STH Q2 2023 Update A Letter from the Editor Multi

Every quarter I like to do a little update just to give our readers a behind-the-scenes look at what is happening. Oftentimes there is a big difference between what folks see publicly and the inner workings of STH, so I like to peel that back. In this edition, I want to go into how we are almost accidentally creating another channel for STH and some of the future plans. I also have an ask of our readers.

If you want to check out how this series has evolved, here are the links to the previous ones:

That list is getting quite long so we updated the format for 2023.

We tried adding a second video editor for YouTube videos over the last quarter. Ultimately we need one to increase our video throughput. Part of that challenge, and our ability to get video out, has been that I have only been home in Austin 10 of the past 45 days. Oh, and I got married last weekend in Los Angeles. We are going to have a bigger ceremony in October, but yes, that happened at our old college campus (Loyola Marymount in LA.)

Things are quite busy personally as one might guess. We are hoping to start a family in late 2024. In the meantime, I now have a new four-legged friend.

One of the projects I hope to do over the next month is to take some of our content, plus some other bits, and start doing analyst reports as paid downloads. We need to have a product, and this is perhaps the most obvious. There is a decent market for these analyst reports, and often the analysts who are doing these reports are sourcing data from STH anyway. Publication #1 is STH and will continue to be. Publication #2 is going to be YouTube as that is on its path. Publication #3 is likely going to be these analyst reports. If folks have ideas for what their companies may look to purchase from analyst reports feel free to let me know.

Later in 2023, we are going to talk about some of the bigger infrastructure projects for this year, but I might wait until they are ready before showing them off.

In our Q1 Letter from the Editor, I focused on some of the behind-the-scenes happenings at STH. Even since then, some may have noticed that the STH YouTube channel has taken off like a rocket ship. While in Taipei, we had a few folks ask about this, and here is a simple visual:

It may be small, but it is growing very fast. Whereas the STH YouTube channel has around 188K subs as of the time of penning this, the main site would be a ~1M subscriber YouTube channel in terms of engagement, assuming the engagement level held constant.

Currently, we are seeing views equal to 50-75% of our subscriber count on each video. For some frame of reference, many larger YouTube channels often get 10-20% so we are expecting that to change over time, but our current trajectory is very strong. Perhaps this summer it will slow, but it is on track to double in ~10 months in both subscribers and monthly views.

That growth rate and ratio are important. The STH YouTube was ~1/10th the size of the STH main site on 9/30/2022 when we hit 100K subscribers. Three quarters later it is on track to be ~18-19% of the size. My original stretch goal of hitting 170K subscribers by the end of 2023 is now silly, and the number might be more like 270K or around 27% the size of the STH main site.

Usually, everything slows for STH over the summer, but if we kept this growth rate, we will be treating STH YouTube as its own “publication” later this year or next year. When we started the channel, our assumption was that it was going to be the same audience. Now, we know they are effectively different audiences. That was my miss. The impact is that it will become its own thing.

It has been fun to see STH grow. Walking into one of the exhibition halls at Computex 2023, AIC had a booth near the door in the front row, and someone pointed out our AIC SB407-TU 60-bay Storage Server video was playing in the booth.

While personally I like to read, we also need to recognize that the YouTube channel is growing rapidly. We have been getting many companies interested in video-only content recently, but I have been pushing back against this concept. At the same time, we are now getting around 8 requests to sponsor videos per week, while only publishing 4-8 videos per month.

It seems like the video side is taking on a life of its own as its own publication, and that was not the expectation even a year ago.

Did you know STH has a weekly newsletter that comes out Saturday with curated “Top 5” pieces from the week? We know you cannot visit every day, so we can deliver our picks for weekend reading directly to your inbox. Subscribing to the newsletter is easy. Here is the form.

We are not selling your e-mail addresses and MailChimp聽is managing everything at this point so you can subscribe and unsubscribe from the list as you want.

We are not promoting the newsletter via overlays and pop-ups. Those are very effective, but they are bad for readers. I do not like them, so as long as I have a say, we are not going to have newsletter signup overlays. I run STH as something I would want to visit daily even if I did not work on it.

Finally, subscribe to our YouTube and check it out here. Since that is a big focus at this point.

Subscribing to STH’s newsletter helps you see my favorite pieces of each week and a preview of the next week. Subscribing to the STH YouTube channel also helps us demonstrate our reach beyond just the website. Sometimes, doing things like showing power consumption or fan noise is easier than writing about it. This has also been something important for STH over the past few months. We are having to demonstrate reach, and simple things like subscriber counts help explain reach.

Again, a huge part of this journey is all of the folks making STH an amazing community. That includes our readers, viewers, our team, forum moderators, folks at vendors, and more. Hopefully, as we move into our new facilities we can expand the team to bring even better content to the STH community.

Just to give some perspective on how rough it is right now behind the scenes, this piece was planned to go-live weeks ago, but it is now just barely making it in the Q2 timeframe.