I remember Matt Chat from way back. He always seemed to have between 500 and 2000 views for his videos. They always seemed to be better than the viewing figures would suggest. He seemed to have his own interesting niche. But it was always a bit confusing as to why he never grew that much over time. Even today he still has sub-20k subscribers, which I still find odd.
Anyway, the stats of what's in his head currently regardless of any patreon funding will have a huge impact on his daily psyche.
Some stats on Matt Chat that I've endeavoured to produce since reading this thread this morning:
Chart 1: Each MattChat video's individual views, from the first to the latest:
nb: #39 has a part one and a part two, as does #50. #78 has three parts. Because back then video limits were just 10 minutes, and he was still establishing in his own mind how he wanted to count episodes. As such, the numbering is slightly off, but since it's so squashed-up it doesn't matter, it's impossible to tie one video to one line anyway. There is also a duplicated re-uploaded #369 alongside it's original.
nb: There is no MattChat#339 on his channel. Did he have a math fail or has it been removed by his or others means. Who knows.
nb: Viewing figures now do not represent viewing figures upon a video's release. One would expect higher views the older the video is, as per common sense. However, this would represent an even trend across all videos, so the general impression is still the same.
From Matt's point of view, when he looks at his stats, he hasn't had a 20k+ video since he interviewed Chris Avellone about Torment in 2014.
Prior to then, he'd have varying spikes of greater interest that would have been hugely motivational to continue, even though he clearly only has 4 MattChat's that are clearly the most popular:
#221: Seth Robin's Early Days
#123: Might and Magic VI Mandate From Heaven
#86: Bard's Tale 4 and Wasteland II with Rebecca Heineman
#54: Quake with John Romero
He's gone an awfully long time without any significantly noticeably 'above average' popularity video. In fact, since this decline set in, he's even had about a half a dozen MattChats which still haven't even exceeded 1,000 views, even after years on the shelf.
But individual views aren't overly useful by themselves. As the rules have changed, so have Matt's videos. for the first year and a half he was limited to 10 minutes. When this rule was lifted his videos gradually increased in length, a sort of very gradual creep over all the years to where they can now be hours long.
So where he used to post about 40-50 MattChats a year, from 2017 onwards he started to reduce the number of MattChats being released, from 31 in 2017 to just 16 in 2021. Even though the total time required to watch all his videos might have actually increased.
So let's look at his total annual views, which were the golden MattChat years:
It's a similar story, but, of course, we need to divide the total views by the number of videos, because 44 ten minute videos would likely get more total views than 10 one hour videos, if all the videos got 2,000 views. So what his historical per-video viewership:
And yes, it's not quite as bad a situation as the previous graph suggested, he's not actually been on continual decline since 2014, in fact he's had lots of little improvements from bad years.
But still not really getting any 'big hits', which will likely create a lot of built up frustration.
I suspect he's happy with 2,000 views per vid, as one should be, many would love that, but it's not hugely profitable to play youtube on those numbers and it wouldn't take much change in the patreon feed to set the panic in. And when you've been at something for 14 years and not much has changed it can sometimes feel like your running to stand still.
I'm glad some rich folk have come forward to help out, for a lot of youtubers who don't have good connections they probably wouldn't have kept going much beyond 2015/6. Such is the precarious and often depressing side of Youtube (and fame-based industries generally).