YouTube news: What If Geography is now Geography by Geoff!

Plus a look at my plans for 2023 for both this Substack and my YouTube channel!

Happy holidays everyone! Hopefully my lack of content here over the last week wasn’t too disappointing. It’s been a busy one as I mix holiday duties with all my regular work. Anyway, I’m just popping on today to talk a bit of news about my YouTube channel, formerly named What If Geography, as well as to clue you all in on what I have planned for 2023. And don’t worry, I have a recap of 2022 coming later this week so stay tuned!

But first, let’s get to the big news.

YouTube Channel Rebrand

I’m assuming that everyone subscribed to this newsletter is familiar with my YouTube channel. I’d be surprised if anyone here wasn’t. But if you aren’t familiar, I host a semi-popular YouTube channel that has been called “What If Geography” for the past year. I posted my very first episode in January, 2022 and slowly grew it from there.

Now, 38 episodes later, I’m ready to break out from the “what if” scenarios a bit. To speak plainly, I have really fun episode ideas that I continually have to shelve because there’s not been an easy way to “what if” it into a video. And, as a geographer, I kind of just want to explore geography more broadly. Of course I have a video that explains all of this, so if you want to watch that, please check it out here:

That said, the What If Geography podcast that I started with my friend and colleague Hunter Shobe, will not be rebranding. Though I’m no longer going to post individual episodes here on Substack. So if you want to catch those, go and subscribe to the podcast on literally whatever app you use: https://www.spreaker.com/show/what-if-geography. And if I happen to be missing an app, let me know in the comments and I’ll get it uploaded!

Alright, I’m done with talking about the rebrand. Let’s talk about 2023!

2023 and beyond

2022 has been a transformative time for me personally. Prior to this year, I did not make YouTube videos at all. And, in fact, when I did start making videos, I didn’t really do it because I thought I would hit any level of success (not that I’m a huge channel by any means but it’s been way beyond expectations). Anyway, we can get more into that when I write up by 2022 recap article later this week.

But while 2022 was transformative, I think 2023 is going to be even bigger. Here’s what I am planning:

More eclectic geography YouTube episodes with more consistency

People might not know this about me, but in addition to my creating content for YouTube, writing and co-hosting a podcast, and now writing on this Substack, I also work a normal 40-hour-a-week job within the city planning field! As you can imagine, this makes creating content week-in, week-out to satisfy YouTube’s all powerful algorithm a huge challenge. Depending on how busy or stressful my work week was, would largely influence the quality of my YouTube episode and how much creativity I was able to put into it. And often times I simply wasn’t able to upload a video at all! This past Fall, for example, was extremely hard and my channel suffered for it.

For 2023, I’m planning on shaking this up a bit. I’ll talk a bit more later about how I plan to be more consistent, but to keep it short: I’ll be devoting more of myself to geography in 2023.

But in terms of episodes, I’m definitely looking forward to being able to explore geographic content that is more consistent. And as part of this rebrand, I plan on having regular episodic content wherein I cover:

1. Logical high speed rail corridors in the United States, Canada and Mexico (first episode coming January 2nd!)

2. The geographic history of the world’s current countries

3. Natural disasters of the world and how they impact us all; and of course

4. More what if countries, which has already been a long standing series of mine that I’m looking forward to revisiting well into the future

This is in addition to my singular one-off episodes about a topic that might not fit into a series, but is otherwise just very geographically interesting!

All that’s to say is 2023 will be more consistent and more eclectic and you can catch them all on YouTube, for free, forever. New episodes of my mainline episodes will continue to premier every Monday at 2:00pm PT.

60 Second Cities on YouTube Shorts

My next big plan for 2023 is my introduction to the world of short-form video content. Throughout 2022, I’ve been exploring ways to bring meaningful content to this unique style of video and, honestly, it hasn’t been easy. When you look at most TikToks, Shorts, or Reels, they’re overwhelmingly centered around pranks, reactions, or dancing videos, which is definitely not my style. However, I think I have found an interesting way to get into short-form video content that I actually kind of like!

Beginning this Thursday, December 29th, I will premier my first ever YouTube Shorts series called: 60 Second Cities. In it, over the course of 60 seconds, I will give a high level over view of a different city in the world. Complete with maps, data, statistics, fun facts, and other tidbits of information. As a city planner, I love cities, and this has become a surprisingly fun way to talk about them.

I have no idea how successful these Shorts will be. It’s quite likely that the kind of content I create is not the kind of content that fits with YouTube Shorts. But that’s okay, I’m enjoying the format and will continue to do so over the coming year.

You can expect a new “60 Second Cities” video to premier every Thursday at 2:00pm PT. As of now, I will not be publishing on either TikTok or Reels, but if that changes I’ll let you know here.

Lots more deep dives on the What If Geography podcast

Finally, for those that are enjoying the podcast, first off thank you! But also you should know that Hunter and I have a lot of content planned for well into 2023. The goal right now is to continue to be consistent and create fun and engaging episodes. To that end, we have another episode coming this Wednesday all about what Washington D.C. would look like if it was a full state. We also have 5 additional episodes in the works as you read this. One will be our very first 3-part episode I think, but it should hit close to home everyone. All that’s to say: expect a whole lot more podcast episodes going into 2023 and beyond!

But if I can speak candidly for a bit: podcasts are a challenging medium to tangle with. Where YouTube has the algorithm to push content to its viewers, podcasts are much more decentralized and, as such, have a slower growth trajectory I think. I don’t have much to compare it to, but each episode we publish gets a few more listens, which is nice, but it’s also nothing earth shattering. Hopefully as we continue to publish episodes and continue to put in the work, the podcast will take off on its own. But I’m still figuring it all out! So bear with me as Hunter and I figure out what works best within the podcasting world.

Podcast episodes are published every Wednesday at 12:00pm PT on basically every podcast app you can think of. To find it, please visit: https://www.spreaker.com/show/what-if-geography.

Also note here that I will no longer be publishing What If Geography podcast episodes here on Substack. It just didn’t seem to make much sense to me.

Geography by Geoff the YouTube channel

One last thing: I’m really excited by my new branding, but I want to recognize that not everyone will be. And that’s okay. I hope the majority of my subscribers stay tuned for my next adventure, but if you decide it’s not for you, I understand. Maybe you’ll stumble upon one of my videos down the road and see that, while the framing device might have changed, the overall content is still high quality and entertaining. Because, at the end of the day, geography is fun and I just want to share it with the world.

Thanks for reading!