Keepin' Up With KL ✦ April 2023 (Patreon)

Hi everyone! 👋 April was an INCREDIBLE month and I'm so excited to share the details with you all. First, welcome in to all the new patrons that joined during the month of April and the start of May! This is my monthly newsletter that I write at the beginning of every single month where I share a ton of information and insight and provide updates for what is to come ahead. I always want to be as open and transparent as possible, and many folks here find value in these newsletters and being "involved" in the behind-the-scenes of the channel. It also provides some different content here to sprinkle in between everything else and I really enjoy writing these and sharing. Thank you for being here! 🧡

Here in Alberta, it feels like we went from winter to summer in about half a week and didn't even have spring at all. The worst part of this is that it's incredibly dry. Already this season, we have over 100 wildfires spread around that are out of control and it's a little scary. That hasn't happened this early in the season in my entire lifetime. So far where I am, things are okay. But as soon as I'm better, I'll be packing an emergency bag for Ella and I and also making sure to stock up on foods that don't require power to eat. 

As I'm writing this (well, I've been writing this in small periods of time across the whole week) I am currently SICK. Oh my gosh, I got so sick from the Expo which means that I haven't been able to do anything that I had planned to do during this week off, which was really annoying to be honest. The rest of my planned time off this year is to attend other events and meet up with friends, so I'll have to try and figure out when I can take time off again to do what I had planned to do this past week. Maybe in August sometime. I'll keep you all posted.

I said this in last night's Member of the Month post, but my reactions next week are definitely gonna come out differently than scheduled since I'm still not able to record anything in my current state and I had tried a bit of editing yesterday, but that just makes my head hurt. I'm really hoping by tonight/tomorrow, I'll be completely back to normal. 🤞 Thank you for your patience.

• # of Videos: 38 total (⬇) - 8 public videos (⬇), 3 shorts (⬇), 1 live stream [Patreon] (=), and 26 for Patreon (⬇)
• Impressions: 5,644,952 (⬆)
• Total Channel Views: 222,491 (⬆)
• Views on April's Videos: 115,718 (52.01%) (⬆)
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): 2.7% (⬇)
• Watch Time: 60,356.80 hours (⬆)
• Average % Viewed*: 33.1% (⬆)
• Unique Viewers: 101,890 (⬆)
• Net New Subscribers: 1,495 (⬆)

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 much of a video that a viewer watched. Because my videos are usually on the long side, I like my percentage to be around 30%.

I've decided to update my graphs to lump in this years data with last years data just to really be able to see how far the channel has come since I started and then you can easily see all the past data too! As you can see, YouTube performance is far from consistent LOL. But look at January through to now! A great climb.

April was the best month that I've had on the channel since March of last year (my Revenge of the Sith month). Despite putting out fewer videos, everything was up across the board (aside from CTR, which is typically lower the more that YouTube blasts out my videos in the algorithm). Quite a number of the movies that I watched brought in a ton of new viewers who then went back and watched my other reactions, which is always the goal, especially now that I've got quite the library of videos that continues to grow. April also had my largest subscriber jump since I first started the MCU. 👏

My best performing video was Captain America: Civil War, crossing 50,000 views in less than a month. Y'all really love that movie! 👀

In last month's newsletter, I shared we were at 15,750 subs. Today, we are at 17,286! The difference doesn't quite add up to the Net New Subscribers number, just cause the numbers are from different dates. It blows my mind that the channel is already well on its way to 20k. 🥳 

I've been asked about mine and Sam's reaction to Lethal Weapon 2 and when it's coming out (both the full-length and edited). We had said it would go out in April on her channel and obviously it didn't. She announced a few weeks ago that she was going on a break from YouTube because of burn out. She edits as her full-time job and edits ALL of the reactions for her channel and she very much just hit a wall and became overwhelmed. She's not sure how long her break will be, but she knows that she will be back. So our Lethal Weapon journey is just on a pause right now. Don't worry, we had watched and recorded Lethal Weapon 2 before that happened, but Sam just hadn't gotten a chance to edit the full-length or the edited version. Anyway, we both appreciate your patience with this. ❤️ I don't want to pressure Sam and I don't want to even offer to put the reaction on my channel because I really love the idea of alternating the reactions to share our communities with each other.

• Favourite Movie: A tie between Captain America: Civil War and Everything Everywhere All At Once
• Favourite Reaction: Smokey and the Bandit, because of my first IRL guest, because of my Dad, because it was fun!
• Highest Liked Reaction: Smokey and the Bandit at 99.7% thumbs up
• Lowest Liked Reaction: Captain America: Civil War at 98.2% thumbs up - my highest lowest % in a long time!

I had shared the May schedule, but it's definitely going to start differently than I had originally planned! I'm hoping that I don't have to change any other reaction dates after next week, but it'll all just depend on how things go and how I feel. Either way, I'm so excited for the movies coming this month! And I know a lot of you are too, which makes me happy! Thanks so much for voting in all the polls and for submitting suggestions on my form! It's going to be a great month.

This month I really hope to finally get a video or two uploaded over on my kale plays channel and instead of TLOU going out on the channel first, it will be Red Dead Redemption 2!

In last month's newsletter, I said that I'd be testing out The Last of Us to see how it runs on my PC. Well, the update to that is that it wasn't running well at all. I played just under a couple of hours (and recorded it), but it just wasn't at the quality that I was willing to put it on my YouTube channel. I ended up returning the game and getting my money back. I finally used this opportunity to tell myself, "Okay, maybe a PS5 isn't actually a bad idea." In the past, I really wanted to avoid getting one because I just didn't feel like I would use it. But now that I do reactions, a PS5 can even help with that by allowing me to watch physical copies of movies if I need to (something that I currently can't do). Prior to TLOU even releasing on PC, I had had some folks offer to chip in for a PS5, so I put this up on my Throne Wishlist and I want to extend a huge thank you to those who have contributed to it so far. ❤️ I started with the first contribution (since I feel uncomfy putting the entire thing on a community to fund) and right now it's at 49% funded! Absolutely no requirement at ALL, but if this is something you'd want to help with, you can do so here. 

There are a few spots in the June schedule that are listed as TBD, so stay tuned for some polls coming up throughout the month to help decide those.

After seeing how many people loved my reaction with my dad, I've already reached out to both my mom and my brother to discuss bringing both of them on the channel. We don't have set plans yet, but my mom is open to the idea of sharing a movie with me that I've never seen before, just like what my dad did. My brother is younger than me, so we can't exactly have the same experience. He is a huge horror movie fan though and as much as I would like to have him over to watch something neither of us have seen, he has expressed wanting to be with me for one of his favourite horror movies. I really shouldn't let him down on that. So stay tuned for more details about this!

Member of the Month

If you missed the post from yesterday, Mark B was the winner of May's draw and he's gotten back to me with his pick! I'll let him share in the comments if he wants to, but the only hints that I will give is that it's a movie from 1965 and there are no reactions to it on YouTube. Maybe mine could be the first one day? I hope those of you that like older films are excited too. 😊

Reminders

• Early Insiders Tier: If you are in this tier and process a cancellation, your spot does become available to someone else immediately, which means that you may not be able to re-join the tier at a later time. As of writing this, it is showing 3 spots available. If you would like to switch to this tier, now is a good time! You can do this in your Membership settings. 
• Annual Memberships: If you think you're going to be here for a while and you want to save some money and also ensure immediate qualification into the Member of the Month draw, you can switch from monthly to annual at any time and save 10% on your membership. You can do this in your Membership settings.
• Discord Server: I always like to remind you about my server, where you can chat with myself and others in the community a bit better in real-time on a daily basis and it's a great way to connect. I've also been hosting some movie nights (a few of us just finished watching the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films), and I have watch parties for the TV show Gotham almost every Saturday morning (my time). We are just over halfway through Season 1 right now. To join, sync your Discord account in your Patreon settings and you'll be automatically put into the server. Since opening the server to the public, we've had some people from YouTube come and join us in the space and it's been great getting to know some folks a bit better! 

The only major life update that I have is about the Calgary Expo, which I opted to do in a dedicated post for you all! So if you missed that, check it out here. Especially if you love Hayden Christensen. I had such a great time (aside from it getting me sick LOL) but my brain all week has been in this awkward stage of rethinking the interactions I had with Hayden and how I could have said everything DIFFERENTLY, especially considering the time we had lmao. Why do brains do this to us? Why am I torturing myself with the "I should've said this instead." crap? Has this ever happened to anyone else after a celebrity meet and greet? 😅

I had a ticket to go see Return of the Jedi in theatres on Thursday, but ended up having to cancel it. I'm really hoping to make some time this upcoming week to go and see it! I have to! I can't miss it!

I've been feeling a huge international travel pull lately. Those of you in my Discord server will know that I've been in a Japan rabbit hole on YouTube that started I think at the end of March or very start of April. I've been watching a ton of Japanese cooking videos, restaurant videos, general traveling videos about capsule hotels and overnight sleeper trains, bullet trains, the list goes on. With Star Wars Celebration 2025 taking place in Japan, I'm definitely thinking of checking off two big items in one trip... That gives me lots of time to save up as well!

I've decided that I'm going to start ending these newsletters by turning it to you! Kinda like I do in my YouTube videos.

• What was your favourite reaction video of mine in April?
• What was the best movie that you watched in April?
• Tell me what your favourite moment was in April! Any accomplishments, fun events, cool moments with loved ones?

I feel like I never say it enough but THANK YOU so much for being here and for the support and community and the fun times. I'm eager to get better and back at this so we can talk about all these movies and series! 🧡

Wishing you a wonderful month of May!