Thanks a (half a) Million!
Thanks a (half a) Million!
PhotowalksTV had a banner 2022
A huge thank you to everyone for joining me on the road and travels for PhotowalksTV on YouTube, the newsletter and iPhone Photo Show podcast in 2022.
The final numbers are in and just shy of 500,000, at 496,841.
Wow!
I left USA TODAY on January 4, 2021 after a multi-decade career to focus on travel photography and the Photowalks series and two years later I couldn’t be happier with the way things worked out. I love having the freedom to roam and focus solely on my passions, and it’s so cool to hear from so many more people, post USA TODAY, in feedback to videos, newsletters and podcasts than I ever did working for a legacy publication.
Go figure!
The breakdown:
PhotowalksTV: 304,964 views, which is +112% from the previous year. New subscribers: +30%.
Newsletter: 150,584 reads, +110% from 2021 and +45% subscriber growth.
Podcast: 41,861 listens. The show began in late December, 2021, so nothing to compare it to. But what a great start!
Most Viewed PhotowalksTV episodes:
Our visit to Palm Springs, California in November, 2021 was the one most folks tuned into in 2022, consistently ranking in the top 3 every day this past year. It inspired me to kick off a new series, visiting some of the other desert cities in the area, starting this weekend in Palm Desert. I hope you’ll catch it.
The rest of the top 10:
Santa Fe, New Mexico
The Oregon Coast
Mendocino Backroads
Taos, New Mexico
Guess we like the West Coast, huh?
This year we’re off to Florida (Tampa, Clearwater Beach) and Atlanta, back to the Central Coast and California Desert, may make it to the midwest (Hello Columbus, Ohio) and New York City, and have another Europe outing coming soon.
The most read newsletter posts
News you can use relating to smartphone photography struck a chord, along with a cool profile of a man who collects millions of seashells.
Why you shouldn’t use iCloud for backup was no. 1
No. 2s through 5:
Which cloud service is best? for photography?
Meet the best iPhone photographer I’ve come across, Russell Brown.
Most listened to podcast?
My interview with National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson about using the iPhone on assignment, followed by an in-depth tutorial on the iPhone camera menu.
Post USA TODAY
In the two years since ankling the old job, besides making weekly PhotowalksTV videos and podcasts, and penning weekly posts here, I’ve also been writing for AARP’s tech section, where I work with my old partner in crime Edward C. Baig and his talented editor Linda Dono. I contribute photography and video services to my beloved local community newspaper, The Easy Reader, and teach photography courses for the KelbyOne.com website. Thank you Scott Kelby! I’m also, as always, a photographer for hire in L.A. and also have led live Photowalk sessions, at home in Los Angeles, as well as San Francisco, Flagstaff, Arizona, Pismo Beach and San Luis Obispo and Palm Springs. Next stop: San Diego, on February 11th. Please join us!
Thank you Sponsors!
A huge thanks to my 2022 sponsors: SmugMug, the online photo service which hosts my website, Flipboard, the social magazine app and Mylio, backup software that also provides access to your photo library on multiple devices.
Thank you viewers, readers, viewers and listeners! The conversation has been so rewarding. I love hearing from you. Please keep it up!
Two recent questions: Dave wrote me yesterday in regards to taking our photos back from Big Tech and asked a great question—how do you in fact get them back from Apple and Google? I’ll weigh in with an in-depth answer in the weekend edition.
Another reader enjoyed the Paris episodes of PhotowalksTV, and marveled at how they were filmed on an iPhone. “Can you say a little about how they are assembled?” Were they edited on an iPhone too? Nope, I’m still a laptop guy. I’ll jump in on my editing workflow this weekend too.
Two other special shoutouts. Mark Thompson, who moved his radio show to the Internet in 2022 after a format change, had me on the new show often, and sung my praises to his audience so many times, the newsletter really grew even bigger, and to that, I owe a giant thanks to the one and only Mark. Check out his The Mark Thompson Show on YouTube, where it airs live Mondays through Friday from 10-12 a.m.
Secondly, kudos to the under-rated power of the Flipboard network. The social magazine app has been around since 2010, and for many people was the first great app for the iPad. It was seen as a way to read the news we cared about in one place, in a more visual format, keeping us up to date without having to go from website to website. But for many, Flipboard came and went, or so it seemed, at least to them.
Quietly, Flipboard got bigger and bigger, expanded beyond the iPad and found most of its audience migrating to smartphones, where millions of people still congregate daily to catch up. More than most people realize. I started posting the newsletter on Flipboard and it really struck a chord with folks looking for photo meets tech meets travel stories. On any given week, 10-40% of the PhotowalksTV newsletter readers come from people discovering it on Flipboard. So huge thanks to Mike and Marci McCue, the founders of Flipboard, as well as all the great people who work there.
As always, 500,000 thanks to everyone for taking the time to read, watch and listen and spend time with me via this newsletter! Don’t forget to hit reply to let me hear your thoughts, and a huge happy new year to everyone.
Jeff
Thanks Karen--Substack is the greatest, right?
Awesome 👍🏾 Good News and Photography! Happy Blessed New Year! ✝️🙏🏽❣️📸📹 *Vandie Van 🚐 Wings 🦋