Trip to Leiden and YouTube record - Issue #11
Welcome to November everyone! 🍁
🇳🇱 Stuff I’m doing in The Netherlands
The weather in Holland still doesn't feel like November to me, to be honest. So far I feel that people were lying to me about the weather in here. This weekend it was +20 and sunny. Maybe it's just a rare year but I'm loving it.
On the weekend we made our first long bike trip to Leiden. It's another city we wanted to explore and potentially consider buying a house in.
The city is around 25km from The Hague one way so it was quite a trip. Also, because Europe changed to winter time we didn't plan it properly and ended up going back in the dark. We had to bike through the national park along the coast back home. The downside is it doesn't have any lights. It was completely dark except for the lights on our bicycles.
Overall, the trip was amazing. We absolutely enjoyed the city. I've already praised Utrecht in the last issue but we loved Leiden even more. It looks like Amsterdam with half of the city center filled with canals but much more cozy and comfortable. Fewer tourists and more local life.
Moreover, I had an impression it has more nice residential areas around the city with great accessibility to the city center and train station.
Unfortunately, despite being much smaller than popular Dutch cities, it's still in the same "expensive" category of housing. I think it's our favorite so far anyway.
I still can't wrap my head around how great residential areas in The Netherlands are. Even small towns with a couple of thousands of population still have such beautiful areas to live in. That's why I don't worry about where we ended up buying a house, it'll be nice almost anywhere. It's quite hard to find a bad area here.
📺 YouTube
I recently started again my Russian channel on YouTube and recently published a new video. This video was the fastest viewing video I've ever had.
It hit 1k views in less than 24 hours and it kept growing. After 4 days it has around 4.1k views. It proves my theory that in Russian I can make better and fastest-growing videos and it has less competition.
The downside of course is revenue. Views from Russia are not monetizable so it only gets money from abroad which isn't much.
You can see this video only have ~$0.5 RPM (dollars per 1000 views) which is ridiculous. But as the channel grows I'll think of other ways to monetize it.
I want to hit monetization with my English channel to compare RPM between the two since it's the same content
👷 Taco Digest and other projects
This is quite an important week for my other project Taco Digest. I am planning to increase the pricing and completely remove free accounts from it. I don't think it's sustainable to support them, at least at this stage of the project. Curious to see if it'll lead to new subscriptions or not.
In general, planning to spend a bit more time on Taco Digest from now on and make my way to version 2 of the project.
🎁 Content I’m consuming
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I'm watching the second documentary from Ewan McGregor and his friend traveling on motorbikes. This one is called Long Way Down and they travel from the UK down to South Africa. I find it not as interesting as the first movie but still pretty cool.
👾
I'm on the 40th hour of Horizon Forbidden West and the game is still amazing. Especially the level design and how beautiful it is. The story is also quite interesting.
We also bought a new board game (I think we're addicted now) called Dune Imperium. It's themed in the Dune universe but doesn't have much to do with it. It's similar to Terraforming Mars I talked about before.
PS We even ordered a second coffee table from IKEA to play more comfortably 😂 Current one is running out of space from time to time.
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As usual, hit me with any questions/suggestions by clicking the reply button in your email client, and have a great week!
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Written in my mini office in The Hague, The Netherlands 🇳🇱