So many ideas for projects, nowhere near enough time to work on them all.



Hello there, I’m Justin and I make videos about Japanese Pro-wrestling. If this is your first time seeing any of my stuff, I ran a YouTube channel from January 2017 to Spring 2018 where I published more than a dozen critical video essays exploring various aspects of New Japan Pro-wrestling. The channel generated over a million views and close to 20,000 subscribers in about a year before being taken down for copyright claims. It all happened (coincidentally, I’m sure) right before New Japan launched their own YouTube series doing pretty much what myself and other’s were doing- though, I’d argue, not nearly as well.



It is, of course, valuable to have easy to digest content that can act as a sort of translation tool. Something that recaps and gets across the nuances of stories that are being told over long periods of time. Not to mention storylines that are primarily being played out in front of an audience that speaks a different language and may have different cultural sensibilities from an English speaking fandom. But there’s only so much that can be covered through official channels.

Pro-wrestling does, after all, have a strange relationship with what is real and what is not. In Japan, that line is even more blurred than it is in the west. Since I can never be too sure how knowledgeable my audience will be on certain topics, there will always be a need for some degree of onboarding. After all, It’s important that everyone be up to a baseline level of understanding if we are going to be discussing something in greater detail. Though, as a writer, the overreaching philosophy that I have always taken with my work has been to figure out, and then try to explain, the best I can, what it is about pro-wrestling that makes us like it so much. Anyone can cover the who, what, and when- as long they put in enough research. That’s why my goal has always been to discover the how and why. Which is something that a company might not be too keen on exposing themselves.



So, what now?



Sure it sucks having to start over, but I was never going to let a silly little thing like having a year’s worth of hard work scrubbed from the face of the earth stop me from pursuing my love of writing. So I’ve decided to start fresh with a brand new channel called RNPuro. Moving forward, my videos will more or less be written with the same careful attention to detail and thorough analysis that they’ve always had, just with still images as a visual aid, rather than using footage of New Japan matches and promotional material.



My most recent video, an hour and a half essay titled “Kazuchika Okada: An Argument for Best in the World”, is the first of these new projects and is the result of 8 months of hard work. The final video being three times longer than anything I produced for the old channel. If I was going to start over, I wanted to return with something that showcased what I would be capable of if given full resources to write about whatever I wanted, for as long as I wanted. Fortunately, Okada is one of the few topics I can think of that would require that degree of nuance to properly explore, so my future videos will more than likely return to being in the 5-20 minute range- however much I feel is needed to properly cover a particular topic.



For now, my focus will remain on covering New Japan. There is still a number of aspects about that promotion I feel a desire to explore. Also, it’d be silly to move away from the promotion people know me best for covering, especially when my current goal needs to be reestablishing the viewership I’ve lost in the interim. That doesn’t mean my work will always be New Japan-centric. My ultimate goal, and one I’ve had since the very beginning is to eventually get to a point where I can slow down on pure NJPW content and begin exploring other aspects of the Japanese pro-wrestling scene- both contemporary and historical. Hopefully introducing you to something new to love about the medium along the way.



If you’re currently or plan to start giving me money, you’re no doubt doing it because of my NJPW work, so I’ll make sure to let you know ahead of time before making you pay for non-NJPW content. My goal has always been to publish 1-2 videos a month, which usually winds up coming out to be one video every two months or so. Which is why I decided from the start to make this a per video Patreon rather than per month.



Why Patreon (and where to find all my old videos)?



For years, long before I started publishing videos about New Japan, I was writing about all other types of media in blogs and as contributions to local zine efforts, but I was never able to garnish an audience the way I have through making content about pro-wrestling. I’d love to continue to pursue writing about pro-wrestling exclusively, but how much time and energy I’ll be able to devote to it depends on how sustainable I can make it. The old channel didn’t make a ton of money, but I did receive a little bit from ad revenue each month. Which as someone who is always scrounging for cash, that little bit of extra income went a long way. On top of all those videos being gone, due to new YouTube policies, neither will I be able to monetize any of my new stuff for the foreseeable future.



Even before my channel went down, there were months where ad rates for wrestling related channel across the board would dip by 80-90%, or certain videos would be flagged indefinitely and given limited ads with no explanation. YouTube has proven to be completely unreliable for anyone looking to make a career covering pro-wrestling as an independent content creator outside of the most well-established channels.



Unfortunately, while YouTube absolutely sucks for a variety of reasons, it does have a complete monopoly on independently created streaming media. Making it nearly impossible to reach new viewers if you are not on there in some capacity. Hopefully one day I can become big enough to just post on something like Vimeo, and rely solely on my established audience via Patreon to make it work- but we are still a long ways off from that.



Since I have to play by YouTube’s (and to an extent New Japan’s) rules, which are constantly shifting and not always that clear, I won’t be able to produce the same style of fully featured videos that I have put out in the past. Though, for me personally, I’ve never seen the genre of the “video essay” as anything too inherently different than writing on any traditional platform. It's just that this is where the current audience interested in media critiques is looking for it at the moment. I do take a lot of pride in my work, so I’ve always strived to make my videos look competent and flow in an appealing manner, but I perceive the video more as a way of promoting my actual written content, rather than something I consider a crucial aspect of my work.



That’s why I’ve chosen to re-upload all my old videos as audio only on the new channel. That way my work can still exist publically in some form. I’d of course love to just have the old videos be back up and available for all, but I can’t make them too public without risking losing my new stuff as well. I’ve been trying to find a way to both give the original videos to the people who really want them, while also having the base content freely available. That’s why I’ve decided to make a Daily Motion channel with all the old content password protected. The link to the channel and the password to view the videos will be available in a post on here viewable by anyone contributing more than $3 per video. If you, for whatever reason, don’t care about supporting my new work and only care about seeing all my old stuff again, then you are more than welcome to pay $3, download the videos, and then un-pledge. That would still be more money than I would receive even if you watched all those videos with ads 50 times a piece.



Reward tiers and goals



I’d love to go back to the old format, and if I can somehow make Patreon contributions mean more to the channel’s success than the potential ad revenue, I’d be more than glad to take the extra few days of work it would take to make a fully produced video for each and every essay exclusively for Patreon contributors to go along with the “picture essay”, or whatever you want to call the new format, that would live on YouTube. But, as of right now, that extra time would be much better spent writing scripts for new videos. That way I can rebuild my audience on the new channel as quickly as possible, which currently sits at about 1/40<sup>th</sup> of its original size.



That’s why I’ve set a rather hefty $350 dollar per video goal. At two video a month, and even with people setting one video per month caps, this amount would more than makeup for the lost ad revenue a slick fully produced video with 100,000 views would potentially even get me. I, of course, don’t plan on getting anywhere near that right off the bat, but if I am going to treat Patreon as the new main hub for my work, it is a long-term goal I need to set for myself here and now.

If you’ve been a $1 or $2 contributor up until now, the same benefits of being included in the credits for videos you helped produce financially still stands. The same applies to all new contributors and those contributing at higher tiers. But if you feel like contributing more, $3 will unlock all my old videos, as well as any future content that gets removed from YouTube for one reason or another.



I’ll also be producing an end of the month one-hour behind-the-scenes podcast for anyone contributing $5 or more a month. If you care about my work enough to give at that level then you are probably the type of person who would be willing to sit through a long-winded rambly podcast to maybe glean a gem or two of information. I’m still not all that confident in myself when it comes to just talking into a mic unscripted, so gating that content off to just a few people would allow me to be more comfortable when it comes to talking openly about my process. I’m still working on what all this new podcast series will entail, but I’ve already released the first episode and will be keeping that one open to contributors at any tier. Hopefully, it will give you enough of a taste to decide rather or not you’d be interested in something of that nature.



If you like my stuff and would like to help me make more of it going forward, I’d greatly appreciate the support. I can also promise you that I will never stop growing as a creator. Unless I can confidently say that I’m the best person in the world when it comes to understanding whatever it is I’m writing about, I’ll probably never be satisfied with where I am at with my writing.



-Justin

