Welcome to October, TILvids community! I’ve decided I’m going to try to do these updates at the beginning of the month, so as to retroactively look at how things went the previous month, and then hopefully highlight anything I’m hoping to see in the next month.

Some of the main highlights in September:

• I have to open with great news: we added a number of Patrons this month! This is fantastic, and I’m so thankful for their help and support. Right now, I’m paying all the costs to run TILvids, and while it’s manageable for the moment, that’s going to become less and less true as the site grows. Donating to TILvids is how we’re going to make sure we can run the site without any video ads or data harvesting. Thanks so much to our patrons Jerome, Vegard, JC, Jeena, and Jason Resch (who is also contributing some great content to the site, please check out his channel)!

• I added our first exclusive content to the site. I’m making this content under the channel/production name “Smartyflix”. Feel free to check it out, the video about the History of Mozilla Firefox is my favorite!

• I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of October 2nd, 2020, we currently have 19,623 video views, 158 users, and 64.4GB of local videos.

For October, I’m hoping to see a few things happen:

1. Right now (as I’m typing this post), I’m upgrading our server. I’m adding more cores for processing video transcoding, more memory (which should help the site generally load faster), doubling our storage space, and upgrading the connection speed. All of this is made possible from our generous patrons, and should help the site perform better overall!

2. I’m hoping to continue to make some exclusive content! I’m currently working on a video about software tools that were used by 90s kids, hoping to get that done this weekend. I have a few other show ideas already baking.

3. I’m continuing to add content to the site. We have a few creators uploading their own content (which is fantastic, because it’s less work for me, shout-out to Tyler’s Tech for uploading tons of awesome Linux distro content), and I also try to grab a few new videos each night from our creators and from Creative Commons that I think people might find interesting.

4. I’m still constantly searching for new creators for the site. I would say I generally reach out to a 5-10 per week. If you see anyone that should be on the site, let me know, or even better reach out to them and let THEM know; it’s much more powerful when their own fans ask them to support another site.

5. We now have 58 users on /r/tilvids ! This is also great, because every day I try to post a “TILvids Video of the Day”. It’s hard to remember to visit TILvids every day, but these posts show up in feeds on Reddit and give people a reminder that new content is available. If you want to help the site grow, sharing this subreddit with others around Reddit is probably the biggest impact you can make.

I think that’s it for now! Thanks again to our awesome patrons, and to the community just for watching and sharing. This job I’m doing is incredibly hard (and I’m doing it in my spare time). Whenever I wonder if it’s worth it though, I think about all the people that have reached out and said how much they enjoy the community, and it gives me all the energy I need to keep going!