Welcome back once again to another episode of Whatever Happened To; where we talk about YouTuber's that were very promising but soon fell apart for being terrible. Near the ending of August, I talked about Chrisandthemike who was promising but faded into a terrible obscurity backstabbing the friends he once had. Well, we have another one today. I was originally going to put him as a dishonorable mention because on how great his content was, but unfortunately, he did a change a few years back that really wasn't the greatest idea. For today's post we have ChimneySwift11 and the sad decline on how he went from being great to very depressing. Though I still like his old content
Chimneyswift11 (that's how he goes as his real name is Mike) started his account on February 11, 2011. Roughly two days later on February 13, 2011, he uploaded his first video titled "The Minecraft Files - #1: Pueblo Home." This was the start of his content and for his first ever series being called The Minecraft Files which lasted from Season 1 all the way up to Season 7 and was never finished. In 2011, he was part of a group known as The Outsiders which featured other popular YouTuber's like Mr360Games, Paulsoaresjr, IHasCupquake and several others. In the middle of the summer of 2011 is when he posted his first mod review. His mod reviews would not come out often but the popular ones would be Minecraft Comes Alive and Tropicraft. Within the later years, he would move to other games and would try to make a series out of it with some include Slime Rancher, Lego Dimensions, Lego Worlds and several others. One of his most popular and yet most viewed video on his channel is titled "Sonic Generations - Ep. 14 - Sonic vs. Shadow - Modern" which sits at over 5.2M views.
The Decline:
Drastic Change in Viewership / Rebrand / The Twitch Loophole:
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| His content in 2011. |
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| His content in 2019-2020. |
So, before everyone gets mad at me for putting him on here, I used to be a real fan of his back in 2011-2015. I haven't been keeping up with Chimney's newer content since he's reverted back to Minecraft content in 2019. I did however keep tabs as to his history and being on YouTube for the last 12 plus years or so and to my knowledge, it's not good. Since the start of his channel up to the present day, his viewership had taken a sharp decline since then. Even some of the stuff between 2015 and 2016 were not as great back then and it's honestly very sad to see him go down like this. Even for the people who feel the nostalgia trend hit.
Because of his decline in viewership, he wanted to change up the content and on January 11, 2018, it was announced that he would rebrand his current channel to 'Please Stand By' which was at the time a new chapter for vlog and exploration type content and that he would move his ChimneySwift11 content over to Twitch. While many people supported him for the new chapter, others were letdown and disappointed by this change and it was a mistake. With a channel that has over 1.6M subscribers, it was pretty redundant to actually do this on the main channel rather than creating a separate channel and keep the main channel focused on gaming related content. It could've been explained better and something like this:
"Hey everyone, it's ChimneySwift here and today I have created a new separate channel called 'Please Stand By' where I go exploring around the world and trying out new things. If you like vlog and exploration videos, go subscribe to that channel. This channel will remain for gaming content. - Just an Example.
Something along the lines of that or similar to that. Plus, exploration and vlog type videos are considered to be the lowest on the list for content nowadays as it's been done by other YouTubers in the past. On top of this, when I searched up ChimneySwift's decline, it linked me to two askreddit threads about channels that are a shell of their former selves, and it pretty much explains it. During the time when he rebranded his channel, he would often resort to gaming live on Facebook and Facebook is a sketchy tactic in it of itself.
When he did returned to YouTube and rebranded back to his original channel name, the content was only posted to one video per week as opposed to muliple videos per week. Then you have the recent trend to which popular oldschool YouTubers are resorting to now and that is switching over to livestreaming. Now, livestreaming on Twitch is totally normal and could be a way to bring in a newer audience. There have been some successful channels that do this. However, it's also a major problem as for the YouTuber's who post livestreams on their channel, it's almost as if they don't want to engage with the YouTube audience anymore. ChimneySwift had took this route rather than going back to YouTube and producing the content that people want. It's still very sad. Now in terms of his channel statistics on socialblade, he's been losing subscribers and has been losing the viewership because of the fans that once tuned into his videos. I get that content creators need to change, but at least keep you're audience engaged in the action. Unfortunately, he's resorted to Sea of Thieves livestreams which is far from the best.
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