Greetings, and welcome to an LGR end of year thing.

Yes, it's 2019, 2018 is over with.

That's what end of year means.

And I'm just gonna do one of these videos

that it seems like everybody's doing this year.

I dunno, I haven't noticed it as much in previous years,

like doing a retrospective of your own channel's year.

And I kind of liked the few that I've seen

so I'm gonna do one myself.

I normally do something at the end of the year anyway.

Normally it's just me talking about the games

that I played.

I'm still gonna do that.

In fact, we're gonna have that towards the end of the video,

but for now let's just talk about some things

that have happened on LGR, because, man,

it's been one heck of a year.

First up, thank you extremely high amounts

for supporting the channel and watching videos,

subscribing, all that kinda stuff,

I don't normally push, like, please subscribe

or whatever because honestly I don't care

but it's been one of those things where

as I come closer to that magical million number

it's been kind of exciting to see it happen for once.

What does it actually mean?

Not much, really.

It's just a nice number, nice, big round thing

that people look at and go, yay, good for you.

So that's cool, it's nice to be there,

I guess I'll get a golden plaque or something,

I haven't heard anything from YouTube about that

so maybe I need to get in touch with someone,

I don't know how that happens.

It's been so long since I got my hundred thousand plaque.

Anyway, thank you very much for subscribing regardless,

because, yeah, it's a nice little thing that makes me think

I'm probably doing something right,

even though this microphone is really uncomfortable.

But yeah, as I was saying, numbers are cool.

Speaking of numbers, here's another one for you: 101.

That's the number one of videos

that I have released publicly on LGR this year,

or last year, 2018.

I say publicly because I post or upload

a lot of crap that goes through a bunch of iterations

and sometimes I decide it's just garbage

and it never goes up.

But 101 I think is the number of public videos

that I've actually finished,

I've got another 20 or so that I just never finished.

I'm hoping to get to those in 2019, we will see.

And for that matter let me just go ahead and say

a big, huge, massive thank you to everybody

on the LGR Patreon

for supporting, not only financially,

but just, with your advice and help

and pointing out when crap goes wrong,

because I upload things early over there,

and sometimes it's a week in advance,

or a couple of days, whatever,

people are always like, oh, hey, you missed something

or mispronounced something or you could have mentioned this

to make the video better, or what about this.

And that stuff has improved so many of my videos

over the past however many years I've been on Patreon,

but in 2018 in particular, I dunno.

So, yeah, thank you very much to you kind folks

for your watching things early and supporting the show

in all the different ways that you do.

You've been awesome.

Everybody's been awesome.

In fact, I'll just get to some of those awesome numbers.

So, check this out.

For the entire year of 2018

on LGR the channel got 73 million, 311 thousand,

186 overall views with an asterisk there

which apparently means that

some views were miscounted at some point

because of YouTube error.

There are asterisks beside every single one of these stats

I'm gonna be reading off, so, whatever man.

But anyway, this is close enough.

Basically 75 million views.

That's pretty wild.

I think that's, no, that's not the most

I've ever had in a year, 2017 had like 82 million.

So, I'm technically down on views,

but I don't really care.

That's way more than even makes some logical sense to me

like, I'm just amused that this many people

watch my stupid crap.

Like, it's just hilarious.

I talk about old computers and software and tech

and stories of companies that are long gone

and nobody cares about that.

The stuff completely irrelevant to anything going on.

Maybe that's why people really really like it,

I don't know.

Either way, thanks for watching and in such high numbers.

So, yeah.

What is, however, bigger than 2017.

So, the views, yeah, they were down

but the watch time is up, as is the average view duration,

so the watch time actually went up to 609 million,

117 thousand, 970 minutes for 2018.

And what that actually means is,

let's say if I have a 15 minute video

and you only watch five minutes of it,

that counts towards that watch time.

So, five minutes here and there, whatever.

However much people have actually spent

actively watching my stuff goes into that

and so that equates to 1,158 years and 48 days.

Good grief.

I guess what I'm saying here is,

my apologies for ruining productivity everywhere.

I mean everywhere.

We'll get to countries and demographics here

in a minute,

because I think that stuff is super fascinating.

But, yeah, average view duration is up

to eight minutes and five seconds

which is pretty crazy.

It's up 15% compared to the year before

so, maybe that doesn't matter to everyone

but it actually matters a whole lot to YouTube

in terms of pushing videos out and all that kind of stuff.

In essence, how much I get paid,

at least, that's how my understanding is.

Yeah, average view durations being higher is a good thing.

YouTube likes it, I like it, I guess that means

y'all like it too because you're watching my videos

for longer which is a good thing.

It's been pretty steady all year too.

I don't know if it's indicative of anything

I'm actually doing different, I don't know.

I don't feel like I am, but, hey, cool.

One thing that is up there: likes.

1 million, 828 thousand, 677 likes.

Dislikes are up too, yay! (laughs)

I got 31 thousand, 922 dislikes.

Awesome.

Comments are up, I mean everything pretty much

is up, which is good.

177 thousand something comments,

180 thousand something shares,

483 thousand something videos added to playlists,

so people adding to favorites

and other crap like that, so that's cool.

All that stuff is up across the board.

Oh yeah, and subscribers, I got 275 thousand this year.

274 thousand, 95 to be exact.

So, yeah, that's a nice number.

That's the most I've ever gotten in one year.

Over a quarter million, good grief.

So, yeah, here's where things start to get

really strange and fascinating, especially for 2018.

This is not activity I have seen before on LGR.

Okay, so, just looking at my top 10 videos,

let's just go through those and the number of views

that I received on each of these videos in 2018.

The number one viewed video on my channel in 2018

was Doom on a calculator, the T1-81 Plus games tutorial,

which got 1.249 million views.

Which is awesome, but that video actually

came out in 2017.

Well, it's just the algorithm I guess,

because it wasn't necessarily,

like when that video first went up,

just a bit of backstory on that, I just tossed

that video up because it was something quick that I could do

in an afternoon, I didn't have a video ready

for Monday so it was like, Sunday,

and I was like, oh crap, what can I put together,

and I didn't even script anything, I didn't do crap.

I just, I had a calculator, I remembered,

oh yeah, you can put cool things on here

and I used to do that in high school

and I already had the cables and the software,

all this stuff backed up from way back in the day.

So I just grabbed it all out of my digital storage

and put it in a video, and then it took off,

and I got picked up by friggin' every tech outlet

out there and a bunch of social media

and all the typical things where people share stuff

on the internet.

And it got good, few million views?

Two and a half million views in 2017.

And then this year it got another 1.2ish, so it's almost

up to 2.4 million views now which is just,

it's just being recommended, I guess.

It's showing up on people's home pages

from what I'm hearing and like, it's popping up

in the recommendeds all the time, even if they've

already seen it, so yeah, if I look at the graph

of the actual viewership over the years

it's just like, it keeps getting pushed out

every so often.

I don't know why.

Genuinely don't, but, hey, cool.

People liked that video, and in fact,

really interesting was that, I actually got contacted

by, I dunno, some PR firm or something

representing Bethesda and they used that video,

or a very small snippet of it

for Doom's 25th anniversary video

that they put up on a bunch of channels.

I know it was on the PlayStation channel, and a bunch,

I dunno, it was just all over the place

when Bethesda was celebrating Doom's 25th.

Part of my video was in that, like, oh.

That was a cool moment.

So, anyway, had to sign a contract for that

and all sorts of weird crap, but anyway,

they don't have any rights to it,

it's just one of those things.

But, yeah, so, number two video.

That was number one.

Number two, again, not a video from this year.

848 thousand views for the brand new IBM PC AT unboxing.

(laughs)

That, again, went up in 2017.

In March 2017.

That ended up I think actually being

about my most profitable video this year too, yeah.

That made a lot of money this year.

Like, more than it did in 2017 when it was uploaded.

Bizarre.

And again, I think it's just because,

not only are people watching a lot of that video,

so it just ended up earing more anyway

and it kept getting recommended more

and it's continually getting views, like,

just too many views for a video that, honestly,

I'm not too terribly proud of.

It's just me opening a computer all excitedly.

I thought it was a pretty low-effort video

considering my normal fare,

I didn't do a whole lot of research for it.

But, still, it took a few days to put together,

so I'll take it.

That definitely paid for itself pretty quickly.

Number three, let's keep moving on here, Gizmondo.

That's the first video that I actually made this year

that actually ended up on the top 10 viewed this year.

864 thousand views for the Gizmondo, that makes sense.

I expected that one to spread around a bit

because it's just a crazy story

of the Swedish mafia and crashed Ferraris

and a bunch of nonsense.

It's an awesome video, I'm still proud of that one.