Ah you guys, you have no idea how sick I am right now! We put filming off for two weeks but we can’t wait any longer so we recorded this one now and, well, you can see for yourself in the video below… Usually I sit all serious and emotional to discuss what has happened in the past year, blowing my own mind along the way. Not this year. Well, kind of. I loved the 2020 year in review, it was wholesome and warm, and emotional. The 2021 review, not so much.
That review felt to me like a bit of a sales pitch. I know that I was just sharing launches happening on that very day, but it just felt a bit gross to me. Little did I know that I would feel gross on filming this year. Karma, maybe?
I think we actually did really well to film this video given the circumstances, so here it is:
2022 for us here at Team Tog was a little different in terms of the goals set. We’d already made it clear that YouTube was no longer a core focus for us (we’ll still be there, don’t panic), so we were pleasantly surprised by the stats in the table below which shows an incredible hold on the previous years stats. Interesting, no?
2020 vs 2021 vs 2022 YouTube Only Comparison
| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube Views | 249,000 | 711,000 | 799,989 |
| Viewer Country Count | 72 | 102 | 98 |
| New Subscribers | 7,000 | 14,000 | 14,000 |
| Minutes of content watched | 1,400,000 | 4,000,000 | 4,010,000 |
| Likes | 14,000 | 31,000 | 33,000 |
| People Helped* | 67,000 | 250,000 | 370,000 |
For us, 2022 was about the sustainability of our business models, internal processes and industry reach. That happened in spades. We strengthened relationships and built strong brand partnerships, namely with our two official partners, Pixapro and Tenba. Our internal team went from 2 to 4, which in itself is terrifying for me to deal with on the daily.
We were at The Photography Show again with our trade stand, only this year I had 4 show talks on the stages, and a full schedule of on-stand demos in the interim! I spoke and taught at The Residency of the North and even travelled over to Italy for the Pet Photographers Club retreat in Lecco.
We travelled for commercial and private clients, filming and shooting stills as required, meeting lots of new faces and visiting new places. We went to the tippy top of Scotland, 9.5 hours one way non-stop driving from our driveway, to go play with our dogs and scale waterfalls.
As it stands right now, 2023 is full – including a number of international private workshops and 4 confirmed speaking engagements.
We released 5 online courses:
We also supercharged the Premium Membership, which now holds over 150 MTog-only videos, including over 30 full step-by-step editing tutorials. I critiqued over 700 images as part of the Premium+ Deep Critiques and more MTog’s than ever achieved international recognition, titles and other awards.
Myself, I’m happy with my 82 international recognitions for this year as I didn’t enter anywhere near as much, and I definitely didn’t create as much! Those 82 include 2 titles, 7 images with 90+ scores in international competition, and at least 22 finalists (some cycles not complete).
Personally, I went to Judging School, a goal for me in 2022, jumped my pony over 1m fences and went to my very first dressage competition – all of those were goals for me. I also faced my fear of water and theoretically overcame it when it counted, and launched The Naked Tog – my passion project.
And let’s not forget The TOG Awards!
2023 has much to look forward too, but it’ll look a little different from me personally. It’s definitely time to rest up, and set some new goals!