The Secrets of YouTube Success – 2012 Edition

Define what “successful” means to you. Expect to work for it.

Before you start, you need to define what “success” is for yourself. How many views per video do you want to get? How much money do you want to make? These numbers, incidentally, need to be realistic. If you’re starting out with a vlog channel, you have to recognize that there are a LOT of vlog channels, and of all those, only a handful achieve success like ShayCarl has. Fresh out of the gate, you can’t expect to have that kind of insta-success.

Even JennaMarbles, to date the fastest growing YouTube channel of all time, required a more consistent stream of content before she started getting a very impressive consistent viewership. She built her audience off of the foundation of a strong, consistent content schedule.

Your potential success is determined entirely by what you put into it. The top channels on YouTube work on videos full-time.  You can’t expect to match their success if you’re not putting in the same effort. You cannot pull a livable wage if you’re not putting in full-time hours. On the other hand, don’t expect that, just because you put in the hours, that you’ll be successful. You need hard work as well implement a good strategy. Potential success is how hard you work. Actual success is how smart you’re working.

The fact is, at this point in time, it’s more difficult to achieve breakthrough success than it used to be. It’s not impossible – but the kinds of subscriber and viewership gains on a per video basis are not what they used to be. In fact, of everybody, only JennaMarbles is achieving that rate of growth. That should make things very clear – there’s more people and more content than ever, but the fastest growing channel is still a relatively recently created channel. Again – not impossible, but you need to come out with some very compelling, “sticky” content.

“Good” content can languish. “Sticky” content can suck. You want both, not just one.

You want a video to be “sticky” (or have “viral potential”). You want to ask yourself: “What is the first impulse a viewer will have after they see this video?” If that impulse is to close the window having thoroughly enjoyed your video, than congratulations – you’ve made a good video, but it didn’t stick. What you want is the impulse to pass the video along to their friends immediately. You want that video on their mind when they’re standing around a computer with a bunch of their friends at a party and the inevitable YouTube Video Share-a-thon happens. You want that video to be something they want to share with the world because that impulse – the impulse to consume something and then retransmit it, is literally the definition of a “viral” video.

That being said, just because a video is a “good” video doesn’t mean it has “viral potential.” The opposite is also true. There are many award-winning short films that can be found on YouTube (this one, for example), but few of them have millions of views. They are objectively fantastic works of art, but they don’t get passed around. If your goal is to get passed around, you need to tap into that desire to share.

The most viral video of all time is, shockingly, a thirty-minute documentary on a war criminal:

As far as documentaries go, the Kony video is not particularly well made. Nor can anybody really familiar with the facts of the situation call it a very “good” video – it smugly concludes the single solution to an incredibly complex situation with hundreds of years of rooted history to simply “more awareness.” Yet the video is brilliant because it cut right to the heart of the impulse to share.

Normally, the emotional payoff you get from sharing a cool video is probably the same as introducing a friend to a band they’ve never heard of, or recommending a movie they’ve never seen – it’s the pride of having discovered something first, the joy of sharing it with a friend, and the prestige of building a reputation of being a person who has good taste and is on the cutting edge of interesting content. Not Kony, though – after all, you aren’t exactly on the cutting edge if you’re the 90 millionth viewer.

Instead, Kony removed the external rewards of esteem from your peers and getting in on the ground floor, and replaced it with something more powerful – the feeling of saving the world in a way that everyone can see it. Because their central argument was more awareness was all that was needed to bring a horrible war criminal to justice, it stands to reason that the simple action of sharing the video on Facebook or Twitter is contributing to ending the reign of a tyrant. Not only are you spreading that video, every time somebody shared it on Facebook, they publicly showed off their worldliness, their commitment to justice, and their willingness to act. Sure it’s armchair activism, but it feels just as good as the real thing.

That’s why Kony continued to grow the way it did – because even after millions of people saw it, any individual viewer could still get that hit of good feelings by simply sharing it. Kony was a drug in video form – and the method of administration was sharing it, which only spread it further.

Now, not every video you make will necessarily tie such a powerful emotional response to the act of passing it along, but you only need to look to yourself to figure out what’s the best way to do this. Of the videos you’ve seen and you’ve passed along to your friends, ask yourself: “Why did I send that? Why did I think my friend would like that?” Answer those questions, and start applying them to your own work.

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