Happy New Year!

Since today is the 1st of January, I thought it would be a good opportunity to look back at 2015 – and set some goals for this year.

First of all, let’s look at my 2015 goals.

Websites: I was aiming at 7500 page views/month, but I gave up maintaining my blogs almost entirely. Consequently, I did not get even close.

YouTube: Goal was 150 subscribers, and as the year ended, I had 134 (I peaked at 135 for a day). Thus, I fell short by about 15%. It’s a bit disappointing, but considering the channel grew by 19 subscribers in the entire year of 2014 I am quite happy.

Videos: One year ago I decided I would take my channel more serious, and upload one video every week without exceptions. I am very happy to report that I not only met that goal, but vastly exceeded it – First I switched to several videos a week, and then to a daily schedule. All said and done, I uploaded 362 videos over the year.

So what are some conclusions?

I think the daily schedule is working really well for me. Since I started uploading daily, I doubled my monthly views. I also gained twice as many subscribers in the second half of the year as I did in the first.

Choice of games matters as well, no doubt. Where I was very random before mid-year, I now have a consistent EU4 schedule.

So what about 2016?

I’d like to get to 200 subscribers. I’ve chosen this target number more conservatively this year – better to overachieve if that’s possible.

I will stay with a daily release schedule: EU4 every day at 9pm, with other games in the optional 3pm slot as I produce the videos.

I will actively promote my channel. I am not sure how I can measure this, but I will keep a log of what I do.

Last but not least I will start streaming, ideally on a weekly basis.

What about the websites?

I’ll pretty much ignore them. The YouTube channel is what I enjoy.

That said, I will update the website(s) for my channel; I will maintain my geek blog (as I only post whenever I solve a technical problem anyway), and I will also post about other relevant things – i.e. the websites aren’t dead, they are just on a “minimum effort” level.