I am Jeremy. I have been going by Joker on our main channel for almost 5 years now. Yes, that’s how long I have had a YouTube channel, and though it is monetized and is pushing two thousand subscribers, it has slowed in its growth and is lacking in forward momentum. I started the channel as a place to share my love of games, and by games, I refer to the tabletop kinds: card games, board games, RPGs, and TCGs. This was always my intention. I remember talking to Ming Chen of the show Comic Book Men back when he was a guest at my first-ever convention, Hudson Valley Comic Con, about the idea. That was two years prior to me ever starting the project.
He was co-hosting a podcast at the convention, and he was allowing people to guest on the podcast and talk about ideas they might have for making their own podcast. I said I wanted to do a podcast or a YouTube channel dedicated to tabletop games. I was going to call it TableTop Talk (later, I found out this name is already taken, though who knows if it was back then). We chatted for a bit about the idea, my passion, my board game collection, and my passion for sharing my love of games. My collection at the time took up half my bedroom, and now with the addition of my partner’s collection, we have it taking up an entire wall of shelves as well as splitting the remainder among two other households.
That conversation really spurred me into action! I was motivated, I was driven, I was passionate. I was so passionate that I didn’t do anything about it for another two years! No, really. I was a parent of a young child of ten, only being twenty-nine myself. I had just gone back to school to finish my two-year degree, and like the madman that I was, I couldn’t stop working multiple jobs at the same time. My passion got put on hold because it had to right? No one actually made money on YouTube or through Podcasts, right? Sure, I saw the people at the top doing it, but that wouldn’t be me. I’d be just shouting into the void and spending more time that I didn’t have working on something that wouldn’t benefit me monetarily or get me out of working the dead-end retail, stock, or sales jobs that I’d always found myself in.
It wasn’t until one fateful day while I was on vacation with my partner that she finally pushed me to sit down with her and make our first-ever YouTube video. I’ll link it below so you can check out how we started. We always used to take board games with us when we went on vacation. They honestly took up more space than anything else in the car and in the room. The first video was shot with terrible quality compared to now. It was edited on iMovie with basic editing. I used my phone to film it, which is no different from now, but the phone I was using back then was an iPhone 6. I look back at it, knowing I can make a better version now, but I leave it up because it was the day that I started towards my dream. It was the day I was pushed into starting towards my dream is more like it.
The rest, as they say, is history. After a while, I started to run into technical issues, issues with time investment, lighting, editing software, places to film, and just a full lack of knowledge in some areas. We weren’t really making traction until the pandemic, when we could dedicate all our time to the channel because we had nothing else to do. Or at least I didn’t. I was unemployed and bored. I only had my son half of the week. My partner ended up living with me for the first extended period of time during the pandemic, which put us in the same place to work on our little project.
Over time, the project drifted away from our initial vision. Board game content wasn’t hitting well with people. There were a lot of big people in the space, like The Dice Tower, Shut Up & Sit Down, Board Game Geek, The Gameboy Geek, and everything coming out of Geek and Sundry. It was a diluted market, and these were established brands that had already done a lot of their growth. I wasn’t funny like Shut Up & Sit Down. I didn’t have an organization behind me with celebrity name recognition like Geek and Sundry. What could set our channel apart? We couldn’t figure it out. So we started to branch out. We found out that we could make content for Unison League, which was a mobile game my partner got me into, and at the time, we were both playing. It did well for us! We started getting views and subs. They doubled, then doubled again. We were making an amazing pace. We expanded to video game content, taste test videos, and vacation vlogs, but Unison League was still carrying us. We were happy at the time to call ourselves the largest YouTube channel for Unison League content.
Eventually, the pace slowed. We had been monetized. We made the partner program, which at the time required 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. Shorts weren’t a thing back then. Unison still was carrying most of the views. We hit on some other things here and there, like a chapter-by-chapter summary and review of Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson. We had caught the car and didn’t know where to go from here. Our pace was steady but slow. Most videos weren’t seeing much traction, and most weren’t coming up on YouTube’s recommendations. We had broken our algorithmic presence. It wasn’t until last year that I finally made the decision that we needed to make a change.
We split our baby. We would try to get our main channel back to its roots (though this has been difficult), we would branch off into another channel for anime content, we would most video game content and live content to a third channel, and my partner would start her own channel. We were building a brand family all under the umbrella of one company. That’s where we find ourselves now. The third channel has been stagnant for some time, and we are unsure what to do with it. Our main channel has remained in relatively the same state, and our second channel, “This Week In Weeb,” has had some steady growth, but it is new and not close to monetized.
To everyone reading this. We hope to one day look back at this story as the beginning to something amazing and we know that when we get there, it will be all of you that helped get us there. Everyone within our circle that has watching, commented, and participated in our content between friends, family, and loyal fans since the beginning. We are chugging along towards getting our second and third channel monetized and it is a journey we are exciting to take on the challenges ahead. With the creation of this blog, our Twitter Account, our Instagram, and our narrowing in on the different content for each of the channels, we know we will see everything take off and we are excited for you all to share in that. Thank you and stay tuned!