We’d like to start by wishing you a Happy New Year!
2018 was a special year for our YouTube Channel as we hit two milestones: We reached 50.000 subscribers and passed a total of 4 million views last December! What started out as a simple challenge of doing 52 tutorials in 52 weeks back in 2016 has become quite a big enterprise, as we, on December 6th 2018, celebrated 3 years and 185 videos on YouTube! We have posted 1 video every single week since the beginning and we are very proud of that!!
As many of you know, we have a very high quality, 2 camera production and a team of professionals to help us out with this project. It takes 5 people (us included) and many, many hours of dedicated work from each of the five of us, every single week, to produce the episodes that you enjoy. Each episode you see takes a lot of planning, pre production, filming, post production and editing. On top of that, the two of us need to imagine the contents of the channel, especially the tutorials, then we need to design and create the projects and make written patterns which we publish on our blog, to support the videos. As we are sure you know, this not only takes an enormous amount of time out of our already packed schedule, it also costs lots and lots of money. Some of the money comes from our YouTube advertising revenue, some comes from our terrific yarn sponsors (Rowan, Regia, Schachenmayr) and quite a lot of the money comes from our own pockets.
We have now come to the point where things are becoming more and more complicated, as we grow bigger and bigger. We won’t go into all the challenges that we face right now, but just consider the number of free patterns available on our blog (more than 100 as of today) and think about the number of questions that we get on a weekly basis from people who don’t understand something in a specific pattern and need help. This creates an even bigger workload for us, as we suddenly also have to take on the role of “customer service” for patterns that we are posting free of charge and which we do not make any revenue from. Unfortunately, we do not have deep pockets and unlimited funds to keep on doing this forever, so we need to implement some changes as of 2019.
We really need to find new sources of revenue to pay for all the work that involves the patterns that we post, as we just don’t have the financial resources for this. Since every other designer that we know of charges for their patterns, we have decided that from 2019, we will start charging for patterns that we post in connection with the episodes. This will hopefully give us some revenue, which is well needed, in order to keep the quality of the patterns to the high standards that we demand and will also enable us to provide more assistance and support when we are contacted by people who may need some help. We also believe that most people who are reasonably skilful in knitting or crochet will be able to make many of the designs from our video tutorials once we show and tell how we do it and without the need to buy the pattern, so we don’t feel like we are forcing people to purchase something from us. Everyone will still enjoy every single video tutorial that we do – free of charge – but those who really wish to buy the pattern, can do it by their own choice, also knowing that by purchasing a pattern, they are contributing to keeping our channel running – and at the same time, they get instant value for the money they spend on buying something they really want. It’s a win – win situation for all of us! We think that in the long run, this is the most sustainable way of financing this particular aspect of our channel. We are currently using Ravelry, while we wait to open our new online store, where we are also thinking of designing and selling project bags with limited edition art work drawn by us as well as other merchandise, all of this to bring in the necessary revenue we need to continue to create great content for our channel and to make sure that the episodes that are posted on our YouTube Channel every Sunday at 6pm CET/ 11am CST continue to be of the very high quality standard, 100% free of charge and available for everyone to enjoy!
We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone from the bottom of our hearts for watching, commenting, liking and subscribing to our channel for these past 3 years. It’s because of your great support that we are able to make this channel happen! And we would also like to extend a warm welcome to all our new viewers who have just joined in on the fun! We also hope that people will understand why we are forced to implement these changes to our new patterns and we would like to offer our apologies for this inconvenience.
Yours Sincerely,
ARNE & CARLOS