History of Dan Root Animation (Patreon)

I've actually had a YouTube channel since December 2006, a year after the platform released and became popular.

Back then I used to watch things like Egoraptor's Awesome series, ROM hacks of Sonic games and YouTube Poops (I know, I know).

My first video was actually one of my friend and I messing around with After Effects lens flares, in February 2010.

I then started making YouTube Poops myself, which actually garnered a fair amount of views, for back then when I had 10 subscribers.

These were of Alan Partridge, and were the only ones on YouTube.

I made a few more YTPs of Ghostbusters and Batman after that, before I started uploading more of my animation work, like showreels and short pieces.

It was around this time that I'd seen Egoraptor's Sequelitis on the Mega Man series, and I started thinking "ahw man, I really want to do something like this".

I'd gotten into a bit of a rut after leaving university, I'd only got a small amount of freelance animation work and was unhappy at my other part time job, and my current relationship was beginning to break down.

I decided to really start looking into how YouTube works, in views, ad revenue, community.  I took one of the YouTube courses and started sharing, engaging and monitoring my content.

Heck, I even attempted to make a video on Super Metroid in the style of vloggers, cutting off my dialogue before I'd finished speaking.

These first attempts were off the wall, quirky and, frankly, embarrassing, and it didn't take long for me to replace them. I was still on around 150 subscribers at this point.

Then I made my first, serious and more thought-out video, which is now currently my "oldest" public video.

And it still picks up traction today. The audio is horrible and the aesthetics I went with are difficult to watch, but I still think it's an accomplished video.

I then made an animated channel trailer which I was very pleased with, and went on to make Let's Play videos (which I've made available to Patrons), after seeing the popularity of GameGrumps.

I made a one-off video about Doctor Who, which got a lot of hits quite quickly, and I think this contributed to my increase in subs, which went up to 220.

I spent 2016 making a mix of "White Background" game theory videos (which are also available to Patrons), which used a fully animated avatar of me speaking about where games could develop, and various other things like films and hobbies.  Peppered throughout were also the first of my "Black Background" game design videos, which did relatively well.

This was all in a time before I started thinking seriously about thumbnails, too, and the above ones are how they look now.

Below are how some of them used to look!

I've only recently started using white space in my thumbnails, something I noticed Nintendo do in their thumbnails, to give the illusion of a slight 3D effect. I've noticed more and more people begin using it, too.

And then, at the end of 2016, after having found Mark Brown's Game Maker's Tool Kit, which is a very good video essay series on game design, I thought "No, do better, try harder, give more, exercise finesse" to myself, and I bought good equipment, Elgato60 Game Capture, which was a lot for me at the time, wired up Super Metroid via my WiiU to get high quality footage, spent a few weeks designing and animating my new introduction to each video, with a character, a set, and voice over, and wrote a script about Super Metroid's design.

Within the first couple of weeks, I gained nearly 1,500 subscribers.

I was blown away, and I saw, first hand, that when you put time and effort into content creation, your rewards are returned ten fold, and the rest of 2017 was spent making more, high quality videos as much as I could.

Another thing I learned was releasing relevant content when a game was coming also boosted its performance, as I learned with my Sonic Mania video.

Is the Death Egg in Sonic 1 was my highest viewed video for a long while, but didn't do that well initially, it'd been a bit of a slow burner.

Around this time I started collaborating with YouTuber and friend Mort, who runs a pixel-art channel. We did a few vodcasts together, but have since been pretty busy with our own work, as we live in different countries.

I started my Patreon page late April 2017, and began using it more prominently in May onwards, gaining my first few Patrons Ben Williams, Mort and Alan Collis.

My beautiful baby daughter was born on 14th June, and I've since had less time to spend on animated segments as I'd rather spend time with her than worrying about views on a video. This hasn't stopped me from keeping motion graphic segments in the videos, of course.

In late 2017 I made my Dustforce's Animation video, an episode devoted fully to video game animation, and it was from this point that I knew I was going to tip the direction of the channel towards video game animation.

Since then I've created a few big hitters, such as my Keyframes video and my Fighting Game video, but it was when Mark Brown and PixelProspector shared my Keyframes vide that I noticed a huge boost in my subs, resulting in me tipping over 10K subscribers on 15th April, which also gave me access to the Community Tab, meaning I could share pictures, videos and polls - a great communication device for followers.

All this while, I was still making my "Atmosphere of Metroid" series, and I had no idea just how anticipated the Metroid Fusion video was, and it did tremendously well incredibly quickly.

And I think it's this that contributed to me hitting 30,000 subscribers in August '18, which was crazy to think of.

Also to note, Daniel Floyd from Extra Credits had released his video game animation channel called New Frame Plus, and we're directly 'competing' with each other, essentially. But it's great competition, cos Dan's a great guy with great content and great knowledge, and it just pushes us both to create higher quality content.

My freelance animation life became quiet during Christmas 2018, so I spent less time making videos during this period, kicking things off again early 2019 with a second Sonic Mania video, looking at how it improved animations from the Mega Drive era.  This video was where I decided to think super-hard about thumbnails, seeing the success fellow YouTuber Skip the Tutorial had made in such a short amount of time, rising the ranks of the 100K squad within 6 months, which is super insane.

I spent probably two months making my longest video to date The Animation of Samus video, and I combined its release with updated branding of the channel, choosing to go for a more clean, sharp logo incorporating the 'play' function which is sort of popular right now, and makes sense thematically.  It was around this point, in May '19, that I finally tipped into 50,000 subscribers.

29th Jan 2017 = 220 subs

29th April 2019 = 50,000 subs

Two years of increased effort resulting in a quarter of a quarter of a million subs.  We'll get there!

Throughout this whole time, starting in 2010, my branding has changed radically, as you see from the banner image of this post. I started using my freelance logo, then eventually started using an avatar head, with skills I'd recently learned in using Adobe Illustrator, eventually evolving back into a logo reflecting more of an animation angle.

Hopefully the branding would stand as this logo for a while, as I stay focused on the channel being about game animation.

During the final end of 2019, I began noticing sharp declines in views, particularly once I began a sponsorship campaign with Skillshare and Squarespace.

My theory is that, as I couldn't monetise those videos with sponsorships, Youtube doesn't promote it as it doesn't make any money from them.

At the beginning of 2020, I decided I would see through the Squarespace sponsorship and take a break from producing videos until perhaps the early Summer, still having not hit the projected 100K subscribers as was predicted by SocialBlade during 2019 (I was originally meant to hit one hundred thousand subs on April Fool's Day).

A new goal during 2020 was to take a break from YouTube and instead focus more on my indie game development.  I had a back-burner idea to make a long-form video for the channel later on, during Summer, and produce it at my own pace.

After all, YouTube's algorithm favoured watch-time over views, so making a longer, more interesting video would spread much further.

I'm truly thankful of all the subscribers, followers and Patrons I've gained in the last couple of years, and I hope this little history has been insightful.

Feel free to ask me any questions, and I'll answer them best I can!

Love you all, bye!