Battle Order
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Battle Order 2024 Financial Report
🕑 Added 2025-01-21 22:13:52 +0000 UTCBringing back the financial report graphic. In August 2020 when I rebooted the channel with the first Ranger video I decided I wanted to be transparent with finances. I think I was inspired by some Kickstarter campaigns that released what they spent money on and such. Back then I did them monthly, but revenue streams and expenses got complicated enough to track that now I only really account for it when I do my taxes. You're not exactly investors because you don't have formal ownership of the channel, but the stability of your contributions does ensure that I can continue making videos while earning a liveable income. Your 412 contributions also mean that hundreds of thousands of people can watch for free, so thank you.
Things improved revenue-wise since 2023. I was a little worried early in the year because income dropped like 40% from 2022 to 2023. This is mostly because 2022 had some flukes that worked in my favor and the Youtube ad/sponsor market peaked and rapidly declined. Over the past couple of years I've taken half or less than half the sponsorships I took in 2022, both because of fewer offers and more offers these days I have to reject because they're bad companies. That's why you had a bunch of adjacent channels with teams, like Armchair Historian and Invicta, start talking about walking back production value and try to open new revenue streams like paywalled off-site content. Luckily I always kept my operation very small (I do everything from research to animations, voiceover, editing, negotiating sponsor deals, etc except for that one Patriot video where I paid a defense writer to help me out). All I have to worry about is my family and not employees, so things will probably continue basically business as usual.
Because I was a little concerned about 2023 I went into 2024 with content guidelines, whereas in previous years I had basically no plan. Things seem to have stabilized. I'm a little worried about what anticipated policies, particularly tariffs, will do to the online advertising market and the economy as a whole should they go into effect so I will probably be doing what I can to reduce my expenses and push the Patreon. If at all possible I'd love to replace sponsorships with Patreon growth because I don't really want to do them and you all definitely don't want to listen to them. As well, in the 2nd half of 2024 basically every sponsorship offer that I got was morally bad (stuff like financial services you don't need, financial services that prey on those with mountains of debt, or gambling) so I had to reject all of them, but I do have a few sponsorships being talked through for the next couple of months that are acceptable.
In 2025 I want to do some more historical narrative based videos than I did in 2024. I'm pretty bad at predicting the exact outcomes of changes in strategy I make, but my greatest videos were narrative-based (e.g. Operation Serval, Little Rock, Russian 200th Motor Rifles, Battle of Dompaire, etc) so it could be a positive.
Comments
Danny Eng
Happy to help. Your videos have become my go-to background noise, and the topics you bring up are always good for stimulating the grey matter.
Archie George
Excited to see your revenue grow!
Nick Kubala
I’d love for my contribution to be considered a gift and not subscription income to be taxed. Already bummed that Patreon already takes a %.
