Holy cow I hit 500,000 subscribers!
Reflecting on my journey as a geography content creator
Over the weekend I officially hit 500,000 subscribers over on YouTube! 🥳 This is a really big moment for me because I never thought that I would ever be doing something like this. If you had told me three years ago that I’d be making my living by creating videos on YouTube, I would have laughed in your face! Even now, as I write this half-reflective, half-celebratory article, it seems very silly to me that this is what I do every single day.
Side bar! To celebrate I’m giving away $250 and a couple signed maps to three lucky winners. Go check out that post if you haven’t entered yet. The contest ends tonight so… be quick!
But now that the moment is here, I wanted to spend a bit of time reflecting on my content creator journey, what this means, what it doesn’t mean, and what’s in store for the future. All that’s to say, for those of you who just want to read geography articles, this is your time to bounce! This is gonna be a bit autobiographical and highly meta. For those interested in the nitty-gritty details of my day-to-day creator life and how I ended up here… this is for you!
How I became a content creator
I get asked this question often, but I’ve never summarized it in one place so pardon if this is a little long-winded. It’s more of a brain dump as I reflect on how I got to where I am today more than anything else.
I think, for many people, the idea of becoming a content creator is something that they’ve been working towards for a long time, something they’ve wanted to do for a long time, or something they are otherwise just very intentional about doing. But my pathway to creating content was never something I envisioned, at least not in this way. Of course, life is nothing but a series of choices and decisions we make that lead us to where we are today. And I can largely boil my content creator pathway to four decisions I made. So let’s start at the top!
Decision 1: Majoring in geography
Before starting a YouTube channel was even a passing thought in my mind, let’s go back more than a decade ago to when I was still in college. Up to that point I had no idea what I wanted to get my degree in. In fact, I was perfectly happy completing my general education requirements and pushing the decision for as long as possible. But that inevitable day comes for us all and I had narrowed in on two choices: history and English. I really enjoyed the stories behind the fascinating history of our world and I also enjoyed writing! So it seemed natural that I would settle on one of those two, even if I had no idea what I wanted to do with it afterwards. In fact, I was pretty sure I was going to settle on history because it’s all the fun of stories with basically the same amount of writing which sounded like more fun to me at the time.
But as I was going through the catalog of majors, I noticed geography was there. To be honest, I had no idea this was even a degree one could choose. Regardless, it appealed to me instantly. Not only would I get to learn about the world, but I would also learn the very programs that would allow me to make and design maps. As a kid who grew up playing the Sid Meier’s Civilization series of video games this greatly appealed to me. I loved maps. Always have actually. I just never really thought that “maps” could be a college degree. And so, without a second thought, I chose geography as my degree, something I earned just two short years later. This would obviously prove to be a big decision in getting to where I am today for the obvious reason: it’s geography!
Which leads us to…
Decision 2: Writing for a living
While I was excited to get my degree in geography, I still had a strong desire to write. After starting a couple blogs in the mid 2000s, I was more formally “hired” to write about Major League Soccer and the Portland Timbers for both SB Nation and, locally, the Willamette Week paper here in Portland. I’m a big soccer fan, not least because of how geographic the sport is! 🤓
And so, in 2011 (I think) I founded the blog Stumptown Footy for SB Nation, a website dedicated to following and covering the Portland Timbers. The pay was awful, but the experience was transformational for me because it taught me how to manage and understand content streams. I was also writing every single day, interacting with fans, covering live events, and interviewing players and coaches. All of these things not only helped hone my skill in writing, but also grew my confidence as a writer. It can be scary putting something out there and hoping that people like it, especially when it’s attached to your name.
Unfortunately, being any sort of writer 10 years ago wasn’t really a viable pathway to a stable living and so I made my third decision.
Decision 3: City planning and graphic design
After writing for a few years, I knew that I wanted to continue my education, and for a while, I strongly considered getting my masters degree in journalism. But knowing how little money there was, how hard it was to get a job, and simply not wanting to not live in poverty anymore, I opted to follow another passion: city planning! I loved and still love transportation systems. And so, instead of a masters in journalism, I got my masters in urban and regional planning.
Pursuing my masters in city planning was, quite simply, amazing. The actual career? Not so much. But getting the degree unlocked something that I later learned I was deeply interested in: graphic design. That might sound weird because the two professions don’t seem at all related but bear with me here!
When I first started my city planning education, I wrongly assumed that city planners made a bunch of decisions about how cities function and then everything abides by those decisions. Want skyscrapers here? Plop! Want a light rail public transit system there? Wham!
In truth, it’s nothing like that. Instead, being a city planner is more of a communications degree than anything else. You’re simply communicating the needs of communities to politicians and the needs of the greater city to individual communities. And to do that you need fancy-as-fuck graphics and maps. And I loved making these things. Both during school and in my early years working as a transportation planning consultant, I dived deep into learning and understanding Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. So much so that, a few short years into my professional career, I attempted to pivot into graphic design, something I failed miserably at. But being a city planner gave me the drive to learn and understand colors, design, and how to make maps, well, pretty!
Which gets us to the final nail-in-the-coffin decision to trying this whole content creator thing out.
Decision 4: Making maps during the pandemic
I have always been a pretty extreme extrovert. So when COVID-19 became a pandemic and we all had to stay home for months on end, I was left with a lot of pent up energy. Energy I previously spent on happy hours, professional events, friend time, etc. I basically had a social engagement every night of the week. But all of that was gone and I was left with… Tiger King on Netflix. I managed with streaming and video games for a couple months but eventually I needed an actual outlet. So I turned to making maps.
I made maps of basically any data I could find and I intentionally tried to sew in a bit of artistic design and flair into each one. After making about a dozen or so, I decided to start sharing them, mostly on the MapPorn Reddit page, but a little on Instagram as well. In fact, if you go back far enough in my Instagram you can probably find some. I even started my own online store on Etsy called MosaicMaps where I made funky little designs of cities in a unique mosaic pattern.
All of this map making built to a point where I got kind of tired of making and sharing static maps. I mean, it was fun, but it was also extremely limiting. I was also becoming interested in learning motion graphics during this time and, with that, video editing. And so, in 2021, I started messing around with these programs. I thought maybe I would do some map tutorials or something, but it was hard! It was so much more complicated and daunting of a process than I ever imagined. It’s like going from creating something in 2D to creating something in 3D… it’s more of everything! So I wavered a bit and shelved my plans to create videos of map. At this point, I figured I was done with any sort of video-based content creation. That is until I saw something pop up in my LinkedIn feed which is weird because I really don’t use it all that often.
Some of you may be familiar with another content creator named Ray Delahanty, better known as CityNerd on YouTube. Not many people know this but Ray and I worked at the same company for a few years. In fact, Ray was my project manager on quite a few projects! During the pandemic we didn’t keep in touch as much so I didn’t know what he was up to in late 2021. But then I saw on LinkedIn that he had started a YouTube channel called CityNerd and, even more to that point, he had just hit 1,000 subscribers! It was incredible! Here was this thing that I found so daunting and yet, at the same time, here was this person I worked very closely with, actually do it! The walls I had built up in my head that stopped me from making videos came tumbling down and it all seemed so possible in a split second.
And so, I started a YouTube channel and the rest is, well, how I got here.
Atlas Explains The World
In January, 2022 I launched my first video on YouTube. It was a departure from what I originally intended (map tutorials) and became more telling stories about interesting things in the world. In fact, my channel’s original name was called Atlas Explains The World which I still contend is a fun name! I made five videos under this name originally about the following subjects:
Ukraine and Russia (since been removed, this video came out before the invasion)
The first four videos performed very poorly. In fact, I think I had less than 10 views total. It was devastating because I was putting so much time and energy into these videos and nobody was watching them! I was about ready to throw in the towel, but I had one more script in the pipeline and I figured, I might as well finish it. And so I did!
The high speed rail episode came out on February 24th, 2022 and it did not perform well at all! I didn’t expect it to at this point, to be honest. I figured I was too late to the YouTube party or I just wasn’t good enough, or interesting enough, or had unique enough ideas. And so I stopped making videos.
But about 3 weeks later, I noticed something happening: people started watching the high speed rail episode. I remember clearly when the video crossed over 10 views, 100 views, 500 views, and then 1,000 views! I was ecstatic! I had no idea how this was happening, but there it was. And with those views came actual subscribers as well. That video would eventually go on to hit somewhere around 40,000 views over the next few weeks (today it’s at 69,282 views). Nothing ginormous but enough to get me started. And so I started writing more scripts and I decided to rebrand because I thought that maybe “Atlas Explains The World” was just not a clear enough name and I needed a better ‘hook’ to go with all my videos.
What If Geography
On March 24th, one month after the high speed rail video, I published my 6th video entitled: What If The Pacific Northwest Became Its Own Country? I also rebranded the channel to “What If Geography” and the idea was just that: I would come up with big ‘what if’ questions about the world and try to explain them. This proved to be a very smart idea because the ‘hook’ was just good enough that it consistently built my channel up… at least in the beginning. My next few videos all did really well in fact:
What if the Interstate Highway system was never built? 91,693 views
What if the American Southwest runs out of water? 1,206,144 (this was a BIG ONE!)
What if New York City was a country? 102,173 views
What if the United States was powered entirely by nuclear energy? 282,291 views
All told I went on to rack up a lot of views over spring of 2022. I thought I had figured YouTube out! And so I kept up with the push. Most videos would do well for the time, some videos would fail but I chalked that up to momentary slips and that things would right themselves in the future.
But then in the latter half of summer, my views started drying up. Suddenly I went from having videos go from hundreds of thousands of views to less than 10,000 and I couldn’t figure out why. Of course, when you’re in the moment it seems like nothing has changed. But in reality, looking back, it was the simple fact that ‘what if’ as a hook only lasts you so long. There’s only so many viable stories out there that can be told as a ‘what if’ story and, for the rest, they’re just getting shoehorned into that format.
Suffice it to say, later summer and fall of 2022 were pretty demoralizing for me. My channel, which I had assumed was on a rocket ship to the upper echelons of YouTube, had stagnated. I was monetized at this point, but the money had slowed down and I was wondering if this was something I could actually keep doing over the long term. At this time, I had a traditional 40-hour a week professional job that often would often push into 50 hours. And the world was opening up again! Happy hours were coming back. People were meeting and hanging out. All that’s to say is time was slipping.
In October of 2022, I came very close to shutting it all down. Views were abysmal. I was incredibly stressed at work. I was working probably 80 or 90 hours a week between my normal job and making videos. And I just didn’t think I could keep the motivation going. Was all of this worth it? I really didn’t know.
Had things gone the other way, the next decision I made could have ended up as my stupidest decision ever. When November 2022 rolled around I took stock of my life. What was I finding joy in? And what was I not finding joy in? I knew that I was not finding joy in my professional job. It was an anchor on my back. And I knew that I largely found joy in making videos. Not always but most of the time. And so I decided that I needed to quite my professional job and make a true attempt at being a content creator full time. And so that’s exactly what I did. I also made another decision about who I wanted to be as a content creator and it wasn’t the ‘what if’ guy.
Geography By Geoff
In January 2023, one short year after publishing my first video on YouTube, I had made the decision to leave my professional career. Something I went to graduate school to do. Something I had worked at for the better part of a decade. I was ready to throw it all away and chase some stupid dream of being a content creator. Looking back: that was a silly idea. It just happened to have worked. And it worked, in part, because I got incredibly lucky.
As I was preparing to exit the professional workforce, I also knew I had to rebrand again. ‘What If Geography’ had taken me as far as it could and I needed to cast a wider geographic net, so to say. And so I decided to just rebrand simply as “Geography By Geoff” something I continue to use today. I’m not sure if the rebranding helped in getting more viewers, but it certainly helped me break free from the content shackle that was framing everything as ‘what if’ scenarios.
What made me realize that I could do this full time was the second video that I published after the rebrand: Why so few Americans live in this huge area in the middle of the country? A video that rocketed up the views in a way I had never seen before. Even now it’s still one of my most viewed videos ever at nearly 5.3 million views. It’s actually not a great video, in my opinion. In fact, I may redo it at some point because, as I rewatch it, it’s glossing over some things that need more detail, and it’s giving too much emphasis on things that maybe should have been glossed over. All that’s to say, it’s clear I was just trying to find some sort of voice during this time. A new rebrand. A desperation to make this work. I was determined to throw as many things at the wall and see was stuck. This one definitely stuck!
But it was also this video, in particular, that made me realize something: I had a very unique combination of skills that allow me to dig into data and extrapolate answers. All those GIS classes I took in undergrad were paying off! I could do statistical analysis! And then I could write stories about that data! And then I could make maps that look pretty and then animate them! And then I could edit and record a video! And I could do it all without relying on some weird ‘what if’ hook.
It’s now been about 21 months since I rebranded. And in that time, I grew from about 30,000 subscribers to now 500,000 subscribers. But what’s more important than subscribers is the views. Since January 2022, I’ve went from about 4 million total views across all my videos, to now 87 million views total. That’s something I never imaged I would have. The fact that I’m not only nearing 100 million total views but that I’ll likely hit that in the next few months is beyond my wildest dreams of creating content.
This isn’t to say that since I rebranded to Geography By Geoff that it’s been all sunshine and flowers! I’ve had rough periods over the last 21 months. Periods where views dipped and it seemed like things weren’t working like they used to. In fact, I’m actually feeling that pinch again right now. My videos views are down as I try new things out! I also launched a new podcast that didn’t work out and that kind of sucks. But it also helps me remember that, no matter how good things can feel at any given moment, it doesn’t take much to feel like everything is working against you. I’m not immune from downturns. No creator is. I guarantee that the biggest creators out there today still stress over their viewer counts. It’s just the world we live in.
So what does 500,000 subscribers mean?
To be honest, subscriber count is mostly a vanity number. It’s nice to see! But at best it gives me a metric to see that people still like me enough to click a button that says “I would like to see more of this person.” It’s great but, in no way, is it reflective of view counts. So really, the subtitle here should be: what 500,000 subscribers doesn't mean. That doesn’t make for a good header though.
As I write this, I’m in the middle of my weekly content creation process. I’m actually writing a script on the side right now, bouncing back and forth between the two. Don’t ask me how or why I do that, but for some reason it works for me. All this is to say, 500,000 subscribers doesn’t really mean anything to my day to day life. Every week, I have to pull together a new video. My revenue counts on it!
And so each Monday, I wake up and pull together the final editing for my video to be published the next day. I’ll also pull together the video thumbnails (three in total) for Tuesday’s video and hope one of them works! At the same time, I’m digging into data and analyzing trends (usually demographic) to see if there’s an interesting story in a half dozen areas of the world. After I find an interesting data trend, I’ll write a script about it, record myself, and edit that recording together. I’ll then annotate the script with notes for both my animator and editor. I’m lucky enough to be able to afford this kind of help at this point. But this hasn’t actually reduced my workload as much as I originally thought, in fact, bringing on additional people has just allowed me to create longer, more elaborate videos! Both my animator and editor will submit drafts for review that I’ll mark up with comments. From there, we’re back to Monday and the whole process starts over again.
In between all of this are extra things I do like write here on Substack, write and record podcasts (though this part of my life is passing, unfortunately), create and identify potential short-form videos, and generally just analyze how my videos have performed recently.
500,000 subscribers means a lot to me personally but it doesn’t really change anything. Every week, I have no idea if my video will be a success or not. My team and I put a lot of hard work into these videos and, sometimes they succeed! Other times they fail and don’t pay for themselves. That’s just the life I live. The number of subscribers, unfortunately, has no material impact on that process.
But it does give me a perspective on how I may want to pivot or focus in the future.
What’s next for me and Geography By Geoff
Not a day goes by that I’m not actively working on something new in the future. While I run the Geography By Geoff YouTube channel (and now also Spotify channel), I’m constantly thinking about how and where I should grow into next. And how I should do that growth. It’s not that I’m worried about complacency, it’s just how I’ve always operated. I crave building and working on the next thing! Sometimes those things are a success (Geography By Geoff). Most of the times, those things fail. The Around The World podcast was something I really thought there would be an appetite for but either there wasn’t, or I simply wasn’t the person to satisfy that appetite. There are a million reasons why things fail, but usually only a handful of reasons why things succeed.
All of this is to say is that Geography By Geoff will keep on trucking as it has for the last 21 months! Every Tuesday a new video will come out featuring some interesting geographic story about an interesting place in the world. I toy with the idea of a future rebrand once again, but that time isn’t here yet. Instead I’m focused on getting better with each video. Which means strengthening things I know I’m bad at — voice-over intonation and pacing for one 😅 — and getting better at things I know I’m good at.
As for what else? Well I’m not quite ready to announce what those things are yet. One could be announced relatively soon (within the next couple months) if it works out, and the other will be announced early next year. Both are pretty big departures from what I currently do, though I guess still kind of similar? I don’t know. It’ll probably make sense when they’re announced. What I won’t be doing, however, it creating another podcast! 😓
And so… that’s all! 500,000 subscribers has been really cool to achieve! But I think what I appreciate most about it is that it forced me to write this article and reflect on my journey to get to where I’m at today. For far too long I’ve simply lived day-to-day and week-to-week as I push out content and then focus on what’s next. So it’s been nice thinking about my story a bit more and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
I’ve got a video landing later today that you can check out if you like. You can view it here at 2:00pm PT!
Loved reading this. A great journey and well deserved 👏 🌍
Congratulations.