Fountain Pen Journey 6 Years On - From Youtube to Blogger

 Fountain Pen Journey 6 Years On - From Youtube to Blogger

A little over 6 years ago I began documenting my Fountain Pen Journey on YouTube (www.youtube.com/fountainpenjourney). It was during the early part of 2017 when I (re)discovered fountain pens and throughout 2017 I fell further and further down the fountain pen rabbit hole.

It was something new, exciting, interesting and absorbing, as well as being something different from my usual hobbies at the time. I immersed myself in the online fountain pen world.

Whilst I bought more and more cheap Chinese fountain pens (mainly Jinhao fountain pens) I soon realised that there were a number of YouTube channels which talked about fountain pens. I spent many hours watching these YouTube videos, which led me further down this rabbit hole!

By the end of 2017 I decided that I wanted to document and share my new fountain pen hobby online and YouTube seemed to be the obvious choice of platform for this.

In December 2017 I began sharing my Fountain Pen Journey on my YouTube channel Fountain Pen Journey

Much like Matt Armstrong of The Pen Habit, I felt like I also wanted to be part of the fountain pen online community and talk about fountain pens in my own YouTube channel.

Christmas 2017 saw me excitedly receiving new pens and inks for Christmas and recording and editing several fountain pen videos during the Christmas holiday - It was all very exciting!

However, only three months later things went wrong: One of my first "expensive" purchases was a Conklin Duragraph Amber, which was barely usable. Even with my (back then) limited knowledge, tinkering with the nib only yielded marginal improvements and I reviewed this pen accordingly.

I soon received an aggressively antagonistic YouTube comment on this review (I did not hold back any profanity in my reply!) but this was my first taste of the types of people that the fountain pen community harbours.

It was at this time that I began this very blog (my first blog post still remains filled with valid points to this day).

Why am I using Blogger now?

6 years of Fountain Pen Journey on YouTube has proven several things to me and I had several objectives - I'll break these down below:

• I wanted an outlet for my fountain pen hobby
• I wanted to share my Fountain Pen Journey
• I wanted to be part of the fountain pen world
• I hoped that YouTube monetisation would lead to an income to buy more fountain pens

I wanted an outlet for my fountain pen hobby

I was new to everything fountain pen related. I was incredibly excited and sharing my hobby was something that I wanted to do!

(Let's face facts, in general life you won't find that many other people who are willing to listen to you talk on and on about fountain pens. I was also driving my Wife mad talking about pens!)

Objective achieved: YouTube did provide me with this outlet - as does Blogger.

I wanted to share my Fountain Pen Journey

In the early days of my YouTube channel, this was important to me. I enjoyed sharing new pens and my accomplishments in nib tuning.

My YouTube channel grew organically and I am grateful to those earliest subscribers who have followed Fountain Pen Journey from the beginning - It has been a pleasure to have you along for the ride!

Objective achieved, but...

I wanted to be part of the fountain pen world

The fountain pen community is the same as in any walk of life: There are some good people and some bad people.

Social media (YouTube in my case) allows everyone to have a voice, but there really are some horrible people who use fountain pens. Every couple of weeks I would receive a nasty comment on a video, but I would keep going.

They say to ignore the haters. Don't let them get you down. The trouble is that having these morons able to comment on videos simply takes the enjoyment out of creating online content.

Unless you have a YouTube channel there is a high probability that you don't realise the scale of this problem. I'm not talking about general trolls here, either - these are people who use fountain pens and as often as I hear people say that the fountain pen community is "lovely" I don't think that the majority of people see too far below the surface! (The heated debates about Noodler's ink names being one good example of how divided and aggressive this community can be.)

The "fountain pen world" is also where my biggest problem lay:

Fountain Pen Journey was always intended to be a journey, where I documented and shared my progress in exploring everything related to fountain pens. Some people hated the use of my term "journey" even though this is exactly what I intended it to be. However, this first mistake was my biggest mistake because as my YouTube channel gained more and more subscribers. Those later subscribers missed my earlier videos, resulting them taking what I said in a later video out of context.

For example, I love the Lamy Safari, but when I did my Pen Mail videos and demonstrated that my latest Lamy Safari had a poorly tuned nib, people would comment saying that I clearly hate the Safari, without realising that my previous reviews/videos said quite the contrary to this!

Objective achieved, with regrettably too many bad experiences for me to want to continue putting myself through a load of shit and wasting my time on YouTube.

I hoped that YouTube monetisation would lead to an income to buy more fountain pens

It took me over two years to reach 1000 subscribers on YouTube. At the time I was pumping out 2-3 videos per week, which was unsustainable in the long term, however, this is what is expected for decent monetisation.

Here lies the problem with YouTube. To make any YouTube channel successful, you will hear time after time from established YouTubers that you need to be doing three things:

1. Have a niche and a personal style
2. Be consistent with an upload schedule
3. Treat YouTube like a full time job

1. Have a niche and a personal style

Yep, I have both. My niche is the lower cost fountain pens, it always was and always will be. Far too many fountain pen reviewers concentrate on expensive fountain pens.

As for my personal style, I certainly have this! My fountain pen reviews are honest. I buy these fountain pens with my own money. I buy the pens that I want, not what people want me to review. I do no frills videos.

2. Be consistent with an upload schedule

Soon after I got monetised I quickly realised that Google/YouTube does not pay very much money at all for YouTube videos! I was routinely publishing at least two videos a week and earning only a few quid for a lot of effort every week.

When I began Fountain Pen Journey on YouTube in December 2017, we were considering moving house but we put this off for years. By the time my YouTube channel was a decent size, we moved house and suddenly I had a life outside of YouTube!

Life/time commitments, moving, getting a good job (where I didn't have the headspace to think about fountain pen videos), etc. means that even one video per week is a difficult task.

I tried batch filming, but this takes up my precious weekends.

After months of batch-filmed video uploads, I really started to take notice of my YouTube statistics...

Many YouTubers advise not to take too much notice of your statistics, which makes sense, but when I started to look at my channel's statistics, this convinced me that I was wasting my time on an unpleasant experience.

3. Treat YouTube like a full time job

To make decent money on YouTube, this is a requirement. However, those YouTubers who do manage to make a full time job from their channels always complain about it. They suffer from burnout, creative blocks (i.e. a lack of content) and so on - Would you choose to work for a company where your pay could be good this quarter, but virtually non-existent next quarter? You can work incredibly hard, but it doesn't matter - You will never receive adequate compensation for being a YouTuber.

My last point is this - YouTube is a volatile platform. It is inconsistent with how successful it is and this has an impact on YouTubers/content creators.

The rise of TikTok saw Shorts being pushed on YouTube. Many viewers prefer short form videos (which is against what YouTube demanded from YouTubers only a couple of years ago!) so these days it is very difficult to gain any traction on YouTube.

YouTube viewing figures have fallen a lot since early 2023 and this was made all too clear to me by one viewer who noticed that (what I thought was a good) video had only gained 300 views in a month and a half - YouTube (at least for me) really is no longer worth the time, effort and grief, so here I am on Blogger.

As of 07/01/2024, my YouTube channel statistical summary looked like this:

“On paper” these statistics look ok, but it really isn’t. It is a slog and YouTube hasn’t performed as well as it did a few years ago.

My average view duration is far too short to justify making long videos.

Only around 25% of my watch time is from my subscribers.

I gained a lot of views from India due to an early review of a Ranga fountain pen which has resulted in a high proportion of my viewers being based in India, who don’t have the same access to or interest in western fountain pens.

Blogging ties in with my fountain pen use far better, which is why I’m now back on this platform.

I’m looking forward to drafting handwritten notes for this blog and typing it up in my garden.