I finished Uni on June 8th, took a brief holiday with my family, and had a week off from working on anything creative. I check YouTube almost every day and noticed the sub count continue to grow while Liam and Frank ran the channel as A.I. Industries.
Liam admitted to me on the 15th of June, before we recorded one of my Friday Night Fun videos, that the fact that the channel has been dormant for the past month is entirely his fault. Who can blame him. The guy has 14k subs! His work is very good and the AIM channel has been growing, so there haven't been any negative effects of neglecting the channel for a bit.
Nevertheless, we have a Majora's Mask recording session scheduled for Monday the 25th. If we don't discuss plans for AIM tomorrow (working on comics), then we will probably do so at the recording session. My thoughts currently are to do something to celebrate 200 subs, officially reintegrate Frank into the channel and rebrand ourselves as AIM again (hopefully with a new logo). I also want to revive Quasar, maybe A.M. as well. I want the three of us to have some discussions about how we're going to go about this new era that almost certainly awaits us.
We've been through a rough patch for the past four years, largely because of Frank's availability. It's broad to say that. Views have been up and down on occasion. In mid-2016 we declared ourselves officially IM and renamed everything. The first downturn in views, subscriber growth, and watch time was in 2016, followed by an incredible 2017 in which we skyrocketed from 47 to 113 subscribers. The trend continues in 2018 when we have now reached 200, a bigger growth than in 2017! Almost every year before 2017, we created a new show because one of us was unavailable. In 2013 we created IM, in 2014 AM, 2015 with AI, and 2016 with GM Industries. During a tough year for myself one of the things that I stuck to was uploading videos for AIM in 2017. However, this year is the first in my entire YouTube career (since 2010) that I stopped even making videos. I don't like centering the channel around myself, but this was obviously a key factor in the year so far.
I look forward to our Monday recording session. It will be a breath of fresh air after some head-down-bum-up time in the earlier part of this year. The road ahead is still foggy, but I have confidence for the time being. I always love to try new things so you'll never know what sort of stuff we might cook up in the time ahead.
Bye All!
