Hi Everyone, Jordan here and I would like to clear up a few things.
I want to be honest with you regarding the last year and more so the last few months with the bus. As you might of noticed the content just hasn’t been the same and has changed so much from day one when I started with V176ESL the Volvo B10. Back in them days I was so happy and excited about doing the content and sharing my journey as a Bus owner and driver.
We have had a lot of problems over the year but as a group we have always pulled together. But with time comes changes to our lives. Myself and Shaun use to have a lot more time to deal with the bus and the problems but in this modern days until we can take on more of a full time role with the bus we just don’t have the time we use to. So it leaves us with just doing our best.
Myself I have been very down hearted and deflated with the channel but this is a mixture of things like how unreliable the bus has been and the amount of trouble this engine has been to repair or even get working at all like we have at the time of writing. To be clear if it wasn’t for my parent this whole engine replacement wouldn’t be happening we would be having to try and fix and sort out the engine and get it back to how it was. Myself and Shaun put every penny we can into the project.
People seem to think that as YouTubers we make a lot of money on Youtube and this just isn’t correct. For a small niche channel like ours where we don’t have driving route videos etc now it is very hard to make money. With our average views of just 200 It is very hard to see when a lot of time and effort is put in. But watching the old content back and the new content I can see that myself I am not the same person the content isn’t as upbeat as it use to be and I am really hoping to change that. Myself and Shaun use to do a lot of messing about and joking that just isn’t there anymore. On reflection that is trying to be brought back.
Something that has helped a lot in the recent times is Ethan who came on board to help with editing this had its problems though, Ethan isn’t in Manchester and isn’t able to just grab the raw video footage from us so with help of that massive server we bought as a NAS (Network Attached Storage) it has given us that flexibility to have Ethan as he is able to grab the Raw video and send the finished back without someone being there. However when the server was bought I knew they was power hungry but my god they are power hungry. If you not aware this isn’t your typical tower pc running as a server we use to have that and it wasn’t bad but it was slightly unreliable and wasn’t very quick so I spotted a deal on Ebay and in the end the guy we bought it off was so glad to get rid of it he let us have it for free if we could collect it in the next few days so that’s what we did. Me and Natalie drove down there to collect it.
So that has made a massive difference not only to the electric bill but to the editing ability now with everything sat on the share we can all log in and access it.
At the start of the year we stopped doing two things one being Patreon and the Ko-fi store. This was a big decision to do Patreon we would be paid throughout the month from them and it was a promising platform to start membership before we was able to have it on YouTube. However due to the them being two different platforms it was starting to become too much of a pain at this currently moment in time to manage and we knew we had to streamline the processes to help it become more personal and better. So it was dropped. Ko-fi was semi dropped so we had our merch store on there and after 3 attempts it was decided by myself without the other knowing like a undercover operation that lasted over a month of myself and Natalie working at night to setup our own store which we now have done and it has been hard to see that no one uses it but it is there.
I know it all doesn’t happen over night and the most recent stuff has got better, The more comments and interaction we get the better the content does. We are working on the improvements and so far the choices we have made to make the business more simple has been for the better and Patreon might start up again in a few years but at the moment we are happy with the simple of everything is on YouTube or our own website that we have control over.
So I would like to say sorry for the lack of content and the quality of the content I am working to get back to the good old days of upbeat and funny stuff. Although this again won’t be an overnight thing I personally have a lot going on in my personal life which makes a massive impact on myself but I am climbing. Although I don’t seem to show it I am so excited to get the bus up and running and get out there on the road to meet you all.
We have put a lot of work into the business and the bus and we aren’t going to give up on it that is a certainty it can only get better.
Thank you for following us and sticking by our half arsed content. I am open to suggestion on improvements we could make just drop us an email at Admin@mancbuses.com