The end of the decade. Let me start by thanking everyone for participating in the JetsonHacks community.
Background
When I first started JetsonHacks in 2014, one of the goals was to get a better understanding of social media through application. By training, I am a software engineer so I understand the concept of “network effect”, or least the theory. How does this translate to a social network? The main question, “How long does it take to build a community around a technical product using social media?” Social media, in this case being YouTube, Twitter and the JetsonHacks blog.
As you might guess, being a computer guy and all, I wanted to know the metrics. How long does it take to get 100 views? 100 subscribers and so on. Quick answers, on YouTube the first 100 view day took about 6 weeks, the first 100 subscribers were on board in three months. There were ~23,500 views the first six months on the YouTube channel.
Now try to take that information and do a five year projection. Remember that the channel only covers NVIDIA Jetson centric content, which means in general that there is a product launch about every year or so. What kind of numbers would you guess?
2019
Going into 2019, the social media properties seemed pretty healthy. YouTube had ~425,000 views and 7,800 subscribers. The JetsonHacks website saw ~188,000 visitors go through 582,000 views. That’s a lot of people consuming a lot of JetsonHacks content!
The 2017 and 2018 user counts and views were both about the same. I figured that we had reached a plateau of sorts, about the size of the Jetson community give or take.
I figured wrong! In March, NVIDIA launched the Jetson Nano Developer Kit. The reaction was immediate, traffic doubled over night.
YouTube
The introduction video on the Jetson Nano is the first video to reach 100K views on the JetsonHacks channel. That video alone is more that 25% of the entire 2018 video view total! We also added some new YouTube subscribers. 10,900 new subscribers (!!!). Right now we’re right at 19,000 subscribers, up from 7,800 last year. Wow. Welcome aboard!
YouTube views? 920,000. To put that in perspective, the combined views in the 4.5 years leading to 2019 were 1,250,000. We’re now at 2.1M views lifetime. That’s amazing!
JetsonHacks Website
As you know, the YouTube videos usually have an associated article on the JetsonHacks website. Here’s the website traffic:
Views in 2018 were 582,000, 2019 959,000. Visitors? 188,000 versus 338,000. I would say that there is a little growth happening in this trend.
The most popular article on the website in 2019 was Jetson Nano + Raspberry Pi Camera with 58,600 views. Visitors from around the globe stopped by for some Jetson goodness. Here’s the top 10:
It remains quite surprising to me that the website is this widely read.
Github
With the advent of the Jetson Nano, we started a new Github repository on the JetsonHacksNano account. A large driver of traffic to the website and YouTube channel is the Jetson Nano, it makes sense to split it off into another entity.
The Good, Bad and Ugly
As the channel has grown, the inevitable happened. First, there are physically too many comments, questions and emails for me to physically answer. I do try to read them though. It’s part of the network effect we mentioned earlier.
A lot of the questions are better asked in the official NVIDIA Jetson Developer forums. And certainly if you bought hardware and are looking for support, please ask the manufacturer for help first.
Second, kinda behind the scenes, the amount of spam went up exponentially. Please excuse anything that the spam killers and I don’t catch.
Third, bigger audience, more bans! I know that a lot of people want to share their opinion on products or me personally. While I appreciate them sharing, there are bounds. Even more fun, the bounds are all at my sole discretion! So if I wake up one morning and don’t like the sound of something, ban! Fortunately we’re in a small corner of the Internet, and I only had to ban a dozen or so this year. Does it make me a bad person to say that I kinda enjoy it?
Thank you for all of emails and invitations to work on projects. Unfortunately my time is pretty well accounted for these days, and it is difficult to fit other projects into my schedule. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to hear about it, certainly if it is interesting!
Next Decade
Wandering into 2020, we should see all sorts of new and exciting Jetson products and projects. I am actively working on making everything mo’ better. I want to thank you for your support, and I am glad that you are part of this community! Are these ’20s going to be roaring too? Happy 2020.
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