How I’ve grown my audience on YouTube this year
This entry may be a bit navel-gazey, but it seems that about 50% of articles on Medium are about growing your audience on various social media platforms because everybody on the internet is desperate for attention in some form, so here we are. Its more for me really. I thought writing about the specific decisions I’ve taken with regard to my YouTube output this year and experiments I’ve tried would be beneficial for me in the long run.
I’ve never really had much of a long term goal on the Stubagful YouTube channel or an idea of where I’m headed. Gaining a small but loyal audience for my Doctor Who videos was just a happy accident. I went a bit overboard with the Doctor Who videos around the mid 2010s because I wanted to make them and I was having fun. Fun has always been my priority with YouTube. I started branching out into reviews of Doctor Who-adjacent shows like Sherlock. I then added other personal interests like Inside no 9 into the mix, and some wholly original material using my own art style. But there was a ceiling. I hit about 10'000 subscribers in mid 2019 and just carried on doing what I always did, only really gaining an extra 1000 every six months or so.
This all changed in late 2022 when a video I’d made that summer in which I analyse the characters and story arcs on Friends suddenly blew up. I had a vague feeling it would do well when I posted it. I’d noticed that YouTube videos that appeared on the main page when I logged in were trending longer. Everyone always says that YouTube’s algorithm values watch time when deciding what to put on the main page when a user logs in, and a longer video is likely to have a longer watch time. This was the first time in four years in which I’d made a video of around 90 minutes in length. A previous long video I’d made in 2018 (a Doctor Who video) had done well by my standards, but not supersonic. The Friends video got to about 10'000 views just after I posted it, but it dribbled out before the end of the summer.
As you can see, months went by and it was still performing as usual. The start of that curve upwards you can see where it passes the 100'000 mark is in December 2022 when I was seeing it get about 40'000 views in 48 hours for some reason. Its remained solid at about 500 views a day ever since (give or take the odd dip). The reason for this sudden uptick was probably because Matthew Perry had just published his autobiography and he was showing up in clips from late night shows uploaded to YouTube and my video was recommended to people who’d seen those. Still though, it can’t JUST be that, can it? Its all very well for people SEE a video, what made people see this video, click on it, and then stay watching? The average view duration is incredibly high, and further analytics suggest people watched half an hour of it, and then returned to it later because asking people to watch a 90 minute video essay all in one go is a bit much.
In trying to figure out what made this video stand out and what I could do to potentially find further success, I ended up reading this book: Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger.
Berger outlines several factors that can cause things to catch on, be them products, TV shows, movies, or viral videos and there’s actually a lot more to it than you’d think. I recommend reading this for anyone who wants to understand internet success.
From reading this book, I realised that what my Friends video had done was it had gotten people talking. YouTube’s algorithms value user engagement, engagement being either likes or comments. The comment section on the Friends video is full of discussions of various aspects of the show that I mention video. The video acted as a springboard for discussion. Its very long and I’ve overloaded it with potential discussion points for people. That and Friends is a unique show that has an emotional connection with its viewers, and by exploring those emotional connections and people’s personal attachment to the property, viewers stayed invested in what I had to say about the show and added their own points. The comments on this video are surprisingly positive for a YouTube comment section. My partner, whose social media platform of choice is more Instagram than YouTube, and she’s noted just how vicious Instagram commenters usually are, said she visited my YouTube video and was surprised at the shocking amount of intellectual discussion in the comment section. People seem to appreciate my verbalising their emotions. (There are some people who think I’m a twat obviously, I mean it is YouTube here).
So the obvious question is: What do I do next and how can I guarantee success on a video? Figuring that out would require patience and a lot of careful tinkering.
I’d been writing a video late the previous year, just before my Friends video blew up about a recent episode of The Simpsons which had grabbed people’s attention. I’d noticed articles appearing in my newsfeeds about it.
I hadn’t watched the Simpsons in years, but I found it interesting that it had shown up in my newsfeeds again. The episode in question ‘Lisa the Boy Scout’ was actually incredibly illuminating with regard to this book I was reading and the topic on my mind of “what causes people to get attention on the internet?” The episode engages with internet fan theories about the Simpsons. It confirms that Chief Wiggum isn’t Ralph’s real father, something I had seen suggested on various social media groups years ago, which was eventually reported in news outlets.
I found it interesting that by engaging with people on the internet in the show itself, the Simpsons had ended up on my radar again for the first time in years. I wanted to make a video talking about this. My original title was either going to be my standard “Stubagful Reviews: The Simpsons: Lisa the Boy scout” but a ten minute video doing just that would limit my discussion, and its not a very attractive title. My next thought was to make it a broader discussion and the title became something verbose like “How the Simpsons engaged with the internet”. That didn’t feel right either.
My Friends video title was short. 4 words. ‘An Analysis of Friends’.
I eventually came out with this.
The title ‘Clickbait Simpsons Episodes’ is defined enough for the viewer to know what they’re about to watch, but vague enough to tickle the bit of your brain that wants to know more. What does he mean by ‘Clickbait Simpsons Episodes’?
The result was about 90'000 views. There was a sharp drop-off when it hit its peak, but my theory seemed to work.
The next video I did was the obvious follow up on Friends, the spinoff they tried in the mid 2000s about Joey, infamous for being a bomb (albeit a fairly successful one: 2 seasons isn’t nothing). I picked a title more along typical YouTube lines ‘The Story of Joey: The Failed Friends Spinoff’ — a bit longer and more defined regarding its content, but I knew it would do well because it would inevitably get recommended to people who watched my Friends video. It was touch and go for about ten days but eventually it started climbing towards the 100'000 mark.
Like the Simpsons, it had taken a few days to get going. There’s a brief period where the algorithm seems to not know what to do with something I’ve done and sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn’t.
Thing is though, I do have a regular audience and this need to return to my usual content eventually, so I tried a brief return to my usual content: a random Doctor Who video. The result was 7.5k views. Usual for me. That was when I noticed the watch time from subscribers to non-subscribers ratios. On my regular content like a Doctor Who video, it looks like this.
On Clickbait Simpsons Episodes, it looks like this:
My regular content is good for my current subscribers, but Doctor Who content doesn’t pull in new people. That’s why my growth had stagnated while I was doing primarily Doctor Who videos over the last few years. Reaching out to new audiences was clearly what I should be trying.
So I tried it. I’d been enjoying the HBO adaptation of the Last of Us. I had been interested for a while in the question of why video game adaptations are usually failures, but this one was hitting for me. I gave it the title ‘The Last of Us: This is How you adapt a video game’ — a bit verbose, but YouTube videos that claim to explain things tend to do well.
Aaaaand it sank. Completely. Hasn’t even broken 3000 views. Even lower than usual.
There are multiple reasons for this of course. I made it several months after the series finished so it wasn’t a current topic of conversation. My typical audience aren’t really gamers. I’d made a video several years prior about why I lost interest in video games, though I’ve made a slow return to in recent years, but I never talked about it. So my current subscribers didn’t want it, and since none of my other videos were even tangentially connected to an audience there would be for the Last of Us, it didn’t show up on people’s YouTube home pages. There’s no basis for an audience there. It seems I need to strike a balance between something my CURRENT audience wants AND something appealing to wider audiences, and TV comedy seems to be it, but importantly when it is TV, it needs a better hook than being a simple review.
I tried a more general piece discussing a broad topic. I’d recently done an essay for my masters on the topic of Metafiction, and I had noticed a trend in a backlash towards the use of metajokes in modern TV shows, particularly with Rick and Morty. Metafiction is a pet subject of mine, so I made ‘This is the POINT of being Meta’ —a slightly vague suggestion of an answer to a question in the title. Seeding a question in the head of someone who sees this video in their feed might create the impulse for someone to click on it.
It did okay.
I think this might have been a medium-fail because although I included all the elements of Clickbait Simpsons Episodes, the topic was broad and encompassed many different shows: I talked about Rick and Morty, Twin Peaks, the Truman show, Don’t Hug me I’m Scared. The thumbnail was of Rick from Rick and Morty so it does appear at first to be about one specific show, but after my experiments this year I’m less convinced of the long held belief that the thumbnail is really important on YouTube.
I tried another couple of iterations of something my regular audience expects with ‘Stubagful Reviews: Inside No 9 Series 8’ — just to check and see what was happening with them— and I got regular numbers, but because I’d had a few hits that pushed my averages up, YouTube studio claims its worse than usual. YouTubers will claim that you need to have a solid run of hits and that if you know a video won’t do as well, you should scrap it. I was concerned that posting videos for my regular subscribers that I knew wouldn’t go supersonic like the other two experiments would scupper the chances of future success, and I had now had a few videos that were bombs in comparison to Clickbait Simpsons Episodes and the story of Joey. Turned out with my next effort, that wasn’t quite the case.
All while I’d been engaging in these experiments, I’d been slowly putting together a big feature-length analysis video in the vein of my Friends video but about the Simpsons, with the same format and title. I’ve decided to do a few of these on various parts of the Simpsons 30+ year history. I released the first of these, ‘An Analysis of The Simpsons: Early Years & The Golden Age’ covering the first nine seasons of the show, the period typically referred to on the internet as ‘the golden age’, and after a couple of days of bated breath: it started growing. Not as high as the Friends video, but I’d done the simple title and loaded it with discussion points like with my Friends video, and got a decent result.
I’m currently working on a second feature-length Simpsons video ‘An Analysis of the Simpsons: Post-Golden Age’. I’m expecting it to do somewhere in line with the previous one. Big deep dive emotional analysis TV comedy seems to be both appealing to my core audience AND gets the algorithm sharing my content to people likely to click on it AND subscribe and stay watching.
Another interesting thing to note is the gender balance. My usual analytics on my videos skew heavily male, and they did with the Simpsons:
Whereas the Friends video is the first time I’ve had a majority of female viewers:
I think it would be interesting to do a few shorter 20 minute videos about TV comedy shows: one with a largely female audience, one with a largely male audience and one with a more mixed audience and see what happens. I would focus on TV comedy since that appears to be the seam I’m trying to tap with these videos.
Right now though, I’m working on a video for Christmas that I know is only going to appeal to a subset of a subset of my regular audience, and I know it won’t do well, but its important to me. Because I hope I’ve made this clear in spite of everything I just wrote: I’m not in it for the clicks. I’ve only been thinking about this as I’ve put my videos together this year because I’ve been finding the process of figuring out how to get people to click on me and the barriers in the way of that to be an interesting area. Maybe you’ll find it useful, maybe not. If anyone has an topic ideas, let me know.
