The Proud Failure of YouTube

12 Jul, 2026

How I'd redo it all in 2013, if I could

In 2026, you get to see the humble beginnings of my channel up above!

A Toshiba Satellite L500. I "won" it by writing a hand written essay about how it would help me with my homework. It did. And it still works too.

Not as well as I'd like after almost 17 years. I mean, it's only got 4GB RAM and around 256GB HDD on Intel. But it managed to render this, after almost 48 hrs of screaming for it's life.

At the start, I was mostly learning from other creators channels. Clicking around, finding effects, stages and motions. Then it came to trying to motion create.

I found a real fun niche that wasn't even monetized until 2021.

Well after people gave a crap about what I was helping build to see online.

Oh well. I am proud of what I created.

Learning all what I did over the years served me well.

Too bad I didn't realize what I was creating until the momentum Naruto ran away the moment I started thinking more like a creative youtuber.

I guess we call them "Content Creators/Influencers" now.

The most viewed moments of my channel, 2016-2019, were great. For someone who prides themselves on seeing things in real-time, the paralysis of taking action that lines my pockets? I'm horrible at that.

I'm great at helping other's reframe how to make money doing the same shit I do, at least.

I've seen the same models I rig for MMD make money for others, and then I end up studying where I went "wrong" treating my hobby like a hobby that could make money.

So, to answer how I'd re-do it all if I could after 13 years of $140~ max in revenue?

I'd:

1. Have known that it's boring, but owning your handle as a domain makes sure you're not staring at a "Premium" or "Make Offer" tag later. They can be cheap too, anything .com, .site, .shop tends to be less than $5 CAD a year, and about $40 to renew. Most registrars let you subdomain a lot to fit your needs. This site was built on a subdomain that costs me about $18/year.
2. Setup Stripe/Tax forms. Then connect your payment method to AdSense YouTube as soon as 1000 subs were reached, Ko-fi for a tipjar, and whatever else has a creator program. For me, that'd have been in 2017, four years before I monetized my channel. I missed out on a lot of business emails forgetting people would email what's on my channel.
3. Have chosen to do more tutorials when people were looking for it, instead of always posting copyrighted materials. Post what's fun, but like...maybe balancing it with teaching what you know? I wish I'd done that from the start. Did you know educational niches tend to have the highest cost per click that advertisers pay?
4. Attached my domain to Carrd and Bearblog, with a one time upgrade to support tiny web projects and get great light-weight site builders that work as containers for complex sites. Both options are easy to structure your sites with subdomains, and since Carrd isn't a blogging platform, iframes help create unique link-in-bio sites.
5. Blogged my thoughts sooner. I've been holding in a lot despite very detailed descriptions on my YouTube Channel. But many people don't read those.

All of this is why I focused on my building out my website, archiving my projects, and typing out my thoughts as if they'll help someone.

Oh well, I still enjoy what I do and make. Even if nothing comes of it but a chuckle at the end of the day.

The line that made me type out loud today:

“Even when you messed up, you were always a proud failure from my point of view.” - Hinata, Naruto Episode 59

#mmd #thoughts #youtube