Remodeling, the third
In March 2020, the limited liability company will cease to exist and I will continue the whole project as a publicist and publisher in the form of a fully liable individual. With all the advantages and disadvantages. However, this time completely with my own money. One, Two, Risk… Oo. After all, you can only continue to do things successfully if you first make planned investments. And so the move after the deletion of the GmbH to its own large web server in the data center I trust was actually only logical. And yes, something like this is also an investment in the future: A powerful Epyc server, SSD-RAID and really a lot of RAM, redundant uplinks and in addition various website optimizations as well as the full licensing of all plugins. You can’t combine professional work and trial versions. Here, unfortunately, I had given full control out of my hand in the past, which later took bitter revenge.
For legal reasons and because there are supposed to be people who love to kick the can down the road, I have prophylactically and at the same time removed all the content from the site for which I was not assigned any rights of use after the GmbH ceased to exist. But to be honest, it wasn’t much and no one really noticed that either. Sometimes I still wonder today why so much money had to be burned on personnel whose equivalent value tended toward zero. ROI (Return of Inverst) and such. But in the end, every new beginning is also an opportunity, and cleaning up a bit has probably never hurt anyone. And since there were also former comrades-in-arms who didn’t take it so exactly with the picture rights, I have manually checked all remaining third party contents time-consuming individually and I had meanwhile something like a flat rate with the dpa. However, being a good-natured person, I never sued for these losses.
After all, in 2020 I still managed to quadruple the site’s reach (unique visitors per month) within 11 months already, because I was finally able to design it the way I myself (and not some third party) thought it was appropriate. In other words, real journalistic work instead of colorful marketing bubbles in power-point constructs by overburdened managing directors. In short: doing instead of meeting. In addition, there has been an abundant tenfold increase in page views. Mind you: except for some work on the CMS and some administration work on the server, this was once again a complete one-man-show.
Push the envelope? Why not…
Already in 2019, my wife (and not only) told me to please do YouTube. Seriously, another open playground and construction site for kids and influencers? After I had almost been brought to my knees mentally on many fronts in this regard, there was finally a hard-negotiated, intra-family compromise. I’m using my old YouTube channel from 2010, which has only served as a repository for private movies and video card sound videos, and just testing it out for a month. If I manage to generate at least 1000 subscriptions within a month, I’ll keep going and in return my wife will buy me matte green paint at the hardware store for a Green Wall. If not (my secret hope), I may leave it again. Fun Fact: my wife later bought green paint at the hardware store for the first time in her life.
The first videos were, from today’s point of view, really embarrassing. The whole thing for you now with head and sound and sitting. But it wasn’t really that skillful.
What about the green wall? Well. The sound was horrible at first, I sat nastily squeezed between a wobbly table and the freshly painted wall. It wasn’t great art yet, but at least I could pinch myself with the cutting.
In the meantime, I have my own larger room just for the videos complete with lighting, stretched fabric (4.80 m x 3.20 m), 4K video camera, recording PC and OBS, monitoring monitors and whatever else you need. The table is stable, height adjustable, the audio track is completely from the professional shelf and analog for good reasons. But even now there is still plenty of potential for improvement.
For those who don’t know, I work completely alone here in the lab and video studio. There are no helpers or noble extras, all preparation, recording and post-production here is lone wolf mode. Lucky for me, I do stand-up and don’t frantically edit the videos together. A 30-minute video, when it comes up, doesn’t even take 40 minutes to record. The rest is Adobe Premiere for the Green Wall and various post-processing. I often read that you could make such videos only with a team and certain effort – all cheese.
A 30 minute video doesn’t take 2 hours from the jolt of finally getting started to encoding. Mostly less. My luck: I have a photographic memory, and if I make the video right after the final check of an underlying article, I don’t even need cues. I generally work without plot and prompter anyway, matter of honor and challenge. The only thing I allowed myself instead of a prompter is an oversized TV right across from where the camera is. Here I can (a) show the chart graphics as slides and with the huge panel (b) also correct my face color a bit.
In retrospect, the YouTube thing wasn’t so stupid. Well, the channel is still a bit uninspired after almost 4 years with just under 77k subscribers, but it is slowly and organically moving forward. Buying up is meh and also promoting visibility through YouTube is not my thing. Maybe there is still something that can be done naturally. If not, also no leg break, because I do not live from it, but rather with it. However, the backtraffic to the homepage is not to be sneezed at, because you get many notorious non-readers back to the written word. Let’s call it educational mission or student support. The other way around is more difficult.
And there was also a story at this point that I deliberately did not respond to publicly, especially since it has since been clarified among colleagues. Just this: All my videos from 2018 were controlled by the Sächsische Landesmedienanstalt (SLM) after many anonymous ads (the favorite work of the Germans). The accusations made could not even be confirmed in the slightest, and the “invoices” sent anonymously to SLM by a former employee, which were supposed to prove that I was publishing unmarked content in exchange for money, could also be refuted very quickly. Some people are so clumsy even when denouncing, as if they would need a run-up of 100 meters even to stand around stupidly. Acquittal First Class instead of Appeal. But such a mess costs time and nerves. Lifetime, then. This is then the real theft.
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