Keepin' Up With KL ✦ May + June 2023 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Well, it feels like a lifetime since I last wrote a newsletter post! I didn't write one at the start of June for May because we all know how big of a write-off May was. 🤣 But I'm very excited to share a bunch of things with you!

First, welcome in to all the new patrons that joined during the months of May and June, and so far in July! Keepin' Up With KL is my monthly newsletter that I write at the start of every single month. This is 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 channels. It also provides some different content here to sprinkle in between everything else and I really enjoy writing these and sharing. Thank you so much for being here! 🧡

May

• # of Videos: 18 total (⬇) - 2 public videos (⬇) and 16 for Patreon (⬇)
• Impressions: 1,924,466 (⬇)
• Total Channel Views: 74,910 (⬇)
• Views on May's Videos: 11,153 (14.89%) (⬇)
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): 2.7% (=)
• Watch Time: 15,752.7 hours (⬇)
• Average % Viewed*: 27.4% (⬇)
• Unique Viewers: 41,780 (⬇)
• Net New Subscribers: 385 (⬇)

June

• # of Videos: 33 total (⬆) - 9 public videos (⬆) and 24 for Patreon (⬆)
• Impressions: 3,985,051 (⬆)
• Total Channel Views: 165,259 (⬆)
• Views on June's Videos: 112,549 (68.1%) (⬆)
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): 2.9% (⬆)
• Watch Time: 42,792.5 hours (⬆)
• Average % Viewed*: 31.3% (⬆)
• Unique Viewers: 73,529 (⬆)
• Net New Subscribers: 743 (⬆)

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 longer, I like my percentage to be around 30%.

At this time, I am not going to be sharing stats and figures for my kale plays channel, but I am pretty pleased with how my playthrough of The Last of Us Part I is going there so far considering how small the channel is.

As you can see with the data above, YouTube obviously favours you more when you are active and posting new videos. 😅 That said, despite only putting out two videos in May I am VERY pleased with the overall views and new subs that month while I was sick. To crack almost 75,000 views on the channel when the two reactions I uploaded only got a combined 11,153 views shows the power of having an existing library of videos for people to watch and why it's important to never get discouraged in the early days of starting a channel! Even if a video doesn't perform "well" within its first week, or even month, you never know who will find it and watch it later on. I still get new views on my Star Wars reactions that were done almost a year and a half ago now.

Subscriber growth has slowed on the channel a little bit. The last newsletter was May 6 and the channel had 17,286 subscribers and right now today the channel is at 18,388. I'm happy with this, considering how slow May was. The subscriber thing is tricky, anyway. Of course, I would love to grow the number, but at the same time it doesn't mean much. Views and engagement will always be a priority over that. I think any creator would just want to hit 100,000 and get their Play button plaque and then be fine. 😅

For some details, I do see data on subscribers vs. non-subscribers! So far in all of 2023, 71.6% of my viewers are not subscribed to the channel. I also get to see data on returning viewers. In the last 90 days, nearly 60,000 people were returning viewers to the channel and of these viewers, 43,560 of them are not subscribed. YouTubers would hit sub milestones so much faster if everyone who actively watched us and returned to watch us again were subbed. 😂 But the algorithm is too powerful and you really don't need to be subbed anymore to get notified of their new videos. This is why I just kinda shrug and go "If I hit it, then I hit it."

I am really happy with how June went. It was so nice to get back into the swing of things and I had my vacation to look forward to, as well. Even though I didn't have a set schedule, I mostly stuck to the Monday and Friday releases anyway as best as I could. This was also the first full month of editing in DaVinci Resolve and it's safe to say that I am really enjoying the program and really glad to be back to a different style of editing.

Top Reactions in May and June:

• Saving Private Ryan - 30,964
• The Batman - 18,727
• Thor: Ragnarok - 17,960

Top Reactions in 2023 (So Far):

• Captain America: Civil War - 58.841
• Saving Private Ryan - 30,964
• Spaceballs - 30,352

Top Reactions on the Channel:

• Revenge of the Sith - 469,393
• Iron Man - 67,754
• Return of the Jedi - 64,131

Honorable Mentions:

• Gotta shoutout WALL-E, Obi-Wan Kenobi Part 6, and The Last Samurai for being the latest reactions to cross the 50,000 view mark! I now have seven different reactions over this view amount. 🥳 This is pretty wild to me, thank you so much for watching!

My favourite reaction that I uploaded in May and June is Saving Private Ryan and this was also my favourite one to edit. My favourite movie from May and June is No Country For Old Men though I'll admit that SPR is also right up there.

My highest liked reaction was Black Panther Part I with 99.0% like to dislike ratio and my most disliked reaction was Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 with a 2.9% dislike to like ratio. Are we surprised? No. 😅 (For context, the highest dislike percentage I have on the channel is Man of Steel with 22.9% dislikes. 🤣 The vast majority of my reactions get over 97% likes. My dislike of MoS really upset people lmao)

In case you've missed it, I did share the July schedule here. I am super excited for all the movies coming out this month and I know a lot of you are too! Very MCU heavy, but a good mix of non-MCU movies too!

It's been a while since I've done a live stream on the channel, but to be honest I probably won't do one until the fall. I've been thinking about it lately, but outside of all the work that I do for the channels, I do have a bunch of summer plans occupying certain weekends and I am trying to enjoy my non-work time as much as I can. Streaming just feels a lot easier in the colder Canadian months. 😅

As for gaming content this month, I'll be finishing The Last of Us Part I and starting The Last of Us Part II over on kale plays.

There has been a lot of these!

Insider Reactions

Breaking Bad Season 5 continues this month and I am starting The Mandalorian! I am squeezing in Mando and BBF before Ahsoka releases on Aug 23, so there's going to be a ton of content coming. Now is the perfect time to upgrade your tier to any of the Insider tiers if you are currently on the Watchers tier. As always, the first episode of both shows will be available for free, but then everything else will be locked to those tiers.

Free Membership [Early Access Feature]

Now folks are able to "Join the Community" for free! All it means is that instead of Followers, they've become Free Members. These folks will get notified of all of my public posts, which are mostly my schedule posts and then anything else I feel like sharing out to everyone! If you cancel your sub here, but still want to be kept in the loop, being a free member is great option! This is an early access feature that I was given and it will be available to all creators eventually.

Free Trials

It's been over a month now since I enabled Free Trials on my Watchers tier, and this has been going very well so far! By default, everyone who joins that tier gets the first week for free. I think I'll keep this enabled for a while!

Patreon Shop [Early Access Feature]

This is a feature I'm super stoked about and I have already started using it.. just one thing so far - the Infinity War reaction! If you are a Patreon member, then you will get access to the files as part of your membership and you can go grab them by clicking on the Shop tab on my Patreon page. This will happen for all watchalong reactions to individual movies. Every watchalong as of this month will be uploaded there.

I'm excited for the Shop because it fills a void in the reaction space especially where people may only be interested in one or two reactions and don't want to bother with the hassle of subscribing to then cancel later. Or they might watch 10+ different reactors and can't possibly afford to be subscribed on a regular basis to all of them. I know I'm already excited for the potential to be able to just purchase the specific reaction I want from some fellow reactors (if they decide to use this feature once it becomes available, that is).

That said, there are some limitations for the Shop so far that I have to think of workarounds for or wait until Patreon changes things (if they do). One of the biggest limitations is a file size limit, which will make it impossible to upload bundles of TV series seasons and larger movie bundles like the MCU phases and Star Wars. Even if I reduce the file size and ZIP it, Patreon has given us a 5GB limit size per product, which is kind of a bummer. What I might have to do is use an external cloud service and link to that for bundles, if Patreon doesn't increase the size limit. We'll see. As a result, I am saving bundles for LAST.

There is also a minimum price I have to put and it's higher than what I thought it would be. It's $3 USD and for me working in CAD, it's making me put $5 CAD as a minimum price. I knew there would be a minimum, but assumed that the $3 minimum would be that way across currencies, meaning I could put $3 CAD. It's not a huge deal. I still think the watchalong value is there. And I have already had one sale of the Infinity War watchalong by someone outside of our Patreon community, so looks like they didn't mind that either!

When I first announced this, I mentioned it would take me some time to go through my backlog of watchalongs to get them on the Shop. I'm gonna estimate probably three months or so, as this gets done in-between everything else I do.

Member of the Month

If you missed yesterday's draw (just scroll one post down to see it), Rhys Tait was the winner of the July MotM draw! They already commented their movie pick which is IT (2017). And if you missed the June MotM draw, the winner was Baal Firenze and he picked The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and this watchalong is available to watch here.

General Patreon Reminders

• Early Insiders Tier: If you are currently in this tier and you process a cancellation, your spot does become available to someone else immediately, which means that you may not be able to re-join this tier at a later time. As of right now, the tier is Sold Out. Thank you everyone!
• Annual Memberships: If you think you might be part of my Patreon Community for a while and you want to save some money and also ensure immediate qualification into the Member of the Month draw if you've been here less than 6 months, 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 hosted some movie nights recently (for movies I've seen before) and I have watch parties for the TV show Gotham almost every Saturday morning (my time). We are almost halfway through Season 2 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!

I feel like a lot has been happening lately, so it's nice to be able to provide a SOLID update here! 😂

VACATION

So I went to New Jersey last week to spend just under one week with some friends I met a few years ago through Twitch, one of whom is one of my mods that you have likely seen here and there in my premiere live chats and definitely in my Discord server if you're in there. I flew in and out of Toronto because at the time of booking a flight it was a whopping $300 cheaper than flying in and out of the States which was shocking to me but I wasn't gonna question it. It worked out well because my friends were driving down to NJ from Toronto anyway and NY state is pretty. On the way back, I drove around 6 hours and Google took us on some smaller highways in western NY state that passed a bunch of dairy farms and small towns and it was just lovely. So nice to not have to be on the Interstate for the entire trip.

While in NJ, my friends and I mostly kept things casual. Good food, good drinks, good games. We went swimming one afternoon/evening, us gals went and got pedicures while the guys went to the driving range, we made homemade pizzas which were BOMB, we had a DnD one-shot campaign the night before July 4th and it was a July 4th themed one-shot and it was super fun. I was a super charismatic bard that came from nobility, but I could only speak in one-syllable words. I didn't attack a single enemy in the entire one-shot, rather using my bard tricks to help out my party. It was so fun and hilarious.

I honestly didn't take very many photos, but here's a group photo of the six of us in the pool!

For my flight home, I had paid for a specific window seat and then was moved to a middle seat instead, which I was like NAH to. I ended up getting a window seat in the emergency exit row. I have always avoided this row for unnecessary anxiety about having to be responsible to open the door if an emergency actually occurred and I've decided that the benefits of being in that seat FAR outweigh the actual chance of a disaster occurring. I really enjoyed my time in that seat.

The flight attendant at one point asked who was going to the Calgary Stampede and I may have been the only person on the entire plane who didn't cheer. 🤣 I had forgotten that I was flying back home the night before Stampede kicked off. For those unaware, the Calgary Stampede is probably the largest event in Alberta that happens annually in July. Big rodeo, lots of singers and bands come to perform, a large midway with tons of rides and some unique food that changes every year. (A lot of the unique food this year is appealing, except for like 5 things, which DEF includes the ketchup and mustard ice cream.) To be honest, it's one of those events where if you've been once you don't really need to go again and I've been MANY times in my life. I would only ever go again if I was going with someone who had never been before.

New Language 🏯

I've started learning Japanese on Duolingo for when I eventually travel there! Hopefully I can swing a trip in 2024, but definitely 2025. This gives me a LOT of time to not only learn the basics, but over and above that a little bit.

It's my first time using Duolingo and while it feels repetitive, that's the BEST thing to make sure the new language sticks, at least for me having as much time to learn as I do! I am also learning the Japanese characters (Hiragana and Katakana for sure... Kanji is a whole other beast), so repetition is even more helpful in that case because learning a new alphabet is hard, y'all. Especially when you're not a child anymore. 😂

So far, it's going really well and it's really fun! I'm very much enjoying the gamification that Duolingo provides as it keeps me motivated to spend 10-15 mins every day in the app making progress. Once I feel ready to move past the more simple learning of Duolingo, I will likely purchase Japanese courses on Pimsleur as this really jumps you into conversational learning and I've heard really good things about it.

If any of you are also on Duolingo and want to add me, just search kaiielle and on there and you'll find me! A bunch of my Twitch streamer friends are on there too, and we love to have accountability with each other. If I know that some of you are following me there, then I have even more incentive to keep up with it. 👀

Now that I'm done blabbing, I'd love to hear from you!

• What was your favourite reaction of mine in May or June?
• What was the best movie that you watched in May or June on your own time? Have you seen any new movies in theatres lately? Let me know, without spoiling!
• Has anyone done anything exciting the past two months? Vacations, traveling, concerts, other events? Let me know!

And finally, thank you so much for being part of my lil' community here! It will always feel so cool that I am not just putting my videos out into the internet abyss where they might only be found by three people. Knowing that I have nearly 300 of you here and thousands more on YouTube is kinda wild. And kinda scary, when you picture that amount of people altogether in one room. The internet feels smaller sometimes LOL.

Wishing you the best July!

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜