Since I wrote about Berm Peak, its creator Seth Alvo has moved the subscription from Patreon to Substack[a] and I followed over there. YouTube is great in many ways, but you get what the algorithm serves you - creators that displease the algorithm tend to see their income disappear and with that they tend to decide to spend their efforts elsewhere. Helping one of my favorite YouTube creators break free for $7/month was a no-brainer.
The Substack chat started with an invitation to post a picture of your bike
, so I uploaded a photo of my now 19 year old bike. A little bit later Seth released a video about How the Bike Industry Takes Bike Photos[b], noting that just about all photos that they had received were way off-spec - wonderfully off-spec. And wouldn't you know, I was featured not just once[c] (which was enough to celebrate), but twice[d]!
The channel has over a million subscribers and the video has as of this writing 135 thousand views, which makes the exposure my photo got in that single Berm Peak video dwarf any exposure it has had on this blog by several orders of magnitude.
