“About to reach 1,000 subs,” ObviouslyBenHughes writes on Twitter. “It’s a number, but I’m so happy!”
This is one of the most pervasive paradoxes surrounding online video. When it comes to numbers – be they subscribers or views – they somehow mean everything and nothing, simultaneously. We don’t ‘care’ about them, we aren’t motivated by them, though, oddly enough, we are happy when they go up.
Reubnick is a familiar voice in the Will Video For Food backrow. It is easy to feel discouraged when you feel like you’re producing great stuff online and the response is less than ethusiastic. (Though we might be reminded of Nalts’ comments about the the curse of subscriber self-worth. It’s a bottomless pit, folks!) Clearly disappointed in the views he was receiving for his most recent video, I thought I would try to put it into some perspective. I noted that his video got more views over night than mine had over several days (and I had more subscribers than him).
“Wait a minute!” he objects. “I thought you were a partner and all that! How is that all you got?”
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This isn’t really how I wanted to start the JOJCAST in 2010 but I kind of feel like this is the place where a lot of conversations happen that really don’t happen anywhere else. A lot of the people I’ve interviewed over the years have been very candid about the stuff they experience in their video creation. I kind of feel like I want to get this out of my system so I can put it behind me and move on. So please indulge today, I’m just going to talk about something that’s going on with me and next week we’re going to return to more regular programming… 
