2022 Wrapped - Adocasts Monthly

Issue #4

Adocasts 2022 Wrapped — 2022 Wrapped, Adocasts Monthly

Happy New Year, everyone! First I want to thank you all for your support, questions, feedback, and love throughout 2022! Your kind words and love, help us keep posting week after week. Your questions keep our ever growing queue of lesson ideas growing. And, your feedback helps us improve our craft.

2022 was a great year of growth for us compared to 2021, so let's take a step back and look at what we accomplished. Then, we'll look forward at what's ahead in 2023.

2022 Analytics

In 2022 we released 46 lessons, including our streams, on Adocasts. The goal we set for 2022 was 52, so we were just shy but still fairly close.

On YouTube, we accumulated over 77,000 video views, a 136% increase from 2021. As for the Adocasts site, we unfortunately only have analytics from April onward, but we still managed just under 75,000 views in that time.

In 2021, we had 1,600 watch time hours on YouTube. Throughout 2022 our videos were watched for 4,700 hours, which is a lovely 189% increase! This also put us over the YouTube Partner Program requirements, which we were accepted into in early November. Thanks to this, we're now consistently earning enough every month to pay for our site's server. 🎉

Most Viewed Lessons From 2022

Of the 46 lessons we released over the course of 2022, below are the top five most viewed lessons that were published in 2022.

I'm honestly surprised to see the Adonis & Inertia: Ep 5 ranked so highly. When we made this lesson, the thought was that it'd just be a filler lesson to help us cut out fluff down the road, but here it is in our top five.

Most Viewed Lessons in 2022

Now let's take a step back and see which of our evergreen content continued to pull in the views. Here's our top five most viewed in 2022 regardless of publish date.

This year we're seeing a nice shift in our evergreen content. Defining Model Relationships was the only one from this list and the only AdonisJS lesson to make the list in 2021. It'll be fun to see what out of this list remains next year! Have any thoughts on which will hang around?

Goal Setting for 2023

Now, let's take a moment to set some goals for 2023. Like always these goals are just nice to haves, they make zero influence over the content we produce.

Content Goals

In late 2022, we made the decision to stop producing written content along with our video lessons and instead just focus our energy on the videos. This change opened up about half of our time, which in turn, enabled us to start producing two videos per week instead of just one.

Since this change our schedule has been Thursdays at 9AM EST and Sundays at 9AM EST.

So far, this has been pretty sustainable for us, so we'll keep at it going into 2023. Because of this, we're going to double our output goal for 2023 and aim to release 85 lessons!

Again, we're never going to release a lesson just to keep schedule. It'll need to meet our quality threshold before going out. As with in the past, if a lesson doesn't meet our quality requirements, we'll stream or skip posting for that scheduled slot and remake that lesson.

Analytic Goals

It's always hard to set analytic goals, especially since we currently can't really look back year-over-year on our site's analytics since it only goes back to April 2022. We switched to Plausible shortly after switching to GA4, so we lost our Universal Analytics numbers since those aren't carried over to GA4.

So, we'll just say it'd be awesome to see us crack six figures on both YouTube and the site in 2023, reaching 100,000 views in a 365 day period. Cracking 10,000 subscribers would also be awesome!

Please remember, our subscriber count is skewed since the Adocasts YouTube account was previously used as a gaming channel about ten years ago.

Coming Soon to Adocasts

Last but not least, let's talk about what's going to be coming at Adocasts. If you follow us on Twitter or Mastodon, you've probably seen the teasers we've put out about the site redesign we're working on.

It started out as a home page redesign, which we badly need, but then it spiraled from there into a whole redesign, even incorporating Unpoly.

One nice new feature that'll be coming is a mini-player so you can continue watching a lesson as you browse across the Adocasts site.

Also, we'll be adding a request portal for lesson requests. We keep a notebook and jot down the requests you all send us, but they do easily get lost and misprioritized that way. This portal will help us all see what's been requested, vote on what we'd like to see most, and see what's been accepted or declined by the Adocasts team.

Adocasts Subscription

Along with, or shortly after, the redesign release we'll also be launching a new subscription-based product, with the additional option of a lifetime plan for those like me who dislike subscriptions.

We're still hammering out the details of what all this will entail, but we can safely say it'll provide:

An ad-free experience for members on the Adocasts site
Early access to all scheduled lessons
Priority lesson requests, meaning if we accept your request, it'll move to the top of our request list.
Special badge for your profile across the Adocasts site
Plus more

We'll announce more about this as we get closer to launch.

Here's To 2023

So, here's to 2023! We, at Adocasts, hope the new year brings exciting opportunities, awesome projects, and educational growth for everyone!

Thank you, again, for all your support throughout 2022. We took the majority of the last week of 2022 off to reset & refresh. We'll be back to our regular schedule starting Thursday January 5th, 2023.

Happy New Year! 😊