Keepin' Up With KL ✦ July 2023 (Patreon)

Hi everyone! I hope you're all having a fab summer! For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere anyway, and for those of you elsewhere - hope things are still going well for ya. 

First, welcome in to all the new patrons that joined in July and so far in August! 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! 🧡

• # of Videos: 32 total (⬇️) - 11 public videos (⬆️) and 21 for Patreon (⬇️)
• Impressions: 4,246,914 (⬆️)
• Total Channel Views: 210,917 (⬆️)
• Views on July's Videos: 37,967 (18.00%) (⬇️)
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): 3.3% (⬆️)
• Watch Time: 51,567.0 hours (⬆️)
• Average % Viewed*: 35.5% (⬆️)
• Unique Viewers: 76,511 (⬆️)
• Net New Subscribers: 761 (⬆️)

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%.

Reactions Posted

• Avengers: Infinity War - Part 1 / Part 2 / Review
• Big Hero 6 
• Ant-Man and the Wasp 
• Clerks 
• Captain Marvel 
• Constantine 
• Avengers: Endgame - Part 1 / Part 2 / Review

Top Reactions in July:

• Avengers: Infinity War - 48,799
• Avengers: Endgame - 27,872
• The Batman - 10,784

AIW and AEG are both parts combined, and keep in mind for Endgame that the number is only for its first day on the channel since I uploaded it on the last day of the month.

The Batman being the third most viewed reaction in July came as a big surprise to me.

Top Reactions in 2023:

• Captain America: Civil War - 61,746 ( ⬆️ 2,905)
• Saving Private Ryan - 38,246 (⬆️ 7,282)
• Spaceballs - 31,618 (⬆️ 1,266)

The top three reactions for this year are still these movies (and the figures in brackets are how many views they've had since last month), but when I do the newsletter covering August, there'll def be some switching up here! 😊

Top Reactions on the Channel:

• Revenge of the Sith - 471,595 (⬆️ 2,202)
• Iron Man - 69,919 (⬆️ 2,165)
• Return of the Jedi - 64,773 (⬆️ 642)

All of my MCU reactions are getting a little boost since putting out both Infinity War and Endgame so wasn't surprised to see Iron Man have an over 2k view boost.

Honorable Mentions:

There are a couple reactions slowly climbing their way to the 50k view mark! The Dark Knight, Rogue One, and The Empire Strikes Back. 👏 

KL's Favourites:

My favourite reaction in July was Endgame, both to edit and to watch back. This was also my favourite movie that I watched in July.

For a second favourite, I have to go with Big Hero 6, even though Infinity War was amazing and so was Clerks! Honestly, July's movies were just AWESOME, all of them! It was a superb month.

Viewer Like/Dislike Ratios:

Most Liked Reaction: Ant-Man and the Wasp at 99.3% likes / 0.7% dislikes.

Most Disliked Reaction: Avengers: Infinity War Part 2 at 96.9% likes / 3.1% dislikes - probably because I didn't cry enough y'all!!!! I had a comment today from someone who was "disappointed" that I didn't show any emotional investment! I replied "Watch my Endgame reaction to get the emotional investment." 😂

- - -

It's not surprising that July was a very good month for the channel and I may have strategically put Endgame on the last day of July so that I could feel a bit better about not putting out any videos for the first half of August. 😂 That said, both IW and EG would have gone out a lot sooner had May not been such a stupid month for me. BUT it all ended up working out really nicely anyway so I'm def not upset about it.

I'm actually SHOCKED that only 18% of the views in July were on the videos that went out in July! This was a fantastic month for viewers watching videos from June and prior. This is a data point that I love tracking to be able to see at a better glance how much my older videos are helping the channel grow. Like The Batman being the third most viewed video in July - I put that video out at the beginning of June! So I love seeing that.

As for the current subscriber figure... well Infinity War and Endgame have given me a nice little boost. I'm currently less than 500 subscribers away from 20,000! Which is such a bonkers number to me, like hello?? I was going to do a live stream celebration at 25k, but I might do one at 20k too cause why not? And who knows when I'll get to 25k. What do you all think? Should I wait or do live streams at both milestones?

I'm really excited for this month, mostly because of the lil' break I'm having to kick off the month, but also because I get to officially finish Phase 3 of the MCU, wrapping up the Infinity Saga and I get to dive into the MONSTROUS Phase 4 and get to explore TV shows! This is gonna be so awesome.

Just to recap my MCU plans, which I did share, then changed my mind, and now am officially going with:

• I'll be watching all of Phase 4 in its release order and all watchalong content for Phase 4 will be uploaded for all tiers here on Patreon - regardless if it goes to the channel or not
• Most of Phase 4 will be edited for YouTube: all of the films and then select shows. There's a handful of shows in the Phase 4 list that I personally can't see myself spending the time to edit to put on the channel, BUT maybe I will? It's one of those "I'll see what I feel like when I get to it" kind of things. You all know editing is a lot of work and I'm back to doing it all myself again. The most loved/anticipated shows will absolutely go on the channel though, so not to worry there.

As for other MCU shows like the ones on Netflix and such - those will be uploaded in watchalong format for folks in the Insiders tiers. I'm planning to start one of these shows in September - once all my Star Wars shows are wrapped up and I'm just left with Better Call Saul. I will be putting out a poll for Insiders tiers to have you pick what I should start with first. Stay tuned!

kale plays - what's going on there?

If you are new around here and didn't know I had a gaming channel - I do! Click here to check it out and subscribe - I'm hoping to get to 500 subs soon!

Last month I said I would be finishing TLOU Part 1 and moving on to Part 2 and then I didn't. Surprise - doing a lot of content can be overwhelming! I also thought I'd have more time than I ended up having in July. Now that my personal plans are really slowing down, I will be getting back into the gaming grind. Cause just like with movies, there's so much to play and experience! 

Has anyone played The Expanse game yet? I forgot it was coming out this summer! It came out a few days ago and I really want to play that one for the kale plays channel too .. eventually. The show is one that I watched pre-reaction channel and it's one of my favourite shows ever! Can't wait to play the game.

DECLINED PAYMENTS ISSUE

I don't think a lot of you were impacted at all by this, only because my decline amount this month didn't seem super out of the ordinary compared to regular months. But Patreon DID run into some issues and it did affect a lot of patrons and creators. Patreon did an upgrade to a payments system that was required by one of their payment partners and it resulted in banks around the world thinking Patreon pledges were fraudulent. You can read more about it here. 

If you have a declined pledge, Patreon will try to re-take the payment at some point this month or you might be able to go in and change your payment method.

Insider Reactions

• Breaking Bad Season 5 will conclude this month and then El Camino will be the very first movie-exclusive reaction for the folks at the Insiders tiers.
• The Mandalorian Season 2 will conclude this week. The Book of Boba Fett reactions will drop super close together and then I'll be powering through Mando Season 3. I still plan to have everything watched before the first two Ahsoka episodes drop on the 23rd.
• It's a really good time to up your pledge to any of the Insiders tiers if you want to binge-watch these with the rest of us, or check out any of the shows I've watched previously. House of the Dragon, Andor, The Bad Batch, The Clone Wars, Rebels, Stranger Things 4. 

Update on Early Access Features

Everything's going swimmingly! The Shop MP4 purchases were really popular for Infinity War and Endgame - each of them getting 5+ purchases from non-patrons. People have been taking advantage of the "Join for Free" button to be updated on my public posts, like the schedule and anything else I share. So yeah, can't complain! The Free Trial feature is also going really well.

Patreon Lounge

In July, I was given access to a mobile-only feature called Lounge. This is basically a giant chat room for all of us! I've been using it to quickly provide you all with updates about certain reactions and such. This works really well and then I don't have to clog up the feed with a post. If you have the Patreon mobile app, feel free to pull that up! If you don't, well let's cross our fingers that it will also come to the browser website eventually.

Member of the Month

Congrats again to Kelvar for winning the August draw. Kelvar got back to me pretty quickly with their movie choice and I think a lot of you will really like what they picked! It's a film that's been reacted to by other channels AND it's been requested on my form more than once!

I'll be getting out the July movie reaction that was picked very soon!

Regular Patreon Reminders

• Early Insiders Tier: If you are currently in this tier and you process a cancellation of your membership, your spot does become available to someone else immediately. This means that you might not be able to re-join this tier later. Right now the tier is Sold Out. Thank you everyone!
• Annual Memberships: If you think you're gonna hang around here for a long time and you want to save some money, you can switch from monthly to annual at any time and save 10% on your membership! You can do this in your Membership settings. This also qualifies you immediately for Member of the Month if you've been here less than 6 months.
• 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 don't actually have much to share here, because I did dedicated posts about the two big things that happened recently! My trip down to Montana to meet and see Incubus, and then my little hang last week to meet Cassie from Popcorn in Bed and her other two mods that I work with to help out with the channel. 

I only have two big plans the entire rest of the year now and I'm looking forward to things slowing down a little. Don't get me wrong, social time is GREAT and big plans are GREAT and I feel like I never get enough of that anymore, but the introvert in me enjoys just enjoying the smaller and simpler things in life. 

- - -

I am still learning Japanese and it's going really well and I'm ready to immerse myself a bit more into the language, so I've decided to finally venture into ANIME. Unfortunately, there won't be any reactions or reviews or anything of the sort that I can provide for content 😆. In order to really help myself learn the language, I'll be watching anime without any English at all! This means I won't even be understanding what I'm watching for probably the next 6 months or more. So it's kinda hard to provide reviews that way LOL.

But when the time comes that I finally understand what I'm watching, I'm happy to chat briefly about the shows through this section of these newsletters! I've decided to save the most popular shows for when I finally understand Japanese enough, as a way of rewarding myself for my progress. 😊 

And big thanks to my good friend Holly for giving me some anime recommendations strictly to try and learn the language. I'll be sticking with the Shoujo shows which I'm told is the sub-genre of like slice of life / high school stories. If any of you are looking for an anime reactor to watch, she is fantastic! Click here to check out her channel. 

This is like the reviews in my videos where I say "And now I turn it to you to leave your comments down below..." 🤣

• What was your favourite reaction of mine in July?
• Who has seen Oppenheimer, Barbie, or both? I have a ticket for Barbie on Friday night and I'm seeing Oppenheimer on Saturday night. Yes, this means no reactions for y'all. But it's been literal YEARS since I've been to a movie in the theater and I couldn't help but feel like I need to go see these both on the big screen. So I'm very excited! It's important that reactors keep some movies to themselves too.
• Share anything fun that happened to you in July! Any plans for August?

- - -

Thanks so much for being part of this Patreon community! This community grew a LOT in July... and I appreciate your support so very much! For those of you new around here, I currently make all of my income from the channel and this Patreon. YOU are the reason that I am able to keep doing this every month and I couldn't be happier. I am also blessed AF to have a pretty low cost of living and so I've been able to make all of this work pretty good for the last little while. Of course, I would like to keep growing the channel and Patreon so that I can start getting regular and consistent help with the channel and not have to do every single thing myself, plus it'd be nice to be able to start saving money again LOL. I still want to increase my video sponsorships on the channel to help out with all this too, although that's been a lot tougher lately to be honest. Brands are starting to want higher view counts on videos, which is a bit of a pain, but it is what it is. We'll get there.

Because what I do is 100% thanks to YOU, this is why I spend so much time writing these newsletters and sharing the channel data and information with you! It's one of the ways I like to thank you, on top of providing all the reactions for y'all to watch of course. I hope some of you find it valuable to be involved on the "backend" stuff, the behind-the-scenes. I also just love being transparent and sharing the wins with you!

And that's a wrap! I'm wishing you all the BEST August. ❤️