoyed seeing me suffer through something so ridiculous and I'm very glad for that. Even though the HS was bad, it was genuinely really fun to make that video for you all because it was nice to be able to complain about something so openly and not have anyone down my throat about it in the comments. 🤣 Because of that, I'd love to incorporate some more "bad movie" reactions on the channel. The kind of movies that are so hated they're loved, kinda like what the SWHS is. I would only do a handful a year, maybe two or three!

Alright, time for me to answer these and wow, these answers are hard this month...

• Favourite Movie: Tie between WALL-E and The Avengers
• Favourite Reaction: Tie between WALL-E and The Star Wars Holiday Special
• Best Comments Received On: It's so hard to pick just one reaction this month for this! I got so many lovely comments on everything I put out in December. However, I'm going to pick Thor because of this comment:

• Highest Liked Video: The Star Wars Holiday Special is sitting at 100%... Y'all, this is my ONLY PUBLIC VIDEO THAT DOESN'T HAVE A SINGLE DISLIKE ON IT ON THE ENTIRE CHANNEL. 🤣 I am loving that so much. Please, nobody ruin this for me or I will come after you. 🤜
• Lowest Liked Video: Captain America: The First Avenger at 98.2%. For the lowest percentage of all my reactions to still be in the 98's, I am super pleased with this!

Alright, this is a lot of numbers and charts BUT let's look back on the whole heckin' year!

I love how it's really easy in the charts to see when I reacted to Star Wars and when I started watching the MCU. There was definitely a lull in the summer time and then I really found my groove in September. The last four months have been a lot of fun and I really ramped up the videos in November and December to try my best to capitalize on the higher ad revenues that companies pay Google for their ads on our videos. It was worth it to do that, so I will be doing the same thing in Nov and Dec 2023. Hopefully I can afford to hire some editing help by that time, which would make it even better!

Overall, I am super pleased with these numbers and how the channel performed last year for this being my first year doing reaction content. Like I said in my New Years Eve post on the channel, the KL from 2009 who wanted to be a YouTuber would be mind-blown by these kinds of numbers on 2022 KL's YouTube channel, and she motivates me so much to keep this going, along with all of you! Thank you to all of you so much for being here and for watching my videos and engaging! I say this so much but it truly means the world to me.

I shared what is coming on the channel for January in this post here. I am super excited to have a lot more variety this month than I normally do! I have also invited you all to my one-year reaction anniversary stream on YouTube where I will be doing a live watchalong to A New Hope! All details are in those two posts.

What I didn't include in the schedule for this month is any review videos. I really want to try and get caught up on these, but I worry that with how long they take that it's just not going to happen as quickly as I want it to unless I stop doing movie reactions to put the focus on the review videos. I keep flopping back and forth on this priority, but I really do need to get The Clone Wars done along with my Revenge of the Sith re-watch (I at least will be watching ROTS before my ANH re-watch on Jan 28). I'll be working on them and hoping to surprise release them at some point this month.

Patreon Member Experience Feedback Form

If you haven't completed this yet, I posted a link to my feedback form a couple of days ago. If you are newer to my Patreon, I'd recommend waiting a little bit before completing it, but if you've been around a while your insight for me will be extremely valuable. I thank you so much for taking the time to complete it, as it's really important to me to know how you all are feeling about what I've been doing and the ideas I have for the Patreon moving forward.

As of typing this, there have been over 30 of you that have filled it out, so thank you so much! And many of you have left super kind words that are incredibly emotional for me. I've shared a few of them on my YouTube Community tab and I'd love to showcase some of them on my Patreon About page. They're all shown anonymously. These comments really stood out to me, so thank you for this!

I really appreciate the insight on the ideas that I have. I'm going to give a little bit more time for the feedback form before I start incorporating some of the ideas on the channel and here on Patreon.

Goals

It's really difficult to set numerical goals for content like this, because anything can happen and I also don't ever want to base my worth off of numbers that are out of my control. So the only thing I've told myself that would be neat to experience is if I end up with the same results as 2022. So that would result in ending 2022 with around 26,200 subscribers and around 420 (lol 🥬) patrons. So those are loose targets. If we hit 'em, we do! And if we don't, there's always 2024. If we hit 420 patrons, that should mean that my current Patreon goal that shows on my page gets hit too, which would be exciting as that means I can officially be doing this full-time without worry and I can start looking for editing help.

I like setting goals that are in my full control and I have a few this year, so I thought I would share them with you.

YouTube:

• Watch 60 films
• Collab with another YouTube reactor to watch a movie or two (I've already started a discussion with someone about this! 👀)
• Do 3 live movie watchalong streams
• Do 3 other live streams
• Have a giveaway in one of the live streams

Patreon:

• Aim for 5 exclusive TV episodes every week
• Have one Patreon member hangout event each month
• Rework my About section and my Welcome messages with videos

Twitch/Gaming:

• Play at least 10 new games on stream
• Do a charity stream
• Finish at least one large RPG on my own time outside of stream
• Finish my Animal Crossing island that I've been working on for far too long

Personal:

• Journal every other day, even if all I have to say is a few sentences
• Practice regular expressions of gratitude for others and love for myself
• Give one compliment every day
• Go for three 30 minute walks every week
• Move my body 3 times per week (yoga, pilates, Ring Fit Adventure/Switch Sports, cross-country skiing)
• When I want bread, make it instead of buy it
• Finish reading the following series: ACOTAR, The Expanse, and A Song of Ice and Fire
• Read the Ahsoka novel

Let me know what kind of goals you've set this year, if any! And if you didn't set any, that's totally cool too!

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That's about it to kick off 2023! As always, thanks for being here! Thank you for your input and feedback and comments as it means a lot to me and I want to keep working hard to provide you all with the best experience and entertainment that I possibly can! ❤️