Battle Order 2024 Financial Report

Bringing back the financial report graphic. In August 2020 when I rebooted the channel with the first Ranger video I decided I wanted to be transparent with finances. I think I was inspired by some Kickstarter campaigns that released what they spent money on and such. Back then I did them monthly, but revenue streams and expenses got complicated enough to track that now I only really account for it when I do my taxes. You're not exactly investors because you don't have formal ownership of the channel, but the stability of your contributions does ensure that I can continue making videos while earning a liveable income. Your 412 contributions also mean that hundreds of thousands of people can watch for free, so thank you.

Things improved revenue-wise since 2023. I was a little worried early in the year because income dropped like 40% from 2022 to 2023. This is mostly because 2022 had some flukes that worked in my favor and the Youtube ad/sponsor market peaked and rapidly declined. Over the past couple of years I've taken half or less than half the sponsorships I took in 2022, both because of fewer offers and more offers these days I have to reject because they're bad companies. That's why you had a bunch of adjacent channels with teams, like Armchair Historian and Invicta, start talking about walking back production value and try to open new revenue streams like paywalled off-site content. Luckily I always kept my operation very small (I do everything from research to animations, voiceover, editing, negotiating sponsor deals, etc except for that one Patriot video where I paid a defense writer to help me out). All I have to worry about is my family and not employees, so things will probably continue basically business as usual.

Because I was a little concerned about 2023 I went into 2024 with content guidelines, whereas in previous years I had basically no plan. Things seem to have stabilized. I'm a little worried about what anticipated policies, particularly tariffs, will do to the online advertising market and the economy as a whole should they go into effect so I will probably be doing what I can to reduce my expenses and push the Patreon. If at all possible I'd love to replace sponsorships with Patreon growth because I don't really want to do them and you all definitely don't want to listen to them. As well, in the 2nd half of 2024 basically every sponsorship offer that I got was morally bad (stuff like financial services you don't need, financial services that prey on those with mountains of debt, or gambling) so I had to reject all of them, but I do have a few sponsorships being talked through for the next couple of months that are acceptable.

In 2025 I want to do some more historical narrative based videos than I did in 2024. I'm pretty bad at predicting the exact outcomes of changes in strategy I make, but my greatest videos were narrative-based (e.g. Operation Serval, Little Rock, Russian 200th Motor Rifles, Battle of Dompaire, etc) so it could be a positive.