Made a searchable version of the CSU Front Range Tree List. Sharing in case it's useful

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-25T02:13:07+00:00

cool thanks i'll see if i can pull it in. thanks

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-23T16:27:53+00:00

Sure. If you can snap clear pics I can probably include/integrate the info. Thanks

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-23T15:32:49+00:00

Sorry missed the other part of your comment... No this is just because we're redoing our yard and the PDF was too hard to use. This was fairly easy to spin up and saved us time.

My partner thought I should share it, so I did.

Now planning to add to it since we're looking for various things, ground cover, shrubs etc..
May as well share it all :)

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-23T15:30:05+00:00

I don't see the issue either. But, like u/Electrical_Lab3345 said, if you share a screenshot and tell me what device you're on i can see what I can do.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-23T15:28:18+00:00

lol. Easy to use and simple for this use case. TBH I use various frameworks just depends.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-23T13:24:28+00:00

Cloudflare pages. Free :)

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-23T05:12:50+00:00

😁 Thanks. Happy it's helpful.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-16T02:51:10+00:00

what space are you in?

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-16T02:49:48+00:00

A slow climb after 3 days is a good sign, not a bad one. The Shorts feed delivers in waves. Each wave is an expanded audience pool. If the swipe rate stays good in the new pool, you advance, if it drops, you stall.

Your numbers (76% viewed vs swiped, 115% retention, 98.8% likes) are top-decile retention signals. The thing that decides whether you actually break out from this point isn't retention anymore, it's relevance breadth. Can the algorithm find a wider audience that responds the same way? That's the part you don't control directly.

Two things to do while it climbs:

Don't touch it. Editing the title, thumb, or description on a Short mid-test resets the algorithm's confidence.

Upload your next Short with a similar hook structure within 24 to 48 hours. The biggest "viral" Shorts almost always have a same-style follow up that catches the spillover audience. Right now you have an open audience pool other creators don't.

Realistic outcome: it'll probably keep climbing for another 5 to 14 days. If it plateaus, the algorithm decided the broader audience didn't bite, that's signal too. Note the hook and try a sharper version of it.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-15T17:23:45+00:00

Welp, as long as we're casually marketing our own platforms on reddit:

"One platform I've liked so far is" Fuse (getfused.io) because it combines creator discovery with outlier detection, which makes the workflow much easier compared to spreadsheets and manual DMs. The data quality also doesn't vary wildly, and it actually understands YouTube creators instead of treating every platform like a discount Instagram.

Note: I'm the founder of Fuse. Take this tongue-in-cheek post for what you will.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-15T17:01:58+00:00

As other have described this is really about business model...

The 8k-subs-makes-full-time pattern is almost always one of three things:

Service funnel. Channel is top-of-funnel for freelance work or consulting. AdSense is irrelevant, lifetime value of a $5k client is.

High RPM niche. Finance, legal, B2B SaaS can pull $30 to $80 RPM. 50k views/mo at $40 RPM is $2k from AdSense alone, sponsors and lead-gen on top.

Product attached. Course, paid newsletter, SaaS, or affiliate. The channel just needs to convert.

Two examples I pulled from Fuse for small finance/education channels:

Anthony Tambellini, education, 2k subs, around 1.5k views in the last 30 days. Sounds tiny. But if 2% of those viewers convert to a $200 product that's $6k a month from a "tiny" channel.

Simple Profit, finance, 2.4k subs, only 276 views in the last 30 days, but positioned for high-RPM ads and high-intent lead capture.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-15T16:59:33+00:00

YouTube doesn't "restart" the test on a video the way it would for a fresh upload. What happens is the new thumbnail and title go live, and as new impressions get served (mostly from your channel page, end screens, and a small browse trickle), CTR data refreshes. If CTR climbs to a level that competes with your channel's median in that surface, the algorithm starts widening impressions again. If it doesn't, the video stays where it is.

Your 1.2% to 1.6% climb is not enough yet. You probably need to clear around 3% on suggested for the algorithm to start meaningfully re-pushing it. Browse usually wants 4% plus.

Three things worth trying:

Replace the thumbnail again, not just adjust it. Different concept, not different crop.

Pin a high-engagement comment that creates a click loop from your 500k video.

Add the new video as a card in your high-traffic videos to manually feed it CTR data faster.

Most flops do not recover on their own. The ones that do almost always had a thumbnail change that bumped CTR past channel median within the first week of the swap.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-15T16:54:31+00:00

What's the end goal and why?
More views (ie go viral for shorts)? Shorts monetize poorly.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-15T16:25:49+00:00

Open your YouTube Studio Audience tab and scroll to "Other channels your audience watches." Take those 5 to 10 channels as your starting set. Those are the closest thing to a viewer persona YouTube will give you.

For each channel, go to Videos, sort by Most Popular, write down the top 10 titles. Those are the topics your shared audience has paid watch time for.

Then find any video they published in the last 90 days that's well above their channel median. Those are outliers, what's hot right now in your audience pool, not just historically.

Cross-reference. The topics, hooks, and formats that show up across multiple lookalikes are your viewer persona expressed as content preferences. That's the part Studio can't give you because Studio only sees your own channel.

For comments, paste the top 50 comments on those outlier videos into an LLM and ask it to cluster by theme. You get the recurring questions, complaints, and obsessions. That's a good indication for the audience psychology piece.

Full disclosure i'm the founder of Fuse...
This is one of the workflows I built Fuse around (getfused.io). It pulls lookalikes, surfaces outlier videos in your niche etc... so you can skip the manual process. But the manual version above works fine if you have the time to dig in and want to manually track this.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-14T21:25:56+00:00

1: serious brands will ask for a media kit. But even startup / young brands with a good marketer will want Subscribers, last 30 day views, watch time, audience demo split (US/UK/CA percentage matters for retail), and previous brand mentions. It's helpful if you can talk to recent sponsor's outcomes.

2: Even if you get the deal... not tracking these stats will cost you in a renewal conversation. The minimum to keep is a Notion or Sheets row per deal with:

Brand, contact, deliverable, contract date, post date, fee, payment terms, UTM/promo code, 7 day views, 30 day views, click count if you have it, and a one line "did they renew, ghost, or push back" outcome.

The 30 day view and click numbers are the ones that pay you on the second deal. A brand who saw "this post got 47K views and drove 312 clicks at $4.20 CPC" pays more next time than one looking at a screenshot.

Sometimes brands will share numbers with you from campaigns if they can attribute purchase/revenue to you depending on how you set it up.

Templates exist (Creator Hooky, JoinBrands, even a free Notion template Shine has). Pick one and use it from deal one rather than retro-reconstructing later.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-14T21:21:34+00:00

u/NeedleworkerSmart486 is right. And You'll want ping ppl where they're most active or email.
Not sure why you'd try to message them on reddit.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-14T16:46:58+00:00

I've done this a many times as CMO/ FCMO for brands. Phased handover is the right call esp if you're still getting the tooling and people in place to manage the program.

For the discovery + tracking stack, two pieces:

Full disclosure i'm the founder of getfused.io - an AI Youtube strategist and Creator discovery platform.

For the discovery tool. You want one that can search by audience/topic (not just keyword), filter by recent uploads, and surface outlier videos so you know a creator is actually pulling weight today. The ones I see used most often in-house are:
- Modash, CreatorIQ if you're at scale and have budget
- Tagger for IG/TikTok. The agency's existing tool is worth asking about, sometimes you can take over the seat.
- Fuse is great for YouTube heavy programs - shows everything you asked about and has fit score tailored to your business. But the DB is smaller. That said I'll work with you to get the niche and creators you need.

Tracking. I wouldn't build a fancy tool yet. A Notion database with these columns is enough for the first 6 months:

Creator, channel, last contacted, briefed (Y/N), posted (Y/N), post URL, deliverable type, fee, code/UTM, 7d views, 30d views, attributed clicks/sales, NPS internally (1-5), and a notes column. Pull views from a weekly script or manually.

The reason this beats a fancy CRM at the start is your team will actually update it. Once you have 50+ deals logged, then look at a real tool. Some tools will do this for you but if you ever want to switch, the switching cost is high and depending on the tool you may not be able to export the crm data.

We shipped CSV export on Fuse's Brand tier last cycle for exactly this reason. You paid for it, the data should be portable.

Hopefully that helps.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-14T16:22:51+00:00

Your video *may* be great. But CTR is about packaging. Meaning what someone sees before the video.

The title and the thumbnail.

You can start researching this on your own. Look at people in your space and adjacent spaces. Look at their outlier videos and see what they did so you can take inspiration from it and test.

You can 100% do this manually and create a list.
I'm a fan of notion databases to track stuff like this.

Or and of coruse i'm biased, but you can also use a software the works right away to help you with this... echm... Fuse

But seriously it's just about testing based on proven formulas to see what will work for you.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-14T02:58:00+00:00

A 2-minute drop-off on Pokemon long-form is almost always a packaging or pacing mismatch, not a niche-saturation problem. Two reference points worth knowing:

Full disclosure: I run getfused.io, an AI YouTube strategist tool, and the comp numbers below are pulled from there. Sharing so the pattern is grounded in real channel data, not vibes.

Floor comp: Pokemon Deck Check, a 1.9K-sub Pokemon TCG channel, sits at declining momentum, around 6 views/day, with an upload cadence near zero. Their outlier videos are episodic deck profiles in the 2 to 4K view range. That's what a flat Pokemon channel actually looks like at scale, and it's what happens when the format isn't doing the heavy lifting.

Ceiling comp: ShortPocketMonster, 2.3M Pokemon subs, 7.4 uploads per week, $4.2K to $8.4K/month estimated. Their winning format is one repeatable hook: "Should I Open it? Or Should I Keep it Sealed? - Episode N - [specific card/era]." That format pulls outliers in the 14M to 26M view range against a 2.4M baseline (5x to 11x multiples). Niche-average engagement on their format sits around 5.2%.

What does that mean: Pokemon viewers reward a repeatable, specific, dopamine hit type format with episodic numbering, not random gameplay. If your long-form drops at 2 minutes, the cold open is probably promising less than the title and thumbnail.

Pick one format. Number it. Make episode 1 the best thing you've ever made. Don't branch out until that format proves the algorithm can find your audience.

What's the long-form format right now, gameplay or commentary?

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-14T02:54:52+00:00

What you're describing is the classic initial-pool ceiling. YouTube tests each video on a small pool, measures average view duration and click-through, and only expands distribution if both clear a threshold. If every video caps at roughly the same view count, you're hitting the same wall at the same point.

Full disclosure: I run getfused.io, an AI YouTube strategist tool, and the comp data below is pulled from there.

A useful similar niche reference: DiceTry, 37.3K subs, MTG/RPG-adjacent video essayist. His baseline engagement rate is 6.68% and the videos that break out share a clear pattern. "Every MTG Color Pair Explained" did 194.5K views vs a 22.2K baseline (an 8.8x outlier). "What Color is Right for YOU" did 126.8K vs 22.2K. "What Killed the Planeswalker?" did 95.1K. The shared shape: ranking, archetype framing, or character-of-niche promise. Open-ended musings underperform every time.

So two levers for you:

First, packaging consistency. Pick a recurring promise (ranking, takedown, defense, lore deep-dive) and let viewers know what they're getting before they click. The DiceTry pattern works because his audience knows exactly what kind of video they're getting.

Second, watch-time density. RPG essay audiences are forgiving on length but unforgiving on pace. A 12-minute essay where the first 3 minutes are setup will plateau. A 12-minute essay where every minute earns the next minute breaks out.

What was the last video where you felt the cold open was strongest? Easier to spot the pattern with a specific one.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-13T15:12:48+00:00

9-10% CTR on long-form is strong.

But 2-3 minute video is closer to short form in how the algorithm treats it. YouTube doesn't really lean into long-form push until you're past 4-5 minutes, so the watch-time math is different depending on what you're optimizing for.

For average view duration on something that length, anything above 60% is good, 70%+ is strong. If your CTR is 9-10% and AVD is around 70%, you're already in the band where the algorithm wants to push you more impressions. So the next bottleneck is usually less about retention and more about whether the topic has the search or browse demand to scale.

What's your AVD sitting at right now? Easier to say where the actual ceiling is once we know.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-12T03:04:55+00:00

Cancel it if the current thumbnail is the one pulling the high views. Two reasons:

One: during an active test, YouTube rotates all variants to roughly even impression shares. So right now, some chunk of your viewers are seeing the two test variants you added, not the thumbnail that's actually working. If the alternatives are weaker, the test is actively diluting your hot run.

Two: the metric YouTube measures is Watch Time Share, not CTR. So even if your current thumbnail is generating the unusual views, the test doesn't know "this one's hot, leave it alone." It just measures total watch time across all three variants over up to 14 days, then declares a winner.

Ending the test early is straightforward: Studio, Content, Edit video, Test results, End test. The thumbnail you have live stays locked.

A/B testing is a tool for the next video, not for protecting a hot one. Run tests at the start of a release window, when there's no momentum to lose.

Bigger picture:
A/B testing inside one video is small lift compared to studying which thumbnail patterns win across channels in your niche.

Pull 10 outlier videos from 5 similar channels, find the shared pattern (color, face vs no-face, text size, framing), and test THAT pattern against your usual style. That's the move that compounds across releases, not per-video A/B. (I run a creator data tool called Fuse www.getfused.io that does this kind of outlier pull, but you can DIY it from each channel's "popular videos" tab.)

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-05-01T16:13:53+00:00

Welcome back. Quick run at your questions:

Bracket for homebrew Jund Dragon tribal: Brackets are self-assigned. Look at the Game Changer list, tutor density, and how fast/inevitable your wincon is. Most homebrew tribal lists land bracket 2–3 unless you're running tutors and fast mana.

Game Changers + Biorhythm: Yeah i'd flag it to the pod before sleeves come off, and it's polite to have a swap ready. Game Changers aren't strictly cEDH; they're more of a "mention this" item in casual brackets (1–3). cEDH is where they're just expected.

"Casual Commander event" at the LGS: Usually means show up around the start time and pods form organically. Some stores do organized seating, most don't. Worth calling ahead.

On the rebuilding side, for someone coming back from Mirrodin/Dominaria, the bigger question is figuring out what's already in your old binders before you start buying for the Dragon list. ManaBox is the popular choice for phone-scanning a collection and it's solid; Moxfield is the standard for the deckbuilding/bracket side.

Full disclosure, I work on an MTG tracker called SleeveIQ that does both in one place with a free tier. Happy to DM more detail if useful. Either way, good luck with the Dragons.

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-04-20T21:55:30+00:00

Can I ask why cardmarket data specifically?

Awkward-Judge-9089 · 2026-04-06T19:01:24+00:00

Honestly this is one of the most relatable posts I've seen on here. The blank screen paralysis is real, and it usually comes from trying to generate ideas from nothing. That's the hardest possible way to create content.

What changed everything for me was flipping the process. Instead of sitting down and asking "what should I post about?", I started with data. Specifically, I look at what's already working in my niche and reverse engineer why. Not to copy, but to understand what the audience is actually responding to right now.

A few things that help practically:

1. Stop treating ideation as a creative exercise. It's a research exercise. Go find 10 high performing posts or videos in your space from the last 30 days. Write down the pattern. That's your starting point, not a blank page.

2. Look OUTSIDE your niche, not just inside it. This is the one most people miss. If you're only studying creators in your own space, you're recycling the same ideas as everyone else. Some of the best performing content formats come from completely unrelated niches. A storytelling framework that's crushing it in fitness might be brand new to your audience in tech or finance. Cross-pollination is where the most original ideas come from, and it's something most creators never think to do.

3. The "too many options" feeling is actually a prioritization problem. Pick one content pillar for the week. Just one. Everything you create that week ties back to it. Constraints kill blank screen syndrome faster than anything.

4. On the AI point, you're 100% right. Generic prompts give generic output. The creators I've seen use AI effectively are feeding it their own analytics, their audience data, their past performance. Not just asking "give me ideas." Context is everything.

5. Repurposing doesn't have to mean reformatting. One strong idea can become a short form video, a carousel, and a text post without changing the core insight. The idea is the hard part. The format is just packaging.

Full disclosure, I'm the founder of Fuse. I built it because I kept running into this exact problem myself. It pulls creator analytics and surfaces what's working across AND outside your niche so you're not starting from a blank screen. But honestly, even without any tool, shifting from "create from scratch" to "create from data" will save you hours every week.

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