1thoughtFantasy: Fantasy Football Podcast

 Him calling out my 1000 (hard earned, engaged, natural) followers, really pissed me off, and what I found in his follower list would ensure I never take Instagram seriously again. He had a backup account "FFFU backup" that had 2000 following and about a hundred followers. Ponder that for a second, because if you're been following along, you know exactly how FFFU got his stagnant following. He started his account, experienced slow growth, and created an artificial, dead fanbase by DMing 2000 people that he would follow them on his second account if he got a follow on his main account from this particular person. Essentially, a classic follow-for-follow scheme to build an inorganic, inflated fanbase, but just a bit sneakier and done in a way that makes FFFU look like a big stud that has tons of followers without any effort. To think that guy was talking down to me since he "had more followers" and every single one of his followers was fake? Laughable, and enough for me to say, "Instagram isn't for me."After my lengthy detour (sorry, I really get going talking about Instagram BS), I'd like to center this conversation around how I ended up doing my podcast. I say all this to say that I learned the hard way that Instagram isn't a level playing field, and it wasn't worth getting frustrated over. Especially since- like I've hinted at, writing isn't ultimately what I want to do. This Instagram thing, while it bummed me out, pushed me to try my hand at video once again and like I said, learn the free video editor "Shotcut". Something Instagram taught me was that people don't have a very long attention span. Despite my lengthy writing, I eventually tried to accommodate short- bite sized stats in my graphic to get more people to engage since they just don't have a very long time looking at your post before scrolling onto the next, generally. Given this, I tried to make shorter YouTube videos as I learned shotcut. I would do the same level of research as I would writing on Instagram, but I'd leave some excess stuff out and the result was usually a pretty action packed video hovering around 10 minutes (sometimes 7 or 8 minutes, sometimes 12 or 13). These videos would do well, but being so bad at editing, I became frustrated with the time between videos I'd spend. Whereas I'd put out a ~1600 word article daily on Instagram, sometimes I'd go a day or two without posting a YouTube video because of the requisite editing and hurdles I'd have to overcome in real time as I was doing that. This frustration made me go through a similarly sizable change in my content as I went through on Instagram. As opposed to doing medium length videos with good production and editing, I decided to do streamlined content that's to the point and under 5 minutes. I could bang out more of them because they took less editing- if any, and I could post one a day just like I did on Instagram. So I set off on this, posting a short video a day and garnering less views than I was on my medium length videos, but enough to justify trying this strategy for a little more. Out of nowhere, though, one of these shorter videos I was doing about a marginal prospect named "Isaiah Mckoy" popped to the tune of 1000 views in the first week. Now granted it didn't go much further than that, but that was the most views I had ever gotten on a single video (and still have!) - it currently sits at 1.7 thousand views. I took note and have since then focused on this shorter form content on YouTube, since that's what the platform is more open to and will promote. How I got to this point of short videos, though, is through some serious introspection in terms of how I can most effectively produce short form content that is going to do well on YouTube.

Ideally, this intersects our audiences and if someone appreciates my in depth analysis style, I'd pick up a follow from them. I started doing this as much as I could- to very varying success, but stopped forever once I encountered... well let's just get into it. I can stomach some rule bending. I can't subscribe to the "if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying motto; however, that comes from somewhere. I'll use the most efficient hashtags possible (I haven't even brought up my hashtag spreadsheet for every NFL team yet, have I?) in order for the algorithm to treat me well, and I'll give myself the best chance to succeed organically; however, when my moral compass gets queasy, I sometimes have to reconsider my practices. Having set the scenario, get this. After a couple dozen collabs, I was reaching further and further down my priority list in terms of accounts I "respect" (pretty much you earn my respect if you write good stuff, given my in-depth analysis and how rare that is on Instagram) and was collabing with someone who was... suboptimal in that aspect. This fellas content was very much brain-dead, lazy analysis, but being my 30th or whatever it was choice, I reached out to him to collaborate with me in hopes of gaining some of his audience through my good writing. After some initial small talk, he asked if I wanted to join a fantasy football group chat, to which I obliged. This was my Instagram fantasy football 9/11. I was added to this group chat and scrolled up to see some stuff I could never get on board with. This group chat with 20 or so Instagram fantasy football "analysts" (none of whom I ever had collabed with, because I took pride in who I associated with) contained no football discourse, rather was entirely filled with posts from people within the group and a message saying something like, "like and comment" or "gas this up", all while the posts they were sharing were absolute garbage. I mean hot garbanzo, some of the worst and most lazy analysis I'd ever read. Going to these objectively awful posts revealed comments from nearly everyone in the groupchat that were never more than a couple of emojis, and never, ever anything of substance... the exact opposite of my comment section that was more engaging in discourse relating to what I posted (albeit even if there were far less comments). Scrolling up in this awful excuse for a group chat revealed accounts saying something along the lines of, "follow me and I'll follow you on my other accounts" which is a huge statement when you really unpack it. Consider my arch nemesis on Instagram- and someone who happened to be in this groupchat, an account that used to be named, "fantasyfootballforyou" (FFFU).

This is well documented stuff that sounds like it's out of a movie, so pay attention. He calls me out in this group chat one day saying, "@1thoughtfantasy, why aren't you commenting on the posts we are sending?" I could care less about anyone and everything in that group chat, and so I say something like, "because all the content sucks" (I mean seriously it was such bad content) and he says something like, "well at least I have more followers than you", so I took to his DMs to defend myself since I didn't want to make a scene in this group chat (which I left after this interaction with him I'm explaining) and since I was talking to him directly. On Instagram, it's a sign of elite status when you follow not many people, but have lots of followers yourself. Following 20 people and having 3000 followers is more impressive than following 2500 and having 5000 followers yourself. I had seen that FFFU had 2000 followers to my 1000, but I also noticed his follower count hadn't grown since I had been in this group chat, not at all. He would post an awful post, all his fake support from the group chat would roll in, and he would gain no followers. I looked at his follower list because something was fishy... TO B CONTINUED!

Live from hotel- picking up where I left off on the top 200, here's my sob story! Hopefully one day, an employer will believe in me after reading what I've been through and continue to go through in the name of producing content. No trains interrupted me and more importantly, my train of thought never wavered to the tune of my first video finally being done and posted. This experience was rewarding, but it also taught me that investing in how to edit would be a good idea to avoid potential future frustrating nights. So I set off on learning video, and despite starting with writing I made the commitment of learning the free video editor, "Shotcut" since I thought it would help me for future projects. My first 2 years of content creation was nothing like this video endeavour I was setting out on, and I was nervous my audience wouldn't receive my new medium well. I went through a whole progression on Instagram article writing before I ever set out on my video conquest, and had learned so much in regards to how to make effective content. At first I posted simple, shitty graphics of the player I was talking to accommodate my writing, but shortly after I graduated to decent enough graphics to accommodate my writing. Finally, I graduated to what I would consider "good" graphics, and it was at this point I started having fun with the type of art I made. I was big into underground music when making these graphics and would do this thing where I'd lookup where the college prospect I was writing about was from (during this point in my content creation, I was doing college football content- hence why I say "prospect") and then incorporate the prospect in some way into an album cover of an artist from their hometown. Ex: if a prospect was from Detroit, I'd put their face somewhere in an Eminem cover (Eminem is the low hanging fruit- I'd do some obscure artist that only I listen to because I took so much pride in representing underrepresented art). Anyways, as I've let on a bit, I spent a lot of time on these graphics. I put lots of thought and effort into the graphics, and I had previously only spent a lot of time on the writing component of my content production. I'd write ~1600 words a day on NFL players and their fantasy football outlook(s), but had never fully committed into the Instagram content creation sphere as I saw it since to me there were just two factors to content creation. I was doing- to my estimation, the best analysis pound-for-pound in the Instagram fantasy space. Honestly, there weren't too many legitimate competitors either. This is what made younger Bryce so confident I'd be so effective in the analysis space. The fantasy football advice on Instagram was the laziest, most unhelpful, reaction farming BS you could possibly muster up. "Pick this guy because he was good last year *fire emoji optional*" was about what 80% of accounts said, but they had visually appealing graphics to go along with them. It was these graphics that I thought was the selling point of a space like Instagram and what was making these accounts- my so-called "peers" that I had seen start after me and grow faster than me, succeed. To me, that was the difference between their follower count(s) going through the roof and my followers remaining largely stagnant- despite my very frequent, in depth content, that now was accommodated by a pretty and aesthetically pleasing image. I was growing frustrated with my hard work seemingly not being rewarded time and time again, so I tried another alteration to my content on top of my new pretty graphics.

While there were only 2 "spheres" to content creation on Instagram and I had now maxed out both of said spheres in my opinion, there were other options for growth- the most ethical of which I deemed to be collaboration. Another account and I discuss a subject and topic (WR prospect rankings for example), add a little "hey this is a collab with so and so, go follow them", tag each other and call it a day.