Hey everyone, it's Jacqueline for Pixie Dust PhD. It's June 2020 now so it
is time for the month 4 creator update. Per tradition this is not really about
Disney or Disney Vacation Club or Walt Disney World; this is really about
YouTube, and me as a creator. We will go over the analytics of course, I think
it's interesting to track that month to month. I'm going to spend most of the
video today talking about racial justice. And this won't be an in-depth, scholarly
conversation by any means; it will probably be relatively broad and short,
but if you're interested in having that kind of conversation with me stay tuned.
The date I'm filming this is Saturday, June 6th. I started my channel on
February 10th so it's actually a little bit early to do analytics right now. My
next week at work is just super busy and I don't think that I'll have time to do
the whole video during the work week, so instead I'm going to do a lot of the
video now and then we'll have a cut to future Jacqueline to talk about analytics
closer to June 10th. But before we get into analytics with future Jacqueline I
really want to spend some time to talk about Black Lives Matter. I did not have
a dedicated video on the channel for Black Lives Matter; this is something I
went back and forth about for a while. In the past to monthly creator updates I
noted that my productivity had been low and I wasn't really getting head on
videos, and I actually managed to solve that this month largely in part because
I had a four-day weekend in May that allowed me to get pretty far ahead
honestly. So after recent events of police brutality I considered using this
platform to amplify relevant voices, websites, resources, places you can donate,
all that kind of thing, and as you can tell by my channel I ended up not doing
that. There were a variety of factors that went into this. One is I don't have
a huge audience on YouTube so I don't feel a huge amount of pressure to use my
platform for that kind of change. The second is I like YouTube and I think
it's really great, and again I'm so thankful for everyone who does have a
bigger platform that was using their platform for good in this moment in time,
but YouTube to me as a viewer feels like the person on the video is talking AT
the audience and it's not as much as the conversations I think something as
important as Black Lives Matter should be. So I've really been focusing my efforts
for Black Lives Matter in my personal life through conversations with
colleagues, people with differing opinions from me, trying to spread
education and resources as much as I can. Some of my work focuses on this also;
part of my work portfolio focuses on equity in the workplace, and I truly mean
equity and not equal opportunity, so I have been using my work platform more
than like my Disney platform, which is tiny and I don't even have a Disney
platform let's be honest. I have made some posts and done some engagement on
my Disney Twitter @PixieDustPhD around Black Lives Matters, but even with
Twitter the character limitations feel limiting for a conversation this
big and this important and that I think a lot of people need more coaching and
coaxing through then really a tweet will allow for. So yeah, a lot of my efforts
have been focused around what I do at work as well as in my personal life.
Honestly I've been slammed at work, and that's totally fine with me and
I'm happy to put in the extra hours for a cause this important; but so even
though I thought really hard maybe about interrupting the schedule that I had
created since I had gotten far ahead on my videos and putting something out I
really just didn't have the time or energy. And I know that that is coming
from a place of privilege--where I am allowed to take a time out from this and
not everybody has that privilege. I would love to be able to say that I am shocked
and horrified and surprised that all the recent events, but I'm not. If you have
been paying attention to our country this shouldn't come as a surprise.
I am very pleasantly surprised that apparently we decided as a whole unit, as
a country in general, that we're fed up and that we're not going to take this
anymore. So the response has been lovely and
surprising, and I'm really proud of a lot of the non-Black people of color and
White folks that have shown up to this fight, especially in my personal network.
As far as donations I did have a little bit of analysis paralysis. As you can
probably tell from this channel I am really detail-oriented, I like to read
the fine print, I like to sort of know all the terms and conditions going into
things. So yeah it took me a while to settle on organizations that I felt really good
about if i donated here my money would go towards actually a good cause and not
to overhead, and not to just paying CEOs a ton of money, etc. There are so many
amazing organizations fighting for equity, as well as just Black owned
organizations that need help right now. And if you are overwhelmed by the
choices I'm just gonna highlight a couple places that resonated strongly
with me that I felt really great about donating to. Note that I'm gonna look
down at my phone a little bit because I will be reading mission statements to
make sure that I don't misrepresent these organizations in any way. And these
organizations that I'm about to highlight focus on things outside of the
protest, and yes I think it's super important to support the peaceful
protests and note that looters aren't protesters and don't get those confused,
but the racism in our country is systemic meaning it reaches way more
than just police brutality--it really affects the whole system. That
means everything from housing, education, health care, and so much more; your daily
existence is affected by this racism. So in identifying organizations that I
wanted to donate to I wanted to donate to something that resonated with me and
I care so much about mental health. One of the organization's I donated to is
called the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective, it's called BEAM, B-E-A-M,
for short. And their brief mission statement is BEAM is a training, movement
building, and grant-making organization dedicated to the healing, wellness, and
liberation of Black and marginalized communities. Their vision: BEAM envisions
a world where there are no barriers to Black healing. And that felt so important
to me and so I did donate to that cause and I will link them down below. A
similar organization that I donated to is called the Loveland Foundation. The
Loveland Foundation is committed to showing up for communities of color in
unique and powerful ways with a particular focus on Black women and
girls. Their resources and initiatives are collaborative, and they prioritize
opportunity, access, validation, and healing. The Loveland Foundation has a
therapy fund and donations to this help fund therapy sessions for Black women
and girls. For those of you who don't know therapy can be extremely expensive.
In the area that I live in the average I think is around $200 a session. The
Loveland Foundation says that nationally it's anywhere between 80 to 200 dollars,
so I guess I live on the high end of things, but it's really expensive is the
point. And access to mental care is so important. And while I donated to several
other organizations, the last one I'm going to highlight in this video is the
EMW Women's Surgical Center located in Kentucky. Now, I have no personal ties to
Kentucky, but what I found out through some research is that EMW Women's
Surgical is the only legal abortion clinic in the entire state and it is one
of six Black owned clinics in the country. Access to health care is a huge
issue in this country, and anytime there's a general issue you can have a
good bet that it will be so much worse for people of color. In particular
reproductive health care for black women in this country is extremely subpar. So
again, this is a cause that resonated deeply with me and I know that my money
will be in good hands there. If you have the means I really encourage you to
donate somewhere that matters to you. A one-time lump-sum donation right now is
great for right now, but also you have the means consider setting up a
recurring payment. Recurring payments help keep programs stable over time
rather than just this one influx spike of donations. Even just five dollars a
month or ten dollars, whatever you can afford, can make a really big difference
for an organization. To bring this back to Disney: I do want to emphasize again
that I am really thankful for all the folks who have larger platforms that
have been speaking out on YouTube, on Twitter, on Instagram, anywhere; and I
trust that a lot of those folks are doing the hard work in their personal
lives as well. It's been really illuminating, especially over on Twitter,
to see all of the racists come out in force. Of course it's really
disappointing to know that those folks exist in the Disney community to begin
with. Disney is not a banner of equity by any means in the corporate world, but so
much of at least the Disney parks experience for me personally is that
everyone deserves that kind of joy, everyone has that kid inside of them,
it's really universal. That's a feeling to me that transcends all boundaries, and
I would hope that a community so invested and that feeling would
understand how that applies to the broader context, but that hasn't
necessarily been the case. That being said there are still a ton of amazing
people, and like I said I'm very thankful for them. If you've watched my monthly
crater updates before you know that I don't like Instagram as much as Twitter
or YouTube in general in the Disney community, and that continued to be true
through all of this--even with just coronavirus I felt like Instagram was
getting pretty gross, and now with Black Lives Matter... it's so bizarre to see
these people making sure they stay on brand, on Disney brand, while they're
trying to promote a movement. It just feels really hollow
when you post a picture of like you and Princess Tiana and the entire caption
is just Black Lives Matter and nothing more, no more context, no resources, not
using your platform for anything. And the weirdest part is I don't follow very
many people on Instagram, and yet I still see these posts from these apparently
very famous Disney influencers that I don't personally follow, but they just
clog my feed. So I have really put Instagram aside for many, many weeks now.
There's a somewhat pervasive argument through Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, all
that, that you know the Disney content creators are like a respite from the
real world. And I don't disagree with that, and obviously this is the first
Black Lives Matter post that I'm making, but while the videos in your
content can be a respite I do think it should come at least with some
meaningful acknowledgement of what's happening right now. And my biggest wish
is that this doesn't go away after the "right now" portion is over. Like
I said earlier, this has been happening for a long time and if we don't continue
to put pressure on authorities this will continue to happen. So continue to
protest, continue to donate, and vote! And not just in the presidential election,
that is very important don't get me wrong, but you need to make change at the
local level also. Things like your district attorney, the police chief,
your mayor, who's on City Council, pay attention to policies and bills that are
being voted on. All of this matters because like I said this is a systemic
issue, and all these things will affect more than just police brutality but the
everyday existence of Black folks and other marginalized people in your life. I
know that this can be tiring, and exhausting, and so also be sure to take
care of yourself because we are in the long haul--this will be a long fight. We
need to make sure that you keep that fire burning in you and that energy
maintained throughout. Let me know what organizations you identified that
resonate with you that you have donated to, or if you can't due to your financial
situation you at least want to amplify. I would be happy to try to amplify those
in my tiny itty bitty Disney community for you.
Hey everyone it's June 10th now so let's go ahead and look at the analytics for
the channel. For month four I've run analytics from May 10th through June 9th.
I got 295 views with 161 unique viewers. There were 24.3 hours watch time,
and average duration is now 4 minutes and 57 seconds.
The average view duration in percent is 44.3%. I have
about 3500 impressions, and around 15.5% of those
were from YouTube recommending my content. Watch time from those not subscribed is
80.9%, and I got nine new subscribers this month. So all the
metrics actually trended in the way that I was hoping they would this month, and
I'm pretty surprised because for the past several weeks I haven't been
promoting the channel very much on other social media. My new subscribers is still
down from the first month and the second month where I got 14 and then 11 new
subscribers, the last month I only got five, and this month I got nine, so that
is definitely progress. The other thing I'm very pleased with is average view
duration; month 1 the average view duration was under 2 minutes, and now we
are at almost 5 minutes, and that percentage has also jumped about 10
percent. And even though I've sort of taken a break from promoting the YouTube
channel on other social media I still AM really pretty active on Twitter these
days. I now have 190 followers, so pretty close to 200 which blows my mind, and I'm
following 332 accounts. As I said earlier I have basically taken a break from
Instagram. I actually checked and I haven't posted in over a month, so
unsurprisingly I lost two followers. I'm actually surprised it wasn't more
considering the inactivity on that account. So I have 57 followers on
Instagram, and I'm following 107 accounts. While this is just a side creative hobby,
something for me to do and a place for me to dump all the Disney information in
my brain, of course I still want to be successful; and I'm not really sure how
to define successful, but it is nice that in most of these metrics the channel is
trending month-to-month in an upward trajectory. So that is--it's good and it
feels nice. And I mentioned this last month, but the DVC content still is doing
well--much better than the Walt Disney World content. So life time for the
channel I have 675 views and 40 subscribers. There are 44.3 watch hours
total. And average view duration is now up to 3 minutes and 56 seconds, largely
thanks to the big spike I had this month in average
view duration. That average view duration translates to 40.6%.
Overall, that's still a little lower than I'm hoping for but it is trending upward
and so I'm just gonna try to stay positive about that. Lifetime on the
channel I have about 8500 impressions, and around 12%
of those are from YouTube recommending my content. And unsurprisingly lifetime on
the channel about 80.7% of the watches on my channel are
from people not subscribed. So as I've mentioned in previous months subscribers
is definitely the metric that I am struggling with the most, that continues
to be true. I did want to mention that a lot of youtubers, and outside of just
Disney YouTube but youtubers in general, are donating all of their ad revenue
from Adsense to Black Lives Matter related causes. I think that's amazing
and I would definitely do that if I had Adsense revenue, but obviously from my
lifetime channel stats were not there yet. I am donating my personal funds as I
can, and I hope that you do the same even if you don't have Adsense revenue. So
those are the stats for the channel this month. If there are stats that I'm not
listing that you would be interested in knowing about definitely let me know in
the comments below and I'll start adding those in, and I can reply to you for the
current stats right now. And if there are any topics that you want me to make
videos for also let me know. You can let me know in any video, but these
videos are really meant to be more interactive as well as reflective for me
in order to know how the channel is doing what people want, etc., so any ideas
you have I'm always open to. I hope you're taking really good care of
yourself physically and mentally, and remember that this is a long journey.
Stay energized, and we'll see you next time at Pixie Dust PhD!