2024 Youtube Retrospective

[@br00zer31]

I always have appreciated your honesty and integrity. I wish you good fortune, good health, and may your endeavors bring you joy.

[@ihategoogle905]

I honestly dont know of a more deserving man to have things work out for. I am a professional internet hater, but I truly wish from the bottom of my heart that everything goes well for you. I have been following your channel for quite a few years now and Ive seen my own struggles in some of the things youve shared over that time. I felt a sense of solidarity. One of my greatest treasures I own is the book you signed "wishing you all the best". Merry Christmas Dr Crawford. Thank you for being there and doing what you do. My life and many others would be poorer without it.

[@AlfOfAllTrades]

Jeg vil med dette ønske deg en God Jul og et riktig Godt Nytt År, her fra snørike Trøndelag, Norge. Lykke til med bolig, jeg håper alt går deg vel i framtiden, både med bolig og kjærlighet! 🎄

[@EGULL97]

This series on Nynorsk vs. Bokmål is much appreciated. Merry Christmas.

[@byronhunt6124]

Merry Christmas, Dr. Crawford. Please accept this small token of appreciation for all the fantastic knowledge you've shared on your channel. Thanks!

[@thelegendfatherofgiants984]

wishing you all the best

[@MrSilvUr]

Seeing the relationship between you and Lauren has been an inspiration for me to pursue my own crush. We've gotten together and have been romantically snapping into place. I feel like what she and I have is the same as what the two of y'all have, and it's been life-changing.

[@paytonthornberry1382]

I hope to find this before I'm dead.

[@MrSilvUr]

@paytonthornberry1382 I don't know your situation, but it seems to take time. We're in our thirties with hands burned from previous relationships and life in general.

[@paytonthornberry1382]

@@MrSilvUr Thank you brother ❤️

[@MrSilvUr]

@@paytonthornberry1382 For sure. Best of luck, and remember: Your heart is a muscle; treat it like one.

[@MrSilvUr]

What do you think of a $1, "I just want to support you," tier on the Patreon? I've seen other creators with them, so maybe there's something to it. I know I personally have seen those tiers and thought, "It's like a gratuity at a coffee shop; I can do that every month," and pledged. You might even call the tier, "Wishing you all the best," or something.

[@camrendilbeck]

Seconding this! I can’t financially support much because of my financial status but a dollar a month is definitely viable, and I’m sure it’s the same for many people! I think of the price of sugar in times past, it’s high price prevented the common people from enjoying it, leading to reduced profits from its sellers (not to say the patreon is priced high, just that it’s easier to justify something cheap as a dollar).

[@MrSilvUr]

Honestly, I feel like the Rocky Mountain setting adds a lot of character to your videos that would be flattened out if you were to do the videos from where one might expect.

[@dus10dnd]

I wish the best for you. I’ve really enjoyed your videos. I myself have been getting into curriculum development as an adjunct and independently. It’s tough. I was developing content for someone else on contract and there were so many issues with unspoken expectations and then [paid] distractions created by the other party, then health issues. I finally completed this first course and learned so much. I think the key is to find new and interesting topics with nuances. One piece of feedback (not having participated in your course). You seem to be limiting yourself by adhering to the academic schedule. I think that is the problem that you can solve by being independent. Make something that is only 4 weeks, or 6 weeks. Making it a more tight topic. If you want an “Old Norse I” course and you can’t get it into that format, make a series of courses that build to “Old Norse I & II” in their totality. The other option, and I would certainly struggle with this, would be to find someone in an adjacent space, like Scandinavian archeology, and collaborate on a course. One area that I would be particularly interested in would be the intersections of Old Norse and Old English, or Old Norse and Latin or something where history can also be included for context. Focus on events where linguistic mingling occurred. Just ideas. When you’re making money independently, you have to always be looking for new streams of revenue. Fortunately, your market is the subset of interested parties in the entire world. Look to be a guest on podcasts where you can sell your products. You may also want something more affordable with a recorded course and your live courses build on it. Make a book and then offer a discount code for your courses… give your book away to students of the courses. Maybe pick up a related hobby and do courses for it. Like shipbuilding and then speak to the linguistics of it in their totality context of the people.

[@mcolville]

"And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

[@puberis]

Never give up! I like the shorts with your woman in them (feel better, miss!). She's so gentle and precious and pleasant. I love how she looks at you. I love how you look at her. I love how you two melt together when one puts an arm around the other. It's a wonderful thing. It gives some flavoring of personality to you and the channel too. It gives a measured glimpse into the man behind the academic.

[@gurthangorcus]

Dr. Crawford - Wishing you all the best!

[@BrandonJulianWindsor7]

Wishing you and Lauren happy holidays and a happier year going forward! I've been following your channel for years and words cannot express how much your good information has helped many people (myself included) Grateful for all you do and happy for you having found such a wonderful person to share your life with! wishing you all the best!

[@willremy5142]

I hope you don't let anyone rain on your parade of joy. Keep that feeling in your heart and it will take you a long way. Happy Holidays to you and yours!

[@lefunnyN1]

i just wanted to say, i hope you two manage to build a good life together and also dont give up with depression in your life, i know how life can be tough but dont give up. merry christmas dr. crawford

[@Heathenwolf-uv1zo]

Congratulations on getting sober 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉. My boyfriend is also trying to get/stay sober, good bit of my family either smokes cigs or drinks.

[@Language_Guru]

Greetings, Dr. Crawford. I only came upon your channel a month or so ago via a KZbin suggestion. It turned out to be a good one! I feel with you when it comes to getting a doctorate in an obscure subject. In my case it is ancient Semitic languages, specializing in Syriac. It is a fascinating field, but one with very few paths toward a tenure track. I wound up going into other kinds of work. I won't bore you with the details, but I will wish you and Lauren the best in the upcoming year! May you find financially viable work and have a joyful wedding. And may you have a long and happy rest of your lives together!

[@LoganKearsley]

Marrying someone with corporate experience seems like a pretty good idea for a media creator who neither has no wants business acumen!

[@cynthiak3372]

Wishing you both a happy and prosperous 2025.

[@BobbyHill26]

I really hope that you can find something that provides you with financial security. I’ll admit that I’m one of those people that mainly stick around for the language videos, which I realize isn’t really what your channel is for, I just don’t particularly care about Old Norse myth at all. I loved PIE news series that you had going there for a bit and I’m a big fan of your interviews in general, regardless of the topic. Although I don’t have too much interest in most of your content, I do still usually play them, if for nothing else as background noise and to support the channel, as I have infinite respect towards your goal as a public educator. I think I’ve likely developed what they would call a parasocial relationship, as I’ve been rooting for your success for quite a few years now. I think we have fairly similar personalities and mindsets and I’ve taken steps down paths similar to ones you’ve discussed walking, and it’s a great encouragement to me and gives me hope to see you make things work to some degree or another, even if it is a struggle that requires a bit of stumbling through the dark. Was also very happy to see you’ve found someone that provides you with love and support, I’ve also found someone to do the same for me this year and, at least so far as it seems to me, although some burdens might get a bit heavier, there’s a certain joy in bearing them. I think I’m beginning to understand the peace that seems typically reserved for those deeply committed to religion. I could spend all day saying whatever other nonsense comes to mind, but I probably ought to just wrap it up by saying that I very sincerely wish you all the best Dr Crawford

[@luxtenebris7246]

Jackson, as a long time subscriber who has been watching less and less of your content over time, I'm going to give you some brutally honest feedback. I hope this doesn't strike you as insulting, because it comes from a place of me wanting to see you succeed and believing in your project of a community funded, open source, educational career path for academics on KZbin and other platforms. On the positive side, your best attributes are your academic 'chops' (no one can doubt that you're qualified), and your ethic of objectivity and honesty. In other words you come across as a qualified and trustworthy source on Old Norse, and linguistics more generally. This alone will net you a dedicated number of hardcore Norse learners and enthusiasts who treat language learning and myth study as a serious hobby. However, (and I think this is important) the numbers of such people is fairly small, and *probably too small to support you financially in the long term*. The next group that Norse content would appeal to are the Neo-Pagan/Asatru crowd. For better or for worse you seem to have largely alienated that group. I think you've done so out of honesty rather than hostility, and that is admirable. It probably would have been more profitable for you to lean into the pagan thing and try to monetize it despite your own misgivings, and you chose not to do that, which is again, admirable but unfortunately doesn't solve your financial woes. This means that to make a living out of this you're going to need to appeal to more casual viewers (like me), who have a passing interest in Old Norse, the history of the Vikings, and the lasting impact these things have had on our world, but who aren't going to be dedicating serious amounts of time to this as our main hobby or area of study. This is where I think you are seriously failing. Lets start with titling. Frankly, your titles are terrible. You have carried over the academic practice of descriptive titles into KZbin, and they don't work here. Many of your titles sound like they could be titles of academic essays. They describe what the video is about, which is NOT what a KZbin title should do. Effective KZbin titles are not descriptive, they are communicative. They communicate to a potential viewer WHY he or she should watch the video. This usually falls into one of three categories: promising excitement, communicating relevance, or asking an interesting question (which they promise to answer). Generally you do none of these. Here's an example of a recent video title of yours. "Loki in Our Medieval Sources". Compare this to something like: "You're Probably Wrong About Loki" (you're telling me I'm wrong, which means this video will be relevant to me and my opinions. It promises to teach me something new). Other examples: "Was Loki Really Trans?" (asking an intriguing question), or if that's too political for your taste, "Is Loki the Strangest God In the Norse Pantheon?" (asking an intriguing question), or you could flip it to communicate excitement: "Here's Why Loki Was The Strangest God in the Norse Pantheon". Now when I clicked on that Loki video, it turned out to be an interesting back and forth question and answer session you did with another person. That exchange would have interested me, but I had no idea that's what it was because that wasn't communicated anywhere in the thumbnail or title. Something like "I Get Publicly Grilled on Loki at the Utah Natural History Museum" would have lured me in. Or if that is too clickbaity for you, at least something like "Taking LIVE questions on Loki at the Utah Natural History Museum." Any of these would have been better than "Loki in Our Medieval Sources", which frankly, is egregious. "The Viking Housefire Experiments" is also an egregiously boring academic style title of a video that, perhaps more than any other, deserved an exciting invitation to view. "We BURNED DOWN a Viking house!" would be the low hanging fruit, but you could also have come up with something more creative. The one example I see of a targeted question in a title in your recent videos was, ironically, not a good time to you use it. "Are Medieval Christmas RomComs Historically Accurate?". No. The answer is obviously NO. Aside from the fact that 'Medieval Christmas RomComs' is an insanely narrow subject to be addressing, it's also obvious that any such movie won't be historically accurate. Now I don't have to watch your video because I already know the answer. Better would have been something like "Here's What Medieval Movies Get Wrong", or even more fun would be "How Many Historical Inaccuracies can I Spot In 5 Minutes?" The next issue is the scattered nature of the content itself, which makes me not want to turn on my notifications. Personally I'm interested in your channel for Viking history, mythology, and Norse language facts and tidbits. I'm not interested in learning Norwegian, let alone the differences between Nynorsk and Bokmal, and while I like LOTR, I'm not particularly interested in your reading and commentary on it. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that kind of content, but when I look back at your last twenty videos or so, there are about 5 which interest me. So I don't want to turn on notifications when 3 out of 4 videos don't interest me, and lack of notifications means I simply don't watch as many of your videos as I might, because I'm subscribed to a couple of hundred channels, and unless you happen to pop-up on my homepage (like this video did), it rarely occurs to me to go check up on your channel. I'm not sure exactly what the solution is to that problem, other than perhaps separating different content into different channels. 'Learn Norwegian with Jackson Crawford' could be its own channel, and there is always room for another LOTR channel. But channel splitting comes with its own risks and complications. Finally, and I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you have a tendency to ramble and lose focus in your videos, especially your longer form content. There have been multiple times that I've been a quarter or halfway through a 20, 30, or 40 minute video where you were off on a tangent unrelated to the title subject that drew me in, and I lost interest and left. I get it, I'm a fairly horizontal thinker also, and tend to jump from thing to thing within a given subject matter, but the competition for attention on KZbin is fierce, and that kind of wandering will simply fail to hold viewers in place. Maybe use notes, or rehearse before hand, or find some other way of tightening up your delivery so that there aren't these dull interludes interspersed with the rich and interesting pockets of knowledge. A lot of this can also be accomplished through more aggressive editing of the videos before publishing. Anyway, these are just a few things you can consider. Hopefully this feedback from one casual viewer's point of view is helpful to you and I hope you don't take it as a personal attack. I want you to succeed and wish you all the best. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you and Lauren.

[@jamesbohling4864]

Merry Christmas. Glad for you both

[@torbenkristiansen2742]

The trip to Norway in order to look at the old maps, was especially memorable. Take care in the undiscovered country, that is the future!

[@colterjohnson1525]

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!

[@ivanheffner2587]

I’d love to have the time to take these classes. I really enjoy having even some limited knowledge of Greek and Latin. I wish I had the same knowledge of a Germanic language to further my ability to understand English at deeper level. Unfortunately, I know that my time is limited and already overbooked. If the videos were available on-demand, I would like to try to incorporate them into my days as I can.

[@geoffgjof]

Merry Christmas dood!

[@drtomintucson]

Jack, money helps, but it isn't everything. You're living a blessed life. If you ever get over being Jon Snow at the party, you'll see that. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and future Mrs Crawford.

[@Alfa_Channell]

Merry Christmas!!!

[@cynthiak3372]

Thanks!

[@theeastgate]

So glad that you are on the mend, Lauren. Must’ve been a very scary experience. God Jul til dere begge.

[@AdamShakeSocialMedia]

Happy Holidays to both of you from both of us in Estes Park.

[@lisab3338]

Merry Christmas! God Jul og godt nytt ar! All the best to the both of you. Thank you and be well.

[@bendthebow]

The penitent man shall pass

[@NilsNormann]

God jul til deg og dine fra oss i Longmont! 🎄

[@Noeaskr]

World tree patron here. You should get a higher tier, I’ll switch to it. I was fortunate enough to make even more money over the last couple of years and you’re a good investment for the things I care about. I’m sorry about the financial problems, it’s tough especially once you get a spouse and eventually kids involved. I feel pressure and I have no reason to be. To comment on the type of videos. The onsite vids have tended to be different from your typical ones. In Iceland for example it was more side quest videos if that makes sense. Onsite videos that are more a documentary would do very well, just a lot of effort. LOTR seems like a similar vain. What I am personally looking for is new insights on myth and cultures from the past. Videos like the Odin bracteate, alternative theories on Heimdallr and Allfoðr were great. Even more collaborations about indo european similarities with your Hittite friend. I know that puts you into territory you don’t seem to be comfortable with but I thrive on that stuff. As a secular and traditional as possible heathen, becoming less secular over time, I want to find deeper meanings from the superficial. Channels like Taliesin’s map have been huge for me lately, comparative mythology in general. Finding out for example that the Utgarðrloki story has a cognate in the humbling of Indra is just too cool. I get it’s not strictly linguistic I understand if you don’t go that direction. Just linguistic insights are enough for me.

[@RobertKaucher]

Jackson, I think that I can speak for the majority of your viewers when I say we believe that you deserve all the best. Ignore the people who complain about Lauren in the shorts or videos. We wish you both all the best.

[@MrGeneration83]

Jeg har fulgt dig på youtube i mange år. Det glæder mig utrolig meget at du har fundet en der gør dig lykkelig og som du forhåbentlig kan dele livet med.

[@apank21]

ty for ur work

[@BetterMonsters]

Something to remember whenever someone is giving content advice is you've got a specific audience that has narrower tastes than something with more mass appeal might have; the things that work for them are likely not to work for you, the youtube algorithm is almost entirely just a matter of what makes your audience want to click your videos, even with the decentering of subscribers. I suspect that if you were a master of AI thumbnails and clickbait titles, you would find yourself with a vastly different, and probably more fickle, audience. Personally, I click a video from you when I haven't seen one in a few days and when it's half an hour or less, regardless of the topic, because you're a good storyteller who presents information with nuance and the appearance of expertise, and you're not performing a wildly artificial character. I found you through Matt Colville's recommendation, and found creators like Dr. Geoff Lindsey and Rob Words through the recommendations youtube threw at me after I started watching your channel. The setting is nice but not decisive; any natural location would serve the same role for me, and any location at all would be fine. The moments when I was gladdest to have subscribed have been those where you present a scene from a period account and seat it in context in a way I wouldn't have had the background to do myself, like the man returning to kill his enslavers because running away would've been theft, and those where you present something difficult to translate and explain why it is difficult and how various translators have approached the problem.

[@BDizzleMySchnizzle]

You bought too much house. It's a mistake plenty of people make. Don't beat yourself up over it. Learn from the experience and move on as best as possible. Don't let it spoil you on home ownership either; it can be a great experience owning a home.

[@mcolville]

You strike me as a Black Company kinda guy....

[@pamelasskaar1422]

Can we still join the myth class? Where do I look for the information?

[@donkeysaurusrex7881]

He had some old videos talking about it. Maybe Stella will see this and comment.

[@allynmccolley6561]

Hi Dr. Crawford. I found your channel while looking for information about runes. I had heard about runes because I’m a tarot card enthusiast, and runes are a metaphysical tool for some tarot card students and readers. Although some people attach metaphysical properties to the runes, while watching your series on runes, I became far more interested in the history of them as a language alphabet than as a metaphysical tool. I also liked your calm and easy way of instruction. You didn’t make fun of those who use runes metaphysically, or of paganism in general but you presented the facts and history of them through your research.

[@lmartell8412]

I’m wondering if you did live office hours and could open memberships that would also increase KZbin revenue.

[@donkeysaurusrex7881]

One (or maybe all) Patreon tiers have monthly office hours when you can video chat with him. Not sure if you might be asking about something else though.

[@donkeysaurusrex7881]

Have you considered mixing it up with classes? I realize this being only round three you haven’t had time to work through it all yet. But like maybe there’s interest enough that once a year or once every two years you can do a modern Icelandic or Norwegian classes. Heck maybe you could even do classes in Icelandic or Norwegian about the finer points of English or American culture. Or classes in English on untranslated novels/poems from Icelandic and Norwegian or classes in one of those languages about Western novels or movies that haven’t been translated. Like I said these are sort of fringier subjects, but if you had half a dozen of them maybe it would make financial sense as you rotate through the lineup.

[@christopherluke9658]

You might want to reach out to a channel called "Men of the West", I know it sounds like something else, they do Lord of the Rings content that would fit nicely with your style. Might be a good collaboration opportunity.

[@donkeysaurusrex7881]

Also I don’t know how involved you are in the entertainment industry these days, but have you ever considered trying to do voice work? Either just narration or actual acting

[@kellyearthrise2453]

God rest ye (or y'all) merry gentleman and gentlewoman, and to everyone out there...🏔✨️