starbonnie76 - Tumblr blog

[starbonnie76]

(4/4) I have not gained an audience or a degree of popularity after nearly 12 years of making videos and music. It's time to admit it has become frustrating.

I switched my content up even more in December 2023, making more professional looking backgrounds and watermarks for my commentary videos. The threshold of 100s (to around 1k views) per video cannot be passed. It's impossible. Obviously at this point, e-boy and e-girl culture had cemented it's grasp on the internet. Creators who were not only my age, but mid-teens and even some pre-teens were getting MASSIVE audiences. THAT is what I wanted in 2013. It made me genuinely think that if I was a pretty girl, but making the exact same content I am now, my audience could be a hundred times larger than it is now. Kids have it a lot easier online now. The other YouTube venture I wanted to mention was my 2023 return to music under the new name Too Dead To Dance. I created a new album, Death Speaks English, using a number of free electronic music creation websites. All but one of my tracks were rejected from Spotify, so to this day, only one single is on that site and it has maybe 20 streams. I posted the first album on YouTube, because I had expected them to be accepted onto Spotify and they had no platform. The most popular track has 42 views months later. I had given music such a long break, but it didn't do the same positive good that video creation had. I posted a few more videos to my personal channel for the first time since 2019 in 2023 as well. Content I hadn't created got views in the 1000s. Crazy. I attempted streaming on Twitch under the Kirbyster Plays name as well. My thinking in 2017, when I started, was to gain a transferable audience on Twitch to then link with my YouTube, with the ultimate goal of growing Kirbyster Plays on YouTube. Alas, it was not meant to be. I must've done 100 attempts on Twitch or more over the years. OBS, even with a Vtuber model. Nothing. So this is actually, genuinely where I am at the moment. I'm barely further than I was in 2013 so many years later. I intend to keep on creating videos as Kirbyster Plays and creating music as Too Dead To Dance. May this year give me a support audience. Thank you all for reading.

[starbonnie76]

(3/4) I have not gained an audience or a degree of popularity after nearly 12 years of making videos and music. It's time to admit it has become frustrating.

In July 2017, I would get another shot at the internet, starting uploads to a sequel channel to The Kirbyster known as Kirbyster Plays, which is the channel I am still using to this day. This was the biggest attempt to break out into the social media scene for a number of years. Uploading the three years of content I'd pre-recorded after the original The Kirbyster channel was deactivated, I would return to making new videos - video reviews, video essays and largely Nintendo-related posts. The editing quality increased drastically. With The Kirbyster, there was Windows Live Movie Maker, but now, there was Sony Vegas Pro 13. I would upload videos consistently, with at least one a week from mid-2017 to mid-2019. Again, despite tapping into current topics and game releases, I found no consistent stream of views, and reaching over 20 views a video was a success. At the same time, I was uploading videos to a personal channel, called Steven Whitear, where I would post continuity adverts and idents from now-offline British Children's TV channel CITV. Uploading content that I wasn't creating was getting more attention. Not only was that demotivating, but I was also getting a little frustrated because at this time, creators like Logan Paul were appearing on YouTube and making videos for a year or so and getting tens of millions of subscribers. More and more creators were putting less thought in their videos, putting out mindless and shallow content to the masses and getting it monetized. What was I doing wrong?? 2019 would see the end of Kirbyster Plays, for now. There are two more massively noteworthy ventures on YouTube I would like to mention at this time. I would begin making content on Kirbyster Plays again in August 2022, on the turn of my 18th birthday. The editing on these videos were massively more presentable than videos I'd even been making two years previously. I got a certain degree of attention after that, but it was miniscule. I'm making videos on Five Nights at Freddy's 4, Kirby and Bayonetta, and they're getting a few hundred views, generally tipping over one thousand views after a nudge. I've bought into almost every YouTube promotion program there is, and this is only as far as it's pushed me. Although The Kirbyster is now over 10, and Kirbyster Plays is turning 7 this year, I want more. The content I'm making is taking 100s of man-hours every month, and it's intended for a larger audience than I'm getting.

[starbonnie76]

(2/4) I have not gained an audience or a degree of popularity after nearly 12 years of making videos and music. It's time to admit it has become frustrating.

I would be just like the creators of Normalboots, but my distinctive quality would be my age. It isn't at all that I was mature for my age, but it was the motivation and aspiration at that age which made me think it was genuinely possible to at least get a consistent stream of views. From November 2013 to November 2014, I would make 9 episodes of The Kirbyster, gaining absolutely no traction at all. The channel ended due to my parents finally coming to their senses and telling me I was too young to have a YouTube channel. Considering the absolute myriad of children on the internet now, obviously this is a silly thought, but the moral is still there - they should have the internet access and freedom they have. Regardless, after a year of video game reviews and planning, I had achieved nothing, which was unsurprising at this stage. It isn't like they were just me recording one long video on a camera, either. They were properly made to recreate PBG and AVGN videos that I had watched at that point. The 9 Kirbyster episodes have been reuploaded to my current YouTube channel Kirbyster Plays, which I'll get to later on. What's important is that a year before this, I had recorded three seasons of videos which were essentially me playing with Hero Factory figures, which I called the Hero Series. The ultimate goal was for this to get a degree of attention as well, but they wouldn't be uploaded until 2017, and if me forgetting the videos existed until now isn't telling, this was an unsuccessful attempt at breaking into the social media scene at a young age as well. The next notable social media crusade was in 2016, where I moved from videos to music after the discovery of an app called Drum Pad Machine. I made no less than THREE albums of 15 tracks under my name, Steven Whitear. The first two albums were released in 2016, with a follow up third album in 2017. All albums exist physically. I have the only copy of them all apart from the third album, where two copies exist, but the other is owned by my distant childhood friend. All tracks from these albums were posted to YouTube, but I cannot for the life of me find them. I may have even been gaslighting myself into thinking they were uploaded at all, because the chronology of having a device to upload on in that era is something I can't figure out in my head. Regardless of how far these three albums got, to my understanding, only 5 people have heard the songs on them - my family, and that one childhood friend. This would not be the last attempt to make music by far, but again, I will get to that. In 2015, 2016 and 2017 (around the same time), I was still recording video review content and walkthroughs. They weren't being uploaded, but I wasn't only recording them for myself. I was 'pre-recording' them all in anticipation of having internet access once again. In 2017, that would finally come.

[starbonnie76]

(1/4) I have not gained an audience or a degree of popularity after nearly 12 years of making videos and music. It's time to admit it has become frustrating.

It's January 1st, 2024 and I promised myself yesterday that I would dedicate around an hour today to air my grievances about my time on social media. This is my first post on Tumblr. The reason why I'm deciding to make this message on a site I've never used before is because this is one of the only mainstream sites where I haven't already attempted to gain an audience. After some time, Tumblr may be the next website I add to the long list of failed attempts at breaking out, but let me at least explain myself first. I'm 19, and will be for the majority of 2024. I have been creating social media content with the intent of becoming a popular figure since 2013. At only the age of 9, with the help of my dad, I made a YouTube channel and began creating video game reviews under the title of The Kirbyster. YouTube was an obvious first focus because that's where all of the social media had been consumed for me up until that point. I wasn't at an age where I could be adventurous yet. YouTube was the only website I would consistently know. At that young age, my idea was to combine the episodic nature of Cinemassacre/Angry Video Game Nerd videos with the humour of a modern YouTuber like PeanutButterGamer and the result would be my own style.