Maybe the hohols and the ziggers should simply stay in their containment threads. Maybe.
Ian had some peculiar fellow travelers in the years, I've simply noticed the nature of his fellow travelers (particularly the European ones) has changed a bit and has become a bit.... charged. It's like noticing how he tried to sell you overpriced mugs and fell for the Estabilished Whatevers, and let's not talk about the Varusteleka shilling.
Othais, the last couple of vids have been great, but from the depths of my heart: the new "classroom" setup is fairly inferior to the old one (it feels both cheap, boring and soulless) and the Ballistol ad in the 91/30 vid was one of the most cringe-worthy things I've ever seen, far surpassing the old "war were declared" cringe. I understand that shilling is boring and you do it only for proven products, but .... it's cringe. If I didn't know it was one of your videos and someone suggested it to me, I'd have stopped watching right there.
That said, excellent work in the last vids again.
I would love nothing more than to abandon all pretense and just cover the material but it was financially doomed. Yes it was a slow starvation but it was inevitable.
We absolutely have to take the risk of change. This plan is an attempt to negotiate expectations on two opposing sides. The other route is to "radicalize" towards drama and hope curiosity swells brand recognition before you flame out. That option, however, has poor view-to-support ratio and doesn't build trust.
So far we only have two broad types of dislike for the new format: Parasocials feel they lost a hangout buddy and antisocials don't want to play pretend with me. I am more of the latter mindset myself. But there is a silent majority and they work more strangely than we generally think. Even most patrons stay silent the whole time. I have been doing a LOT of work IRL sniffing out common viewer perceptions and they are formed on feelings and looks. I can't go vetbro or soyface, so I found a way to theme on what we already did.
Fun fact: I never wanted to do video at all. However, article writing wasn't ever going to support the work. Once we started video, our ad rate was never what the generation before us had. So we tried this new Patreon thing early. I hated ebegging but, again, no show without. It wasn't very popular at first and I remember we had some sort of explanatory announcement back when it was making $400 a month or so. Somewhere I have an email from Ian at the time, who had not signed up yet, saying something to the effect that the patron method was clearly a dead end. I try to think about that when I automatically reject change.
There sadly is a reason Primer is such a unique series. It's expensive, slow, and doesn't play well with the social media format. Because of that I have to constantly grab public attention and somehow shift it into our own expectations. It's a big job for us but no one who "gets it" realizes: you got filtered and never noticed. The majority that never get it just wander off. We have now effectively automated most of this shift and a higher % understand the product.
YT's algo shift and Utreon crashing have effectively distorted our metrics enough to hide any hard conclusions by the way. There is also going to be the usual period of people being curious pumping numbers. That means I can't say for sure if we won yet. We are still in the fog of war. I suspect I won't be sure of the effect until late winter.
There have been very noticeable changes, however, that are not necessarily public. What you might call our peer group suddenly expanded and we are getting much smoother transactions behind the scenes. A number of advertisers (other than the usual bot spam) reached out. Even just loan offers have jumped and a lot of people suddenly noticed we left WW1, though we had long ago. We are also slowly shifting our recommendation on YT, though I may still have to completely pop a new channel to escape whatever hex they put on us.
TLDR: "I rather not but I gotta," has been C&Rsenal's theme even before video.