Good morning Hank, it’s Tuesday. So 13 and a half years ago I was
hospitalized for about a week with a staph infection behind my
eye called orbital cellulitis. And to cheer me up you asked the
viewers of the Youtube videos we had just started making to send in pictures
of themselves with something silly on their head. This is clogs by the way.
Quick historical context, this was astonishingly before widespread
smartphone adoption so taking and sharing a picture of yourself
actually like, required some effort. At that time, our videos got about
300 views a piece, and about 200 people sent in pictures or videos of
themselves with stuff on their heads. And that’s when I realized we weren’t
making the thing I thought we had been making. We weren’t videos for an audience,
we were making videos with an audience. Hank, in a recent video you alluded to the
fact that a couple years ago we decided to stop trying to maximize views on
this Youtube channel. A policy that certainly informed our decision to title like 5 months
of videos with lyrics from a not very good 19-year old pop song.
But you didn’t get too deep into the reasons behind this decision, because
it is a little difficult to talk about. I mean, for several years almost every
video we made on Vlogbrothers ended up on the trending page. Which in a lot
of ways, was great news. It introduced lots of new people to this channel, and
also to our other work. And also there’s just an excitement in seeing your subscribers
and views and every other measurable metric increase. But as we see again and
again on the internet, what is easy to measure is not always what is important.
And in some ways it wasn’t fun. I mean I always liked our audience and I always
felt grateful that they would give us a seat at the table in their lives. But we also had
to live with a constant influx of really vile comments, which made the comments
section a less pleasant place to be, which in turn decreased the sense of community
and connectedness. At least for me. And so it started to feel like even though
our viewership was growing really fast, our community was actually shrinking.
Now of course between 2014-2017 Nerdfighteria was doing lots of cool and
interesting stuff and I don’t want to imply otherwise,
but to be honest I enjoy it more these days.
I love making a video every Tuesday. I love seeing Nerdfighter groups flourish,
from Facebook to Reddit to Discord. And I love seeing people participate in big,
community wide projects like drawing circles in response to my little circle drawings.
In fact, this t-shirt available only during pizzamas at pizzamas.com, is such a
circle drawing made by a Nerdfighter named Kimmy. And I love the
collaborations that are happening in Nerdfighteria, from programming a
sing-a-ma-jig to sing All Star for Hank’s birthday, to solving the little
clues I come up with each week that lead to a secret live show. And then
there are the community wide projects. We’re in the middle of one of our most
ambitious project yet, supporting Partners in Health and the Sierra Leonean ministry
of health at staffing, supplying, and building a maternal care center, a NICU and new
pediatric ward at Koidu government hospital. I mean, we’ve raised more money for charity
in the last 12 months than in any year in Nerdfighteria’s history. By like over a
million dollars.
And I’ve also been really encouraged by the non-monetary stuff that’s happening.
Whether that’s people planning days of service together, or just being kind to strangers
in comments to life spirits in difficult times. So when was the golden age of Vlogbrothers?
Was it in March 2007 when over half of our viewers participated in the first community project?
Or May of 2014 when our Youtube channel was perilously close to US pop culture.
I’m sure lots of different people who have watched this channel at various times
over the years would cite lots of different golden ages. But for me, it’s now.
I’ve needed this space in 2020 more than ever. So thank you for being here with us,
and thank you for working together to make the community spaces, from
Reddit to the comments section, kind and generous.
Hank, I’ll see you tomorrow. I almost said on Friday. But I won’t.
I mean, I’ll see myself on Friday.