Memberships on YouTube

Recently there has been a discussion on the YouTube channel about membership and why a gift membership could not be sent to a specific person. It was getting to the point that I was about to yell because they didn’t understand what we were trying to explain to them.

This channel has a membership of $5 a month and that provides the streams from multiple locations and the chat. The chat and special membership videos are the benefits for paying the monthly fee. Of course, when the membership starts the chat was open to everyone, but then it becomes a lot harder to manage, so now the main changes that are viewed have the chat normally set to “Chat as a member”. As a result of this change, there are people that were normally chatting that are no longer chatting because they don’t have a membership.

I understand that people may not be able to afford the $5 a month, and they might not want to pay that money because of their views. I think it is up to the individual if they become a member or not. There is also the option that you can change your own settings to accept gifts. If you have this set, you may randomly receive a membership.

The discussion got to the point that this one person was complaining and wasn’t listening that the random membership is a YouTube thing and not how the channel set it up. This individual wanted to gift a membership to a specific person and not to a pool. Why should one individual get a membership gifted to them when the rest of us are paying for our own. I understand that the person that she wanted to gift a membership was normally chatting but why single someone out for a membership.

So, for now, if you are a viewer of a channel that has membership, and you want to gift a membership it will go into a pool and those that have their settings to accept gifts may get your gift.

Too many t-shirts

When you go to conferences, especially those with vendors and a vendor area, you will discover that one of the items that are given away will be t-shirts. Of course, these t-shirts are going to be advertising the company that you got it from but for some people, it’s free, so I need to have it.

Yes, what is interesting is seeing how many t-shirts you can get at a single conference, because you could possibly come home from a two-day even with enough t-shirts to last you for over a week and that is wearing each t-shirt for only one day. T-shirts are also interesting because there are so many different qualities of shirts. We have received t-shirts at conferences that are nice, and you want to wear them quite a bit and then there are the t-shirts that you wear a couple of times and then they either stretch out of shape or wholes start to appear.

For us, we don’t get a lot of the t-shirts that are being given out because over the wears we have got quite a few, and we will only wear t-shirts that apply to what we do for our business. We have been to some events, and you can watch some attendees just grab all the different t-shirts because it means that they don’t have to purchase as many t-shirts to wear in the summer months.

Yes, t-shirts do some in handy and have those t-shirts that you can wear when you are working around the house and don’t want to ruin a good t-shirt are nice. I have received t-shirts that I could wear as a night shirt because they are either extra-large or even extra-extra-large and given, I only wear a medium t-shirt they are extremely large on me. We will talk to the vendors that we want to talk to and if they happen to have a t-shirt that we think we might wear, we will accept it, but we will not stop at a vendor for no reasons besides just getting the t-shirt.  I have too many t-shirts, and I need to ensure that I only have enough t-shirts that will fit in one section of my dresser.

T-shirts are ok, as a giveaway but remember you don’t need every t-shirt from every vendor that is at each show because you are going to be seeing these same vendors at multiple shows through the year. Yes, I will wear some vendor t-shirts but we both don’t need any more t-shirts so it’s time to go through those shirts and maybe say goodbye to some of those older shirts.

Welcome to 2024

It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gone. The year on the calendar has changed, but other than that not much else as changed in the world. For me, I am now going to see if I can continue to get my blogs written on a regular basis, as that does make me happy. My blogs are a means of sharing some of the things that I like and that bother me.

This coming year, I hope that I can try and do some more education on the things that I enjoy. I hope to be able to write some more blogs around my hobbies, as well as travels and career things that are important to me. I know that I have a long list of blogs that I would like to write, so I just need to ensure that I can continue to get them written and share them with you.

The fun part about my blog is I don’t have a set list of blogs that I am going to write in a certain order. I write the blog that I feel like writing, and I then schedule it and maybe reschedule something else. My blogs can happen at various times and sometimes a few are written in a day or two and other times it can take me a while to get even one blog written.

I hope that you will enjoy what I am going to be writing about in 2024. My list of ideas is long, and it keeps changing based on everything that is going on around me. So, now that the calendar is changed, and we have started a new year, I hope to get lots of blogs written and posted.

Wrapping up 2023

Here I sit, and I am looking back over this year and seeing that I have been able to get back to doing more writing for my blog. It is something that I missed doing for a couple of years and now to see what 2024 is like. My blog is my way of expressing myself and things that I like and writing about things that have bothered me.

This year I have been able to spend some time working on writing about several different topics, but all these topics are things that I write about and enjoy doing that writing. As I sit and look back at the different things that I have written about, I feel lucky. I am lucky that I can sit and write about all these different things and share them the way that I do.

As I sit here and think through what has happened during this year, I can say that I am happy, and I am looking forward to seeing what is around the corner in 2024. Not everything that happened this past year has been happy, but we have been able to get through each thing and know that each day is a new day. I hope that I can continue to write my blog and continue to have fun writing about some of the silly things that have happened.

I hope everyone has a good holiday season if you do celebrate, and I look forward to continuing to get more blogs written in 2024.

How conferences have changed

We were recently at a conference, and I can honestly say that it has really changed since the Pandemic. What I was noticing was that there were a lot fewer people at it. I am not certain if it was weather related or the location of the conference. This conference was in downtown Toronto, and I figured it would have good attendance, or at least that is what I had hoped.

I know that, even for the two of us, it was a decision that we made the day of the event. When we first talked about the event, we were going to be heading down right after rush hour so that we could spend the day down there. The morning of the event we had a decision to make and that was are we going down as planned, going at all, or going for just part of the day? Sure, our own desire of going to this one event had changed, so we needed to sit back and figure out what was best for the two of us and our business.

The result of our decision was we went for just part of the day and spent the morning at home/office getting some work done. It was nice to be able to have that time to get some work done and then head down. When we got to the event, the first thing that we noticed that it wasn’t as busy as we were expecting. Of course, we arrived when some of the sessions were in, but even after the sessions let out it didn’t feel busy at all.

We did stay through to the end of the event and the prize draws, but didn’t win anything. The one thing that I did notice that even during the prize draws that wasn’t the normal crowd so that was very different. The event was pretty good, and I know that we didn’t talk to a lot of the vendors, as there weren’t the one there that were of a big interest to us. Now to see if there is going to be the fall event next year or not, I guess we will have to see next year what happens.

Events have changed since the Pandemic and the biggest things are the number of vendors that are at the shows but also the number of attendees. The price of running an event has increased a lot with insurance and all the other things, and when you must pay staff to travel and man a booth it can become too expensive if you don’t get the business from the show.

Events and conferences continuing to change since the Pandemic, and they will continue to change as businesses change how they find customers. For now, we will attend the events and conferences that we can if they feel that they will also be of an advantage to our business and customers as well.