How It’s Going

Despite my gap in posting Groaner Dads, getting back to it has been helpful in driving traffic and subscribers for the Bulmash Media channel on YouTube. I’m currently over 2 weeks on my buffer of posted/scheduled videos and I hope to get a few weeks further this week.

And the progress toward making money?

The most popular video so far has been the Three Conspiracy Theorists dad joke, which had over 1,400 views. Over the past 4 weeks, I’ve had 7.6k views, 8.4 hours watched, and picked up 7 subscribers. That might sound like a pittance, but you have to start somewhere.

To qualify to apply for revenue sharing, I need to increase views by about 41x and subscribers by 100x.

When I launch long-form content in a few months with the Hell on $5 A Day podcast, the number of subscribers needed to apply to earn money on your content is the same, but the engagement rate changes to 4,000 hours viewed in a year for long form content. So if you put out 24 ten-minute videos and they get 1,000 (full) views each, you’re set.

That doesn’t really feel fair to the shorts producers until you consider the length of a short. Groaner Dad shorts average around 15 seconds. To get to 4,000 hours with 15-second shorts would take 960,000 shorts views. That said, you get 4x longer to get the 4,000 long-form hours than the 1,000,000 short-form views.

What’s the end game?

I want to sell more novels in the first month of release with each successive novel. The shorts help build up positive juju for the Bulmash Media channel, so there’s a possibility of some better numbers when the podcast launches. The hope is the podcast draws in more fans for Hell on $5 A Day and some of those fans buy Sodom All Over Again. As the podcast continues, there’s more people getting hip to it, the audience grows, and some of those buy a book, and some of those buy one or both books when the podcast finishes.

If that works out well enough, I’ll go into production on a Sodom All Over Again podcast to keep building momentum for the release of New York By Midnight, then that gets a podcast to build up momentum for the next. Wash, rinse, repeat until I decide to do something else. There are 10 novels plotted just in the Hell on $5 A Day universe.

I basically have until the end of 2026 to call this experiment a success or failure. The goals are modest: at least get within view of the point I can try to get paid by YouTube (maybe 70% there), sell 400 copies of my 3rd novel in the first week.

Wish me luck.