Foyfluff Announcement

Hey everyone, I wanted to make a little post to announce a few things and to explain where I’ve been and what’s in store for this channel. I totally understand if you’re not interested in this type of thing just feel free to move along, but in the interests of full transparency, something very important to me, and because I like it when my favourite content creators go behind the scenes, I thought I’d make this post.

Firstly, a TL;DR:

There’s a new direction for the Foyfluff channel – Food videos and analytical reaction-style stuff

I’m streaming again – Hoping to play some story-driven games in which myself and my audience can have a lot of fun, as well as Magic, Hearthstone, and whatever else I happen to be playing. When I play, I want to involve you guys in that.

There’s a new channel too, Foyfluffier – The second channel is mostly just for Twitch VODs and such. I want a permanent place to store VODs so that people can watch them at their own leisure, but I don’t want to bog down the main channel with them. This is pretty standard stuff so I’m sure you all know what to expect.

I’ll be trying to be more regular and organised with my content, but between university, work, and a life sometimes it can be difficult.


Before I begin explaining these points I’d like to start by outlining some of the goals for my channel, and I mean goals in broad strokes not “Reach 10,000 subscribers” or something, though that is obviously something I’d like to achieve. I think outlining these goals has helped me to understand why I’m making these changes, and again in the name of transparency, that’s why I’d like to tell you about them too.

Creating online content is something I absolutely love doing and something I’ve loved to do for a long time. It’s been about 8 or 9 years since I started my first YouTube channel commentating over gameplay of Call of Duty, and I thoroughly enjoy making every single video that I do. That’s why I’d really like to be able to commit more time to this creative endeavour, so my biggest goal is to get my channel to the point that I can somewhat comfortably quit my job and dedicate more time towards this channel. I’m not going to call that, “doing YouTube full-time” because I’m still going to be attending university and getting my degree, but after that, who knows? For now, my ideal situation would be to be able to spend as much time creating online content as I do completing university work.
And that’s not massively difficult for me to achieve. My student loan keeps me alive and housed for the most part, I could afford to not work if I wanted to, but the stage that my channel is currently at makes it not worth the risk. If my hopes came just a bit closer to fruition and some sort of reasonable revenue stream seemed obtainable, I would jump at the opportunity to do it even though it would be a massive risk. Right now I don’t know how long it might take to get to that point so I can’t afford to put everything on black and spin the wheel. I’m not necessarily looking for an easy transition from my ‘real job’ to an online revenue stream, I just need the gap to be a little bit closer before I take that jump.

So I’ll start with possibly the most radical and also exciting change for my channel. Foyfluff’s tagline has become ‘A Forkful of Everything’ and that’s what the channel is going to offer, a wide variety of different video types that reflect the things that I want to make and the things I want to talk about, but with a food-based backbone. I don’t mean I’m going to make a food chat show (though I won’t promise that I’m not going to do that) but that I’ll be aiming to make regular content about food while the other video types will be on the periphery and will be made when I think of the ideas or when the topics become relevant.

This is a pretty bold change in direction for a channel that has built up its 700+ subscribers through videos about card games, and I’ll explain why I’ve made this decision in just a little bit, but first I want to address that fact. You might think that it would make more sense, considering I am starting a second channel, to put the new food/analysis content on the second channel. I think that does make more sense, but the decision I’ve made is somewhat of a selfish one. Firstly, I want to give this new content the best start it can have, and having it show up in my pre-existing subscribers’ inbox gives it the potential for an influx of views from that avenue. Building a whole new channel from the ground-up is so much harder than doing it with an audience you’ve already built up. I’m hoping that if even a tenth of my subscribers give my new content a chance, that’ll be enough to get the ball rolling on this kind of thing. Secondly, I also hope that the people that have subscribed to me have subscribed for me as a person over the particular type of content that I make. If you’re only interested in seeing videos about card games like Hearthstone and Magic: the Gathering, while I will be streaming those games and occasionally making videos about them, they’re definitely no longer the sole focus of my channel and if that makes you want to unsubscribe then I am sorry you feel that way and I hope you find other channels that will provide the content that you’re looking for. Alternatively, if you do believe in me to make interesting videos then I’d encourage you to stick around, after all, everyone eats, right? Hopefully there’s still space for me in your subscriptions, but if not, I do understand.
As promised, I’ll explain the move towards food and analytical content. I guess first, I’ll quickly explain that what I mean by analytical content is sort of topical fact and opinion-based videos. As an example, I’m planning on talking about the recent Banned Iceland advert, and I’m also looking at a little series which I’ll be piloting by looking at the very first Pokémon adverts. I call these analytical videos as opposed to reaction videos because I’ll be taking a very academic approach to these, really trying to break issues down into their components and analyse them in a rigorous and somewhat objective way. That’s a skill that I think I’ve developed quite strongly, and videos like that are where the overwhelming majority of my current views have come from (the ‘When Video Essayists Lie’ video).

So, why the change? Well, I think it’s really important when you’re trying to grow as a channel to identify what makes your channel different from everyone else’s. What’s my USP? What’s my niche? Why should people watch me? When you’re being very self-aware, sometimes the honest answers to those questions can be something along the lines of “I don’t have one”, “The same thing as everyone else”, and “I’ve got no idea”. But, in order to grow it’s quite necessary to have some more satisfying answers to those questions. As a Hearthstone streamer I very much looked up to and in some ways modelled myself after Firebat in particular, but also the other Hearthstone streamers that I liked and respected such as Trump, Kripp, and Hafu. But I never felt as though I was offering anything massively different from them. Of course, it was still different, at least a bit, I am not those people and my streams were not rip-offs of theirs, but in the end, I still didn’t feel like I was bringing anything unique to the table.

I found inspiration in a strange place. I’m sure many of you have heard of Ashens, and hopefully some of you have heard of My Virgin Kitchen. Both of these channels thrive on unique and really interesting content which, to some extent, boils down to looking at an interesting product/recipe and making jokes around it. Their personality is incredibly important to their success, but so is the subject of their videos. Every video their audiences can expect to see something new, something fresh, something they might not have seen before. I decided that was something I wanted for my videos too, but it was difficult to find in Hearthstone or any other card game. For a while I set my heart on the idea that my channel would be about card games in general, that I’d look at obscure, defunct, interesting card games, maybe reviewing every digital card game that exists to look at their different merits. I still think that’s a really interesting idea and I might revisit it at some point, but the bigger problem is that the potential for growth in that area is very limited. The majority of Trump’s Hearthstone videos get between 100k and 200k views. Yes that’s incredible compared to myself, but ultimately it speaks to the fact that fewer people are interested in card games than in other topics, and that’s for the biggest card game in the world at the moment, I’m sure there are fewer still viewers of old and cancelled card games.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle in making videos dedicated to physical card games, though, is the need for a second player. I don’t currently know anyone in close proximity to me that would be interested in playing a heap of old card games with me, and if I can’t make my videos alone it puts me in deep trouble if anything were to ever go wrong with production. In short, although I had originally intended to go in that direction, even going so far as to film an announcement video for that, it was around halfway through the recording that I realised that it’s just not the right avenue for me.

But with the food and analysis videos, ideas just keep flowing out of my head and straight into a Google Docs page that I’ve got set up. I’m overwhelmed with enthusiasm and drive to get going on this stuff and I hope that I can create unique and entertaining videos that you’ll love.

So, that was over 1,000 words on the main point of this video, I’m sure the others will be much shorter though.

Secondly, I’ll be livestreaming again! I used to livestream quite a bit before I got my job, but my job really ate up a lot of my time and it felt like YouTube was the best way to grow. I still think that probably is the case, but livestreaming is something I can do while I’m just playing games to chill out or whatever, I get to talk to you guys about whatever is going on in your worlds, my world, or even just the world, and I can still feel productive even while I’m chilling out. It’s also nice that some of you incredibly generous souls even subbed or donated back when I used to stream, so that could be considered the very start of my revenue stream. I can’t promise anything in the way of a schedule unfortunately, my work rota changes week to week and I’m ‘On Call’ a lot, but I’m going to endeavour to stream at least once a week in a dedicated way, and to try and fire up the stream whenever I expect to be gaming for an hour or so. If I do get to the point where I can quit my job though this will change in a heartbeat.

Next up, the second channel – Foyfluffier. This is largely going to exist as an archive for Twitch Stream VODs so people can catch up or relive their favourite streams if they so choose. Some other content might end up there if I don’t feel comfortable having it on the main channel, but I’ll definitely be focusing my growth on my main channel.

Lastly, I just want to apologise for going dark for so long. Unlike some bigger content creators, I don’t have hundreds of people asking me where I am or assuming I’ve died just because I haven’t put anything out in a while, but it’s still shocking to me that there’s people that care about the content I create and want to know what’s going on in my life. For anyone that wants to stay a bit more in touch with me I’d recommend coming over to the discord channel if you’re not there already as I do tend to be a bit more active there and I try to reply to any questions or comments I get.

As for now though, here’s to a bright and shining future in content creation! I wish you all the best, and please don’t hesitate to ask me anything that you might be curious about.

Many many thanks,
Dylan