AD_HD Introduction

AD_HD is a starwars focused channel that hosts a 2-3x weekly podcast called The Evil Ewok Podcast, featuing the trio of Alexander Daniel who owns the AD_Edits channel, Catherine Le Salle, who owns her own self-named channel, and a video producer named Zack.

The channel covers a wide variety of Star Wars related content, but primarily focuses on ongoing and upcoming Star Wars TV shows and movies. They host weekly watch parties of the latest episode of whatever star wars show is being released at the time, and because the show is released at midnight PST time, they often stream at a pretty late time for their core US audience.

Key Challenges

AD_HD's biggest challenges are finding ways to grow their audience at a time when Star Wars has lost a lot of its popularity in recent years, along with being able to retain their audiences attention and get consistent engagements.

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Solutions

AD_HD dove right in to take advantage of all the useful engagement and retention-focused features that Opus has to offer.

• Emoj Rain: The AD_HD team has used emoji rain in every single show since they started using Opus, allowing them to consistently garner more comments and creating some great moments with their audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rncUzVPdQ8
• Speaker Highlight: As a multi-host channel, AD_HD has taken full advantage of Speaker Highlight mode to add an extra element of motion and visual engagement on their screen with great success. They have a lot of fun with it too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFz0aJY0_Ko
• Being able to work with Opus: Zack talks in detail about how great it is to work with Opus, because they actively work with Creators to constantly improve their product. https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxQIdJmuoRkh5SOH5d1euv3x7w8F6wmfDP
• Streaming More With Opus: With Opus making it easier and more fun for them to stream, AD_HD has already streamed 10 times over the span of 3 weeks since switching to Opus, while their previous 10 streams occured over the span of 2 full months.

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‍Results

Overall, since AD_HD was streaming a lot more with Opus, producing more streams in January than December and November combined, their average views and likes per stream actually dropped a bit compared to their results prior to using Opus. There are several other reasons for the lower numbers using Opus, including:

• Cat was unable to join for 3 of the Opus streams and Alex was unable to join for 5 of them, leading Zack, who doesn't have an established audience outside AD_HD channel, to stream by himself.
• The show that the team has primarily been covering during the time they have been streaming with Opus, called "The Bad Batch" is a children's show who's 2nd season has been off to a rocky start in the eyes of fans, which impacts viewership. By comparison, the Star Wars show that was being released in December, called "Andor" was the most popular Star Wars show to come out in years, boosting their viewership by comparison.
• The team also hasn't made full use of some of the features that Opus has to offer, such as video comments and magic memes, that could increase audince, viewership, engagement and retention further.

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Despite these results, the AD_HD team did see an impressive 22.3% increase in comments per episode since switch to Opus. Furthermore, their overall statistics for January are absolutely crushing their statistics from December, with a 160% increase in viewership and 128% increase in impressions.

Their channel also achieved a record watchtime of nearly 25 minutes per viewer on one of their recent episodes, which is an incredible result considering that the channel had never broken a watchtime of 15 minute per viewer previously.

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If you like the AD_HD team. You can follow their channels at:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWk9N8B-YKHgjukM8k361Dg

https://www.youtube.com/@CatherineLaSalle

https://www.youtube.com/@ADedits9