An update on what Matt has been up to, where the channel is at and how YouTube finally monetised the channel (spoilers) and how it isn’t really worth it – except for the ability to add links to videos!
Thank you for your support.
Tag: Channel Update
Update!
This week TAB hit 4,000 subscribers! Thanks for all your support over the last couple of years. I filmed this update on Tuesday during a recent research trip in the south of England. I visited Fort Nelson near Portsmouth and thought I’d film a quick update while I stopped for a break.
If you enjoy our work please consider supporting us via Patreon, TAB is an entirely viewer supported, non-monetised channel and any help is very much appreciated!
We have some great new perks, check out our Patreon page here.
TAB Update & New Patreon Perks!
Hi guys
I’m very pleased to announce that we now have some ‘Thank You’ perks for everyone that supports TAB on Patreon!
All Patrons will continue to get access to our regular sneak peek and behind the scenes blogs about what we’re working on and what’s coming up and in addition:
$1 Patrons will get a thank you postcard featuring some very cool, specially commissioned art – an illustration of the inner working of the Heckler & Koch G11!
$5 & up Patrons will receive the G11 postcard AND a 2×6″ (5cm x 15cm) The Armourer’s Bench logo sticker!
We’re really excited to be able to offer tangible perks to say thank you for your support. In order to cover postage costs we’ll send off the perks once you’ve been a supporter for a month – this is purely to cover the postage costs (for instance it’s just over £1.20/$1.60 to post a postcard to the US from the UK) to where ever you are around the world!
If you’d like to become a Patron and support TAB, check out our Patreon page for full details here.
TAB is an entirely viewer supported project so we can’t tell you how excited we are to finally have a way to thank you for going that extra step and supporting our efforts with your own hard earned money. Thank you to all our existing Patrons (who will of course be able to get their hands on the new Perks right away) and thank you for reading this and considering becoming a TAB Patron.
Thanks,
Matt & Vic
Where To Find Us
Hi guys, this is just a quick update to let you know some of the other outlets you can find us on. In the past year TAB has grown a lot and we’ve expanded to a number of social media platforms. We know that people different platforms and may not know about us on others, so we thought we’d put together a quick post to let you know where else you can find us online. It also gives us a little redundancy if there are ever issues with any one platform.
Of course, as you all known, we’re over on YouTube – you can find the channel here.
We also have a thriving Facebook page where we post regularly, you can find the TAB page here.
We have an account over on imgur, initially just for occasional photo hosting but the response to posts over there has been great so we post regularly there – especially gifs and that sort of thing.
Most recently we have also set up a discord server for the growing TAB community to chat to each other in, we discuss all sorts there as well as upcoming content.
We also now have an Armourer’s Bench Instagram account, which is brand new, you can check that out here.
Of course as we announced back in November, we now have a Patreon page as well. TAB is an entirely viewer supported, non-monetised channel, so Patreon support is very much appreciated.
Over there we post sneak peaks from upcoming videos and share behind the scenes stuff from research trips and video production. You can find that here.
Thanks guys! – Matt & Vic
Update & Patreon
We put the video above together to hit our main points but please read on for more information.
Hi guys,
A few weeks ago we mentioned the TAB Patreon page for the first time at the end of a video, so we thought it was time we explain why we’ve launched it and our hopes for it. When we launched TAB just over a year ago, we set up a Patreon page for future use but we decided we would wait to launch it. As I said at the time we felt we wanted to show you what we wanted to accomplish and show you we were worth your time and money to support. But a few people spotted the links and signed up as patrons – to those early Patreon supporters – thank you!
We’re still a small channel but we recently passed a few important milestones. We now have approaching 40 videos live, an amazing 2,500 subscribers and we recently passed 100,000 total views! With that we hope we have shown that we are serious about producing detailed, thoroughly researched, well made videos and articles. We appreciate everyone that watches, likes and comments – it makes the work that goes into the project worth while. So we thought it was time to mention the Patreon page publicly.
It’s important to note that Vic and I are not in this for the money. We love history, we love firearms and we love researching and telling the story of incredible designs like the Ferguson Rifle, the HK G11, the AR-10 and the Curtis bullpup to name just a few. When we set up TAB we made the conscious choice not to monetise the channel through YouTube, which at the time had deleted and suspended several gun channels. We felt that the best thing to do was to avoid YouTube’s algorithms and stay under the radar, at least until we were established. Little seems to have changed since then, friends’ channels like Bloke on the Range and BritishMuzzleLoaders have since had strikes, demonetisations and even deletions! TAB is still ‘demonetised’ and probably will continue to be for the foreseeable future. We would prefer to be viewer supported by our community of viewers.
So if you would like to help towards the upkeep of the TAB website, help us buy equipment and research materials or help us travel to collections then we are sincerely grateful and we appreciate every dollar, pound, euro and penny that is donated to us!
What do we share on Patreon?
Over on the Patreon page we currently have two tiers of supporter, you can find out more about those here. At the moment we share behind the scenes photos and content showing you sneak peaks at upcoming videos and how they’re produced. The Patreon Lens feature (basically Patreon’s version of Instagram Stories or Snapchat) is great as it lets us share quick clips and photos easily. We’ll often post several of those a day when working on episodes, often showing you how we research, film and edit.
We also post blogs about upcoming research trips, the arrival of new research materials/books and share photos of guns sometimes weeks or months before the episode covering them is finished and ready to be posted. In the future we hope to do Q&A videos/streams and have some tangible perks (a TAB t shirt might be cool?) too. This is something we will be working on in the new year.
If you are one of the handful of people who have supported us through Patreon over the last few months, once again thank you. If you have just heard about it or have just found the page and this post then I hope you’ll consider putting in $1 a month to support our work, we have grand plans and many more interesting historic small arms stories to share – we really appreciate it, thanks for reading!
You can find out more over on the TAB Patreon page here
Thank you – Matt & Vic
The Armourers Bench 