Adios, Vegans Abroad: Yes, We’re Still Vegan (Episode 90)

After MONTHS of consideration and an informal poll from many of our friends and fans, we have decided to change our YouTube Channel name from “Vegans Abroad” to plain old “Amelia and JP”.

Yes, we’re still vegan. That hasn’t changed. But we realized that our channel is about far more than veganism. In fact, we only spend about 10 to 20% of our time talking about vegan issues, and we don’t mention it at all in many of our videos.

Our channel is a Lifestyle VLOG that’s mainly about us living our normal lives as gringo expat vegans in Cuenca, Ecuador. We share a lot of “day in the life” videos and videos about gentle minimalism, expat living, moving abroad, medical issues, health and nutrition, our dogs, dog rescues, events in Cuenca, travel abroad, cooking, etc. It’s a smorgasbord of topics!

Because of this and our minimal discussion of veganism, we haven’t attracted many vegans to our channel. The vast majority of our subscribers are non-vegans who are contemplating a move to Ecuador or someplace outside of the US. Our second largest subscriber group are Ecuadorians who currently live in the States. They like to see videos of their beautiful homeland.

If either of these groups are searching on Google or YouTube for topics that we cover, many will scroll right by when they see our channel name, thinking we’re going to bombard them with vegan information or slaughterhouse videos, which we don’t do.

If people see our videos in search results several times, but never click to watch them, YouTube eventually stops showing our videos to them, which spells death to our channel.

As you can see in the sample search result below from YouTube, “Vegans Abroad” is plainly visible just below the video title. Yet, we only mentioned veganism once in this video when we said we didn’t know how much meat costs.

The same thing would happen if we were “Christians Abroad” instead of “Vegans Abroad”. YouTube would likely not show our videos in search results for Muslims or Jewish people. That’s just the way interest-based search algorithms work. YouTube wants to show people videos that they want to watch.

We think this rebranding will help us grow our channel and remove our subscriber cap. While we do hope our subscribers will follow our example and adopt a vegan lifestyle, we also don’t want to alienate people who aren’t quite there yet. Everyone is on their own journey at their own pace, and we want our channel to be easier to find and more appealing regardless of life stage.

Other than the name change, everything else will be business as usual. If you have any feedback for us or comments, we’d love to hear them! Leave us a comment on YouTube or below.

Hopefully you enjoyed our video, and if you did, please LIKE, COMMENT and SHARE it, and SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel. ¡Muchas Gracias y Hasta Luego!

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