It seems every AIO content creator eventually burns out and suddenly stops posting their articles, podcasts, or videos. Sometimes they’ll even leave without a trace, with no acknowledgment (at least not through their AIO outlet) of their leaving. I wanted to at least acknowledge that I probably won’t be posting on Adventures in Opinions anymore, at least not nearly as much as I have in the past three years.

Why?

To be completely honest, I don’t know what started it all for sure. One of the big factors was my trip Europe in the summer of 2022. It’s crazy how that already feels like such a long time ago. And it was nine months ago that it started.

Spending a few months away from my normal schedule definitely decreased the amount I posted to an extent, but it mostly affected the podcast as I was travelling around a lot and didn’t have access to a computer for recording and editing the podcast. I did make a few posts from my phone, but no full-length podcasts or anything up to my usual quality standards.

While in Europe is also when I really started posting to YouTube. I was doing a lot of geocaching while in Europe, so I decided to film a YouTube Short finding a cache in Germany just for fun. All I did was take a few quick shots while looking for the geocache and quickly and roughly cut them together in the built-in editor YouTube provides in their mobile app. The video blew up.

Well, kind of. It got over 700 views which was crazy to me coming from running this blog where I’ve been putting so much effort into my content for years and my most-viewed post had four-hundred-and-something views and my average being around 20 views. I later posted a more professionally created and edited Short that quickly surpassed 2,000 views in the first day and currently sits at over 6,000 views. That’s not to say it’s all about the views, it really isn’t. I’ve really enjoyed making content for this small niche over the years and have received great satisfaction from it. I always thought I wouldn’t be the one who left to create content for a broader, different audience like I’d seen happen countless times with other AIO creators (for example, Kevin McCreary). The only reason the audience size matters is justifying continuing to invest time and money into the content. Honestly, creating Adventures in Odyssey content doesn’t have the potential for making money–I’ve only ever lost money on Adventures in Opinions (domain, hosting, recording equipment, etc). My quickly-growing YouTube channel has much more potential for bringing in some side income, even if it doesn’t ever become my job. That helps me to justify putting time into my YouTube channel. Instead of just doing something for fun, I’m also investing in a possible business. Though there are other qualifications a channel must meet, it takes “just” 1,000 subscribers to apply for the YouTube Partner Program, which allows you to monetise your videos from ads. It took months to get the first 100 subscribers on my channel, but in the first months of 2023 I’ve doubled my subscriber count which currently sits at 338.

Another factor is that I’ve simply enjoyed creating this type of content a lot. I like both the medium of video and the niche of travel/geography-related content.

If you want to look at my channel, I will give the URL below. Please know that it will hurt my channel if you visit the page or subscribe without watching any of my videos in full.

So don’t click on a video just to give me a view, if you soon click off of the video it will tell the algorithm that people who start watching it don’t like it because they don’t finish the video. You can check out my channel at youtube.com/perkybird.

Well, thanks for bearing through this and for sticking around these last three years. I think this post got more and more convoluted as it went but I’m not going back to edit it so that’s what it is haha.

Goodbye, for now.