Rebranding is hard
Even if it’s something barely anyone looks at, it’s something I spend quality time shaping and honing at my leisure. While I only do it for fun, it’s still something I pour a good bit of my soul into, which is why it’s worth considering somewhat seriously.
But for me, the thing that gave me difficulty wasn’t the rebrand itself since my old one was such a long edgy-ass name anyway, so this new one is a welcome change. What put my balls through a salad shooter was dealing with the main asset of the brand, which is the website.
Website
It was expensive since I had to get a new domain name — the very thing that made consider the rebrand in the first place. If the domain weren’t available and I didn’t fall in love with it at first sight, I would’ve stayed Avoiderdragon for at least another 18 years.
The blog has a decade’s worth of posts. They’re not a lot since I couldn’t be consistent with writing posts throughout the years, but there are some bangers in there with SEO that I didn’t want to lose. I had previously paid for the old domain for the next 10 years, and I did the same for the new one. The good thing with that splurge is that I could set up a redirect.
Unfortunately, the only real way for me to do that is to find a service that has better options for redirecting. My current hosting service doesn’t have one that lets its https domain redirect to my new one, so I had to route it to another service that turned out to have such an option.
I split hairs for a couple of days and spent thousands of pesos (which I can afford, so don’t worry) to finally find a way to make every URL in my old domain redirect to my new one and still be able to use whatever minuscule chunk of SEO I got for the past decade.
Perhaps this time, with a new and better brand, I’ll be motivated to write stuff that will get way more views so I won’t have to care about the SEO of the old domain anymore and I can finally put it to rest (and save some money).
YouTube Channel
The reason I really wanted a rebrand was so I could be assed enough to do something about my long-abandoned YouTube channel, which I stopped uploading to in the middle of 2018. While making videos has never stopped being fun for me, it stopped being so for that channel with that name due to mistakes I made along the way and all the toxic comments I foolishly deigned to read.
I gave it a long-delayed spring cleaning. I downloaded the old videos I uploaded there as far back as 12 years ago and then deleted them. It used to be my personal channel, so I had some really old stuff with my friends in them. As I counted down the years, it made me think that perhaps I really should’ve uploaded more, but I couldn’t do that just because I wanted to blow up because I know that would only result in shoddy work and questionable ethics.
Video is a lot of hard work, and I don’t want to fall into the trap of doing it just because I had to. This time around, I got a bunch of drafts I would like to try turning into videos I can be proud of. I think I’ll do that by starting over and redoing the videos that have remained in the channel. If I can improve on them, I know I can redeem myself.
Facebook Page
I live in the Philippines. Therefore, I’m on Facebook. That’s just how it goes. While I have multiple YouTube channels because I have no lick of sense, I have one Facebook page I upload all my vids and share all my blog posts to. I also share links and write statuses on it. I don’t expect it to blow up at all since it’s neither a meme page nor full of lewds that would attract eyeballs.
But I’ve had a couple of videos go viral in Facebook. That brings me some hope as while the YouTube algorithm is a cruel mistress and going viral on Twitter is basically setting yourself up for public torture, the Facebook algorithm seems to be a bit more fair. I should upload more on it and see if I can find some traction with more content.
I also used to stream on Facebook because it was easier for me to get an audience through it, no matter how small. But there’s no way to blow up as a streamer in that platform unless you’re a pretty girl playing Mobile Legends or a known online personality. And even if you’re famous on Facebook, you get up to a few thousand viewers at best, nowhere near Twitch numbers.
While its a surprisingly ok platform for video, it’s being superseded by TikTok. Even if Facebook now has reels, YouTube also has Shorts now, so its a double whammy against it. Meta lost several billion dollars this year due to what now-former Meta VR consultant and executive John Carmack would describe as “inefficient and fragile”. Just give the Meta Business Suite a try and tell me it’s not a convoluted mess.
However, Facebook is the only platform I was able to properly rebrand to Avoider.net with. All other platforms don’t take the dot on either the profile or the URL, and worse is some don’t take it on both (fucking YouTube). Perhaps the one sacrifice with this rebrand is that I don’t have a consistency with URLs on every social media channel like I used to.
(I also was able to do so with TikTok, but I haven’t been on there long enough.)
And before you say, “Why not just make it avoidernet?”, I counter that by saying that the point of having the dot there is to promote the website. Perhaps in the future, I’ll get rid of that separator and just have it be ‘avoidernet’ once I get over the need to promote the website through it, but that’s not going to be for a while.
Other Channels
If I get really active, I should post on other platforms like TikTok and Instagram. However, the caveat here is that minding more than two platforms is not recommended as you’d stretch yourself too thin and won’t be able to do your best work in the platorms that actually matter for your brand.
But if making shortform video content becomes a part of what I do, then I might as well give some priority those platforms as well.
Conclusion
I can’t promise that I won’t be lazy. But so far, with this rebrand, I’ve been feeling quite motivated. Let’s see how it goes for 2023.