2023 was a busy year for me.
2023 by the numbers
- Brewed 600 bottles of homemade wine
- Co-hosted ~50 episodes of Slam Fire Radio.
- We reached 31k people on Facebook
- We had 24k views on YouTube
- Cumulatively, we’ve had 413k plays of the podcast via iTunes, though most months are only 4000-5000 plays.
- Published 35 videos on YouTube for HuntingGearGuy. My videos were watched 1.5 million times in 2023
- Wrote 28 articles for this website. My articles were read by 770k people in 2023
- Helped put on 15 Mapleseeds across Alberta
- Attended 13 shooting matches, including 2 major 3gun matches (CHAS Battle of Alberta and MP3G Peace River Team Match)
- Camped or stayed over at a range 9 weekends
- Got certified as a CFSC/CFRSC firearms license instructor
- Got a deer, a ton of grouse, rabbits, etc. Hunted with my youngest son and he got a big bad buck
- Volunteered at various ladies, family day, and national range day events
Publishing videos on alternative platforms
To put it plainly, the YouTube competitors aren’t getting any traction. Playeur, Rumble, Odysee, Bitchute, and Juxxi only make up for 2-5% of the total views I’d get on a video vs the 95-99% on YouTube. I’ll still auto-populate these other platforms where possible but I’m not going out of my way.
The plan for 2024:
The biggest change to this plan for next year will be to do more PAL courses (firearms license courses). To that end, I’ve setup a page on this website with more info and I’ll be setting up scheduled courses soon.
I’ll try to do fewer Mapleseeds myself but we should still be able to do a bunch here as we have 2 other shoot bosses in Alberta.
I’ll write fewer articles since AI and Amazon affiliate spam is starting to take over the internet and is hard to compete with.
I’ll still do video content but I’ll focus on stuff that other people aren’t doing.