This is by no means stellar in the world of Shorts (the top ones get millions of views) but this is an instant outlier for my channel and is great to see the potential it implies. My new channel is @thesmallcrown if you are interested in taking a look. 4 shorts videos in and the research I did before launching this channel is already proving true. The channel has jumped to 74 subscribers in 2 days since launch mostly from the outlier video. Viewership is mostly 24-44 year old women which is the demographic I was wanting to target. I think the cute kids in the video is helping that. The viewership has shifted from predominantly Australia and India to USA, Australia and United Kingdom. This channel is part of my strategy to have a flywheel of content that leads to itself. Online viewership builds brand awareness and evidence of people enjoying the experience. It gives me a catalogue to point people to for live bookings at festivals and events that I can charge for, which builds my digital content for the channel by recording at the event. As viewership grows I get to be my own brand sponsor to promote shows and other products people can purchase or shows I want to point them to online (eg the web series I am writing that will be on another channel). One feeds the other. I was out a another community festival yesterday doing it all again. Got 20-30 usable clips of people playing and had two people yesterday asking me about coming to other live event they are running. At this stage - yes - it is an hours of my time with no direct return - but I call this the capital investment in building the product. I know a few other people in here are doing stuff on YouTube - what are you working on for your channel atm?

I started a new YouTube channel as part of a content flywheel designed to drive online and offline growth. I did a lot of research first to find the approach to support my IRL business activities and I am excited to finally have enough content ready to edit to get it started. I have started this channel as a Shorts first channel - I will add long form later but the start of this is with clips of people playing The Pop Up Game Show (TPUGS) activities. I got to attend a local community festival and had over 20 groups come through to play and agree to be filmed. I designed TPUGS to be a multichannel experience that drives income from multiple sources: - sessions that can tour my OSHC groups as a purchasable experience, - supported by games played on a YT channel to drive demand, - the potential for that channel to be monetised to bring in direct income from YT - bring sponsors for the IRL sessions and online content. So I have 21 viable clips from that first session. I am attending another festival tomorrow and expect to get double that. It is so interesting watching a new channel and seeing the views and watch time develop. Each of the new videos hit around 800-900 views in the first 24 hours then plateau. This is expected on a new channel as the algorithms test the content with viewers. There is an expected spike coming later when the system works out who the audience is. One of the videos has had it's first spike reaching around 3000 views in the last day or so. The strategy is unfolding and I am excited to see it beginning.

Popping this here in full but will cut it up and drop out any nuggets from it separately as well. Krystal is doing a great job building a Film Festival in Brisbane and it was great to chat with her about it.

Amazing book - get your hands on a copy!!

Hey SPers, I just closed my latest theatre show and it went well. Still some audience development needed as we did not sell enough to break even but that was expected. It is a new target market for the venue, and none of that audience knows me or the work that I create but I was very encouraged by the comments that we had of people leaving the show. People across all demographics: we had kids around that 5-year-old age group and then kids in the target market, that sort of 8- to 12-year-old age group and then even the parents and the grandparents came out saying that they really enjoyed the show, which was quite a surprise because I didn't expect it to be so widely received. But the feedback was great and there were people that came back a second time and there were people that really pushed word of mouth and helped spread it so that the ticket sales in the last week were definitely buoyed by the conversation that was happening. This comes down to this idea of creating work that is remarkable, purely in that sense of 'worthy of being remarked about'. That's literally what remarkable means and it's what I'm aiming for with the work that I create in order to grow my audience. I think it's something that we should all be thinking about as creatives.