TL;DR - wherein the Fortnite fiasco teaches me how much my marketing sucks.
That whole Fortnite black hole experience was a bit disheartening.
I felt bad for the people like Rowan, Adrian, and Shae that were waiting for the new season and having to sit through all of that, of course. However, I'm not that into the game, so that was not what was on my mind during a lot of it.
We were all sitting there in the living room, watching the black hole on the PS4/television, or playing the mini-game that came up with the use of the Konami code. Meanwhile, during a large part of the outage, Shae and Rowan were on their phones, trying to get more information about what was going on and following the streams of various YouTubers.
Holy Crap. I'm mostly following the ones that Shae is watching because I'm sitting by her on the love seat and massaging her feet. This one that she is watching is getting many hundreds of thousands of views, a quarter-million likes, and a metric shit-ton of new subscribers - all things that that particular YouTuber said was totally unusual, and that he normally got a few hundred to a few thousand viewers during his streams.
All of this for, in essence, nothing. He was streaming the exact same thing that was on our TV, with a four to five-second delay to boot. No new information, no details of what was going on. He was passing on some miscellaneous information that people chatting on his channel were saying, but that was about it. There was a small skit or two. He was also updating the info on his screen for newcomers to his channel, so that was nice.
Yet there he was having almost constant donations of $4, $10, and $25 streaming across his feed. There was even one for $500. All for basically giving
us the same available information that we were getting by having the PS4 turned on in our living room. Just to be clear, this isn't a dig at him. He was very entertaining, did the best that he could with the information that was available, and toughed things out for many hours.
It did, however; make me realize how much I suck at marketing. Shae and I both have stores where various things that we have personally designed are available. Tee shirts, mugs, hoodies, leggings, wall art, pillows, etc.
We have my fixed income from the military disability to rely on for our monthly expenses. With the bankruptcy, there is pretty much no discretionary income. This is bad in most months, but even worse the last two months, where due to broken air-conditioning and extremely hot weather here in South Texas, our power bill has totaled more than $800 over the two month period.
So we have these stores, and even though I get hundreds of likes, favorites, pins, and comments or whatnot per month, we struggle to come up with one sale per month. Considering the fact that I only make about $4-$6 in profit per sale, that doesn't even pay for the cost of keeping my store open, which is $30 per month for the website.
Ah well. It's been like this for years, and I don't see it changing in the future. I just wanted to rant for a little bit after watching someone bringing in many thousands of dollars streaming something I was watching on my own television.
