Big Announcements, Video Updates, and Future Plans

hey there how's it going everybody in this video I want to talk about some big announcements and some updates and also go over some future plans so the first thing I wanted to talk about some of you may know about this and not but a couple months ago it's actually able to quit my previous full-time job and now I'm able to focus on doing videos and tutorials full-time now so first of all I just want to give a big thanks to all of you because there's no way I'd be able to do this full-time if it wasn't for the people who have subscribed to the channel and supported the channel over the years and also given me such good feedback along the way now I've been doing these videos for about four years now and honestly it's not something I ever thought I would be able to do full-time you know I was looking back at my old stats the other day from you know 2014-2015 and I think after my first 75 videos I was looking at my earnings and I think I was making less than a dollar a day after my first 75 videos so not even enough to buy a cup of coffee on let alone enough to live on but then in 2016 2017 I started seeing some more subscribers and views come in I was able to buy some better equipment and record better videos and now it's you know four years later I'm to the point where I'm able to do this full-time and speaking of subscribers we actually recently went above 100 thousand subscribers for the channel now I think we actually hit a hundred thousand back in March and now we're actually closer to 150 thousand or something like that but I just recently got my silver play

button in the mail and I wanted to share it with you all so this is the silver play button here and this has been a big goal of mine ever since I started making these videos so again I just wanted to thank all of you all because it really means a lot to me that there are so many people out there who have found these videos helpful and have learned from these videos and also take you know have taken time over the years to be active in the comments section you know getting up each morning and reading through the comments is one of my favorite parts of the day because I love hearing stories from you all about you know some people tell me that the videos have helped them through their college courses some people have said that it's helped them land their first job and things like that and reading comments like that really means a lot to me so I just wanted to thank all of you all again so I appreciate that okay so with that stuff out of the way I'd like to take the rest of the video and talk what we can expect now that this is going to be a full-time thing so first of all you're gonna see a lot more larger courses from me now so I have time to actually spend working on larger courses so for example I just released a 12-part flash course recently and I think that was over eight hours of content all together so you're gonna see more things like that now that I have the time because before it was just too hard to work on a large course because I was only able to work on these videos on the weekends and it was hard to keep the continuity in large courses like that over the weekends because you forgot where you left off and it was hard to pick things back up and things like that so now it makes it so much easier being able to do this on a daily basis now one big mistake that I made whenever I first went full-time was that I saw all of this free time that I had to work on these larger courses and I dog directly into working on a large course I started directly working on that Flass course but what I should have done in hindsight and what I'm going to do from here on out is I'm going to also work on some smaller videos so that I have a queue of videos built up that I can release try to release on a weekly basis so that there's no not so much time between video releases because it took me about a month of research and building that Flast blog before I got that out and a lot of people were kind of wondering where I was for that month so now I'm gonna try to have some videos that I can release on a weekly to bi-weekly basis while I'm working on those big courses so right now I'm working on a django

course but I'm also going to record some smaller videos in between so that we have some content coming out now I'd also like to talk about funding and how I'm going to be able to afford to do this now that I'm doing this full-time so currently the majority of my income is coming from YouTube ads and that is just based on the total number of views that I get each month so I think that number is I think 95% of my revenue right now is coming from YouTube ads but ideally I would love to get to the point where the majority of my income is coming through fan funded sites like patreon and that way I wouldn't have to worry as much about YouTube's algorithms or advertisers or anything like that because right now any small change sets to the platform that they make it could drastically change how my videos are discovered or ad rates or anything like that so it's not exactly the most stable form of income I think that fan funding from people who really feel like they could support the videos would be much more stable in the long run now one option that a lot of people have mentioned to

me is that I could start creating paid courses but that's one thing that I'm not gonna do because I don't want to exclude anybody who can't pay for a course from getting access to my content like I said before there are a lot of students who watch these videos or people who are struggling to find a new job and there's simply people who can't afford to pay for a course right now so I don't want to exclude those people from being able to get access to this kind of educational content so I'm just hoping that by continuing to release everything for free and putting out good content that that'll bring in people who want to support what I'm doing and will contribute if they can so either a monthly support through something like patreon or a one-time contribution through PayPal even YouTube has added a sponsor button below each video where you can directly support creators through YouTube itself okay so lastly I

would like to talk to you about sponsors so now that I'm doing this full-time you're occasionally going to see a sponsor here and there but I'm very picky when it comes to sponsors so I get hundreds of emails from people who want me to promote their product or their website or something like that but I'm not going to pitch anything to you all unless it is something that I actually believe in and something that I would actually use myself and at this point I've only found one sponsor that has met that criteria and that is brilliant Borg so I'm extremely excited that brilliant is going to sponsor some videos because I use their site even before they contacted me brilliant is a problem-solving website that helps you understand underlying concepts by actively working through guided lessons they have computer science courses ranging from algorithms and data structures to machine learning and neural networks they even have a coding environment built into their website so that you can run code directly in the browser and that's a great way to complement watching my tutorials because you can apply what you've learned in their active problem-solving environment and that helps to solidify that knowledge there are guided lessons will challenge you but you also have the ability to get hints or even solutions if you need them it's really tailored towards understanding that material so they're computer science material is fantastic and I really like what they're doing they also have plenty of courses depending on what most interested in so they have courses in different fields of mathematics or astronomy solar energy computational biology and all kinds of other great content so to support my channel and learn more about brilliant you can go to brilliant org ford slash CMS to sign up for free and also the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription and you can find that link in the description section below and again that's brilliant org /c m/s okay so I think that it's going to do it for this video I guess I should also acknowledge the fact this is the first time I've done a video like this where I'm talking directly to the camera so let me know what you all think about this I don't plan on doing a lot of these I'm going to still mainly stick to tutorials but I do have some video ideas that I have written down that kind of make more sense to have a conversation style like this so things like you know career advice and stuff like that it doesn't make as much sense just to look at my screen the whole time while I'm talking so anyways let me know what you think about this style of video but as usual if you enjoy these videos and would like to support them then there are several ways you can do that the easiest way is to simply like the video and give it a thumbs up and also it's a huge help to share these videos with anyone who you think would find them useful and if you have the means you can contribute through patreon and there's a link to that page in the description section below be sure to subscribe for future videos and thank you all for watching