History · Noppenecke EOL · Show Formats · 2400 Subscribers · Cost · Final thoughts

History

The Noppenecke was a project which started around April 2019, the basic idea was to showcase Cobi brick tanks.

COBI in itself is a toy manufacturer which produces nowadays mostly WW1 and WW2 Sets from Lego bricks, this is in itself a very nice niche because Lego themselves do not want to produce this stuff.

The targeted market seems at first to be children which most of the marketing also targets, but the real audience is mostly elderly man, see the screenshots for more information, they are taken directly from my own Youtube Channel Noppenecke.

For this audience was nearly nothing on Youtube at the time, my Channel was one of the first trying to get a foothold.

At first the production value was very low, only filming with my smartphone and not really knowing anything about the sets, this slowly transformed, I started to invest in better lightning, a dedicated DSLR Camera to record in 4k and later even a dedicated audio recorder trying to offer the best experience.

This all ended around one year after running the channel, when all production came to a halt around the end of June 2020.

Noppenecke EOL

Or better said, why was it over there where tree big factors why I lost all interest.

• Cobi release policy, first off fuck you if you release a Set for €120 just to bring out an updated version half a year later. This happened multiple times also for some good selling sets it made no sense to collect them, in my year collecting Cobi I witnessed four Tiger tank versions and 3 Kingtiger versions with small changes.


• Cobi.pl only releases, at some point around the beginning of 2020 Cobi started to keep releasing Sets in Limited Editions only in their Web shop, the joke is that these versions were not really limited or at least never sold out. One of the biggest markets for Cobi is Germany and the shipping cost for one Set are around €20. Not only is this a huge turnoff but also made local distributors angry because they could not sell these often very anticipated sets to their customers.


• The videos took way too much time.

These are just my reasons if you do not agree with them, you can kindly shut the fuck up.

Show Formats

Just film it and be done with it.

There were basically three formats over the lifetime of the channel.
The very first videos where simply showing the model with no further information, really simple format if the video was 10 minutes long it took exactly that time to create.

Historic Comparison

Pretty fast I was asking myself why am I doing this, I would never watch these videos myself, so I created my very own format and I would like to give myself full credit to be the first to do something like this in the Lego brick world.

I started to pair the showcase of the model with real life information and images, sometimes comparing very minor details to the real counterpart and explaining what each part represents.

These videos especially at the end took around 40 hours to create, from the research, finding images, cutting, animations, recording footage and voice over.

COBI NEWS

The last show format was also something that manage to capture many viewers the Cobi News.

The Name says it all, there was no offer of a format which gathered all new news around Cobi and put them in one simple video with complementary images and fast-paced.

Cobi themselves only offered some rudimentary Livestreams on Youtube which were mostly in polish and sometimes two hours long with nearly no information, they did this at least twice a week and you can guess how many people watched it.

My format was taking so much over that even Cobi themselves copied my format after 5 months and started to call their livestreams Cobi News which boosted their search results.

2400 Subscribers and 400k Views in just under a year!

To be honest this was easy, the category was new, and I offered a unique package, but was more possible considering i manage to hit these numbers in just under a year?

A simple answer yes, the format was in German only so here was the first bumper... but my English only got worse since I got out of school (which you certainly can see in how badly this is all written)

Best case study would be Brickmeet, he has at this point way more views and subscribers than me, but I will never respect him for his video format, he appeared some time after me and took some lessons from my thumbnails and video titles (also like a little bitch he tried to get people on his channel via my comment section).

The biggest offense are that he does the same as the 100 Lego YouTubers he speed builds sets to dumb royalty free music. That's it the worst offense he puts review into his title I know this is YouTube and clickbait works, but I never had any respect for that guy.

One thing that I have to give him points for is his video quality, it is great, and you can really see that he already had a studio to do this, he from the start saw this as a business opportunity and can do something that I will never be able to with my 40-hour video format.

Being the first, this is crazy important, you can get so much search traffic just being the first with a video to that specific set, so all these speedbuilders are running against the clock in hope to be the first to upload.

But this is also a terrifying place to be in, especially because some Cobi distributors started to record videos themselves and that means they are the first to have the Sets, everyone done the line will have to wait at least 2 - 3 days just to get the Set into their hands.

This is also something that at some point could kill many of these speedbuild channels, all that it takes is that Cobi starts doing this themselves at some point, the moment this happens channels like brickmeet either need to change or will bite the dust, nobody comes to them because of anything they add, they only come because of the Set not the person or any information in the videos.

Cost

Cobi is expensive, not like Lego expensive, but bigger sets cost around €100, but mostly around €30.

Now how much did the Noppenecke cost to run?

Camera + Lights + Voice Recorder + additional equipment = €1200

Well that is not so expensive... just wait I had around 120 - 130 Sets which cost me around €5000

Yeah, that's right... I'm not kidding some of these older sets get expensive fast, also because newer Cobi sets like to sell out, and you never know when you will be able to get it for a video I bought what I needed and just put it aside, I had a massive storage of sets which never got a video made.

Never mind the Cost to get all the research material and books just to find images...

Final thoughts

It was an interesting time and if I think back I maybe would do it again the biggest tips that I can give to anyone wanting to start something like this is: SPEND TIME ON YOUR THUMBNAIL

After becoming the fastest growing Channel it this niche I overtook people making videos since 2 or 3 years... do not put your ugly fucking face in thumbnails nobody wants to see my ugly face BECAUSE NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOU.

They care about the Set not you, you come second... you are not pewdipi your face has no value on the thumbnail... focus on the object... just look at my thumbnails in comparison to others... people did not click on my videos because they were better... FUCK I still hate my autofocus but because i showed them what they wanted to see.

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