November Blog

I haven’t done an update blog since April. A lot has happened since then. I always have wanted to write update blogs monthly. I haven’t been doing them because there is not a lot to talk about. At this point, some things are happening and some things I want to talk about. 

Losing Los Uinkos: The Aftermath

I want to talk about the drama related to my last blog. Before I get into that my allegiance is to Reno 1868 FC. Not to anyone supporters group. I am a member of the Battle Born Brigade and the Douglas Alley Renegades. I just wanted to make that clear. 

What I was expecting when I was writing was that it would be another blog post that no one cares about outside of Reno 1868 FC supporters. I was expecting around maybe twenty to thirty views. I did expect to get some negative feedback as well as some hate. I honestly thought that it would all come from the Reno 1868 FC supporters. My expectations were shattered when on the release day alone the post received 121 views. That’s a lot considering that my previous blog post only got 8 total views. 

The hate was there almost evidently. It was pretty calm on Reddit. Most of the comments on there were about the context of the situation. Most of what happened on Facebook was just a discussion between supporters. I didn’t post it to the USL trash talk page. I unfollowed that group after events that took place at the end of last season. I believe that that page is just toxic and not good for the league. It encourages the idea that because people cheer for different teams they should hate each other.

Twitter is where I received the most hate. Most of the hate was from the people I wrote the blog about. I somewhat expected that. The amount of effort that they made to make sure that they liked, retweeted and commented on everything that was hate towards me was far more than I was expecting. What they did bothered me.  

Outside what they were doing, there was one person who was going around targeting Battle Born Brigade members. I was one of the people that he targeted. He wasn’t as bad as some of the other people on twitter but he was trying hard to try to put me down. I woke up Friday and Saturday to people saying mean things about me and calling me racist. At one point, I was called the Battle Born Brigade’s puppet. I don’t know why but one person called what I wrote cringe. Based on other tweets from that person I assume it was because I am white and I am discussing an issue involving Latin people. If that’s the issue then that’s just stupid on so many levels. If it was about how I wrote the blog then it doesn’t help me that that person didn’t tell me why it was cringe. 

All of that happened before the playoff game on October 26. I was lobbing since late Wednesday early Thursday that we shouldn’t have had our pregame at Mellow Fellow. It’s where Sacramento fans always go. After being targeted by Sacramento fans, I didn’t want to be near any Sacramento fans. Amongst other things that’s what it boiled down too. The pregame did end up at Mellow Fellow. Luckily there weren’t any issues. I, however, was on edge the whole time. I know at least one person who was there I did block on twitter and was a part of targeting me. Before the game, the Sacramento fans were chanting for Los Unikos. That hurt me. After everything that led up to that point, I felt like I was being targeted by the chant. In reality, the truth is probably that most of the people chanting didn’t even see what I wrote or even know I existed. The club as a whole was the ones being targeted. At that moment, what I knew and what I felt were two different things. The game ends. We lose. I was not just feeling sad because we lost and our season is over. I was having a panic attack because it was the worst possible outcome after everything that had happened. After the game, I was just trying to calm down. I continued to see hate directed towards me on twitter. This time it wasn’t about what I had written but about me filming and making content. After that, I was just done. Sunday, I announced I wasn’t going to be on twitter for a while. I plan to not go back until at least this upcoming Sunday.

I have been making YouTube videos since 2015. People hating on what I do or calling it cringe isn’t new to me. It happened after the Las Vegas game. Someone on the USL Reddit told me “I wouldn’t rape even you worthless piece of shit”. I do think that this was sent by one of the guys who was trying to fight us both during and after the game. I also think that one of those guys might be the same person who sent out the tweet about me making content. I have dealt with hate like this before. I have not however dealt with targeting from this many people for this long before.  

I have done a lot of research (before any of this) on what to do when you come across hate or how to tell hate from actual feedback. What I have found that the best way to deal with hate is to not engage it or to be polite. People who target and hate people just to do it feed off the engagement because it gives them attention and validation. I am not an organization or company and the situation I wrote about isn’t about me directly, therefore this is not engaging is my best option. If I was a group or organization or this was about me directly then my best option would be to release a blanket statement. A statement that can be posted everywhere and given to people who continue to bring the situation up. Once someone is shown the statement they can be ignored. 

I don’t think that this situation is over. I think it might come up at the start of next season. I think some people have already concluded that our club as racist. I think that some people are going to use this situation when they trash talk about our club. I think Los Unikos lost a lot of respect from Reno 1868 FC supporters (and from around the league) when they cheered with the Sacramento supporters both before the game and after Reno started to lose. At this point, I want to be done with the whole situation. I didn’t want to dedicate another whole blog post to it. I think if I did it would reignite the fire that is starting to slow down. 

Analytics

Now for something completely different, statistics. I think I have said it in the past but, analytics isn’t what motivates me to make content. I don’t do it for subscribers, website clicks or followers. I do what I do because I enjoy it. 

Now that soccer season is over I am going to be doing this a little bit differently. Starting with my website here is a breakdown of what has happened so far, this year. 

2015, 2016, and 2017 combined got blown out of the water by 2018. In 2018, I had a combined 325 views, 109 visitors, averaging 2.98 views per visitor. I accomplished that with a total of 15 posts. So far in 2019, I have had 1,426 views, 1,081 visitors, averaging 1.32 views per visitor. I have already published 49 posts. I don’t know how many more I will publish before the end of this year. I don’t think that those numbers will change too much by January first. 

so far in 2019, I have blown 2018 out of the water. The only thing I don’t like is the average view per visitor went down. This means that people are more than likely going to my site via a link and reading a post and then not reading other posts or looking at other pages. This is something that I will be working to fix next year. 

Month to month it looks like I averaged around 100 views per month. Two months that stand out are March and October. In March, I got 466 views. In October, I got 376 views. These two months carried the whole year. The amount of posts per month varies from 1 (February) to 15 (July). Surprisingly July only had 112 views on 15 posts while October had 376 views on two posts. I would have thought that July would have had stats closer to what I got in March which had 466 views on 13 posts. In 2019, it doesn’t look like having more posts will result in more views. I think the context of the post is why they get views. I do think that having more posts is setting myself up for more views then publishing fewer posts. 

Moving on to Facebook. With Facebook, the main stats I look at are likes and followers and for me, they have consistently been about the same. So, I started 2019 with 95-page likes. That number shrunk down to 68 in March. In April and May, that number climbed. I had reached 206 in May. By August it was back down under 100. Currently, my Facebook page is sitting at 73 likes. I wish I would have paid more attention sooner to what’s going on. At this point, I don’t know what started the decline in likes. I’m not going to panic about this until it’s under 50. In September of 2018, I only had 36 likes on my page. By the end of the month, I had 146. My number of Facebook likes is always changing. But it does bother me that I don’t know why it happened. 

Instagram. I currently have 64 followers. I don’t get any insights on Instagram until I have 100 likes. I was close at one point to reach that goal. Hopefully, I will get there in 2020. 

Now onto the big one. YouTube. It’s been an interesting year on YouTube. I have not nearly created or had the time to create as much content on YouTube as I want. 

Let’s talk about the official Zac Electrifly channel. I have released a total of two videos on that channel so far in 2019. That number is not anywhere near where I wanted it to be. I will be working the rest of this year and into 2020 on uploading videos consistently. 

Zac plays hockey is a hockey channel. It’s the third channel I post to. So far in 2019, I have posted one video on there. I am looking at ways to change this. I do have plans for the channel. Creating content for this channel is hard because hockey isn’t in Reno.  

Zac plays soccer is my largest channel by a lot. Views are up 43%. Watch time is up 69%. Subscribers are up 100%. According to the 2019 analytics, everything is going well. Looking at what happened in October, views are only up by 1%. Watch time is down 19%. And I didn’t gain any subscribers. With soccer season now over for Reno 1868 FC, there are only a handful of videos I am going to make by the end of this year. All of which might come out by the end of this month. 

Ending the year

I want to produce 3 videos a week for each of my YouTube channels. Along with that, I want to be more consistent about writing blogs. I also want to create original content for my social media channels. Do I have the time for this? Not really. What I have decided to do is build-up to this. 

So how do I build-up to this? It starts with the official Zac Electrifly channel. I need to get back to producing one video a week. Then I can expand on that starting in January of 2020. 

Zac plays soccer, it just has to be about getting back to where I was in February and March. By that, I mean creating more than one series of videos and releasing at least one video a week. Most of that I am planning on starting in January. That being because it’s not soccer season and I have other projects I want to work on. 

I already explained what’s going on with Zac plays hockey. Even though I have plans for content for this hockey season it’s hard because hockey isn’t in Reno. 

With blog writing, I have a list of blogs that I am currently writing. That list should last until the end of this year. I also have plans for expansion for next year. 

Social media will probably stay consistent until the end of this year. New original content probably won’t start until next year. what that will probably look like is Facebook, Twitter and Instagram will all get at least one live video series. They will all get previews for YouTube videos. Just things in that direction. 

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