That escalated quickly (Patreon)

Dear Patreon Subscribers,

Thank you so much for the absolutely unbelievable amount of support you've given me over the past few months. I really truly can't thank you enough. If you're new to the page, it's at least a little likely that you subscribed because you saw the latest video about fast fashion (I won't spoil it for you if you haven't seen it yet, but TL;DR - fast fashion? Not great!). The past two weeks have seen a pretty big spike in traffic, so I just wanted to give a quick breakdown on what happened and when in case you find it interesting. Mostly I'm taking a 20-minute break from writing the script for the next vid and wanted to drop a line to say hello and that I really really really appreciate you being here.

Referring to the picture above:

A - This section represents the sort of resting heart rate of the channel, and at this scale, it appears to be dead. Luckily we weren't dead, I just hadn't posted a video in about 5 weeks, so we were getting about 1,000 views per day, mostly people randomly stumbling upon videos (or possibly my mom texting one of her friends about what her adult son is up to. Also, what a weird thing the phrase 'adult son' is. I get that it helps people paint a mental picture, but it kinda implies that sons shouldn't be adults or something? I dunno. I've never heard the phrase adult daughter). In any case, we'd get about 1000 views per day on any given day.

B - I posted the Fast Fashion is Hot Garbage video to YouTube and the absolute smoke shows who subscribe to Climate Town on YouTube watched it to the tune of about 40,000 views. It also caught a little wind from a couple of reddit posts.

C - For some reason, some robot at YouTube decided today was the day people needed to see the fast fashion video, and began displaying it in the 'watch next' for people watching something similar. The 'YouTube recommended' views started to spike up and since enough random people who weren't already subscribed kept watching past about 6 minutes, YouTube spilled a bunch more viral juice onto the video than it already had and views really started going.

D - AND THIS IS WHERE SHIT GOT REAL as far as I can tell, views kept snowballing until YouTube user Veritasium shouted me out to his 10 MILLION subscribers and a bunch of people came through. A few other YouTubers and reddit posts shouted out the fast fashion video and possibly other videos. At this point YouTube started to recommend other videos and those started to get more views, and they link to other videos and so on and so fourth. If you tried to have a conversation with me around this time, I was pretty much intolerable because I was checking notifications like 30 times an hour.

E - Things started to die down at this point and the views on Fast Fashion taper off.

F - We're approaching a new resting heart rate for the channel. I don't think it will be in the 100,000 range, but it'll probably taper down to above the previous resting heart rate, which is the goal.

Not that I'm really expecting people to have a lot of analytics questions, but if you want to know anything about the numbers or the process or anything, feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to get back to ya. Thanks to everyone who just joined, and thanks to everyone who's been around already. Again, I couldn't do this without you. I really appreciate you making these videos possible.

Love,
Rollie