Retiring End of 2026 - My Last Year on YouTube

Hi everyone. It's been a little while and unfortunately no, the title is not clickbait. At the end of this year, I will be retiring uh the Armure Historian YouTube channel. I won't be deleting or dellisting any videos, so you don't have to worry about that. But there will be no new content going forward next year. Unfortunately, as well, the YouTube production team that I've had, the animators and illustrators um and writers and researchers, they're no longer part of the team. So now it's just me here. And so even if I were to come back in any capacity, it's not going to be that same armchair historian that maybe you're used to. Um, I've got a few reasons for this. We'll try to make it brief and I'll go over a couple of the reasons. You don't have to worry. We don't have any kind of uh crowdfunding campaign. We don't need any of your money and we're not in any financial trouble either. Um, so don't worry too much about that. Uh, but we'll get into those reasons. Now, before we do, I do just want to say thank you to all of you guys and thank you to my team. Without them, it wouldn't have been possible. Without you guys, Um, for the last couple years, I've been doing relatively less than when I had first started this channel, when I was doing the animations and creating little drawings and stuff to go along with it. These guys have really kept the channel floating. And my website members, um, you guys have also, uh, been keeping us alive. Probably the last two years, we've been fully subsidized by our website team or our website subscribers. So, I'm deeply thankful and appreciative uh, of you guys and of course, just all of our regular viewers, too. Um, you guys have made all of this possible. So, I just want to be appreciative and say thank you guys. And, um, speaking of the website, all of our website content, a lot of the exclusives and original videos, those will all be released this year. So, that's the type of content we're releasing. That's why we're not closing down right away. And we've got a year of content for you guys all from the website. Now, unfortunately, that does mean if you are a website member, you've probably seen a lot of these videos. But, if you weren't, this will be a great time for free to be able to see all those videos. And furthermore, I won't be putting any sponsorships or ad messages on them. I might put out a shout out to a personal project at the end of some of those videos, but I won't be interrupting the first couple minutes uh to shout out other sorts of brands. But now, let's get into the central question as to why uh I'll be retiring at the end of this year. Um it's a couple different things. Um I can't boil it down to one thing, and ultimately I have no one else to blame. So, don't worry. Again, I'm not uh this isn't like a complaining video and calling someone out or YouTube out or anything like that. But I will say the platform uh YouTube as a whole um is not the same as what it used to be. When I first started there weren't shorts. A lot of the content was a lot different. There were fewer YouTubers too and fewer uh videos coming out. I think because of the way the platform is today uh the different trends, the way it's shifted naturally. Every generation uh YouTube is going to change and shift and it's going to have different trends. Um this is a natural thing. It's not necessarily better or worse. That's for you to judge. Um, but I think as things have changed and I've given it my eight or nine years here, um, it's a different platform than when I first started and when I first started, I would be looking for videos like uh the Battle of Stalingrad and instead I would get a 1-hour black and white documentary. And I grew up watching documentaries like that. So, I loved those. But part of the motivation to start this channel was to create more accessible historical content that was maybe more entertaining to watch, especially for uh younger generations. And so we focused on animation and making the videos more digestible, like 10 to 20 minutes long. Uh nowadays, if you search up Battle of Stalingrad, you'll get like a 100 results of all sorts of animated channels and many videos that far surpass our own quality, too. Um but that being said, uh you know, there's only so many times you can cover Stalenrad or Berlin or Normandy. So there aren't um too many more big exciting topics that I'm interested in covering. And the platform, I think, has shifted more towards that short form uh one minute YouTube short style videos. If you go to your homepage, I think you're only going to see two, maybe three long form videos before you get a whole row of shorts. Um, and so I think the platform has changed. Again, for better, for worse, it's for you to judge and not for me to tell you. Um, and I think it's very natural. Every generation YouTubers come and go. And I think this is our time. So, I'd rather leave on a high uh and leave on a good note with our longer videos and not have to bring in uh you know, someone to buy our channel out or to ask you guys to fund us even more. I'd rather leave it on a high and um and just be proud of what we've all created. And shorts is just something I'm not willing to do. Some have suggested playing the YouTube algorithm a little bit more, playing around with tags or titles. you know, at my channel's peak when we were getting millions of views uh on a video almost effortlessly, I wasn't even setting any tags and I wasn't really click baiting with any titles or thumbnails. I don't think you need that to survive on YouTube. I think it's just the type if people like your type of content, they're going to watch it. So, I don't really have the algorithm to blame or uh not using certain titles or something like that. I think it's just audiences will come and go, channels and trends will, too. And every generation is going to pick up that torch and innovate in a new way. And I think for me, it's time to take a step back. And I suspect if I go any further, um it wouldn't be fair to you guys or the people who work on this

channel if I didn't see too much of a future for it. I think if we go uh further, I don't really see new things for us to innovate. And I'm happy with what we've created. I'm proud. I don't think there's any reason to kind of continue things on if I just don't see a good direction to go. Um I won't be leaving permanently. If you want to follow me elsewhere off of this channel, I do have a separate channel called Armchair Interactive and that's where I create game development logs because um over the last couple years I've been working game development. If you don't know, I released a game a few years ago called Fire and Maneuver. And that game got a lot of attention, but it didn't really perform too well. I know a lot of uh fans were a little disappointed with it. I know a lot of reviewers were. And um it was a huge lesson for us um and me in uh game development, game design. Well, last year in October, I released my second game, Master of Command, which relative to Fire Maneuver, I wasn't really advertising too much, and my channel uh last year is certainly not as big as it was during Fire Maneuver. But despite that, the game performed much better. And so, despite me seemingly having a larger audience here, uh we found a bigger audience over on Steam. And um really, that's turned into its own separate thing. And I know you guys are here for videos. not a lot of you are going to play uh the types of games that I make and some of you may not play video games at all and that's totally fine. That's why I don't want to push it too heavily onto you guys and that's why I'll be doing a separate channel for that. Um but I don't want to flood this channel with a bunch of other videos that aren't related to history content. Um so you can follow me over on Armchair Interactive. I also have a personal channel called Behind the Armchair. I don't know if I'll use it, but that's another channel you could follow me on. And I've got all those links down below. I also have included the links of all of our uh the portfolios of many of the team members who worked on this channel. So if you have your own YouTube channel or a production company and you want to work with the very talented people who made this channel, um you can do so. You can check out that link and there are amazing people who worked on this channel. They did not contribute to me shutting down at all. Uh in fact, they're the only reason I didn't shut this down two or three years ago. Uh both my team and you guys and your support of course. Um so we couldn't have done it without all of you guys. I really wasn't I wasn't very present even last year. And so even though you saw my face on the camera, I wasn't as involved as maybe I should have been. And so these guys have really done an incredible job uh running the channel. I think that's about it. Um so really between the YouTube platform shifting and me having sort of giving given everything that I can contribute here and finding a passion for game development that I think I'm getting better at. not great at it, but I am getting better each game I do. Um, I think those are really the main reasons. So, I don't have anyone else to blame, and I'm not blaming the people on YouTube or demonetization or anything like that. In fact, we really haven't had a problem with demonetization in the last year. Really, the problem is just slowly declining uh the viewership a bit. And um and just having less sponsors available, things like that. And uh it's not a huge deal. You know, maybe there could have been ways to to sort of cut corners and scrap a lot of the animations and stuff to keep it going, but I think the whole premise of the channel was built on those animations. And I'd rather, again, I'd rather end things on a high instead of uh cutting down more and more. And who knows where we would be if we cut out too much. So, that's about everything uh today. Um I could try to answer some of the top questions if you want to leave comments below. Maybe I can write uh to a few of you guys. Um but yeah, go follow me over there if you want to on Armchair Interactive and uh otherwise throughout this year I'll be posting that um Armchair History TV content which you can follow um as well. But that'll be it and um I will see you next time. Bye.