My Video Went Viral. Here's Why

You may have seen this thumbnail on YouTube. I mean, I can basically guarantee that YouTube has been throwing this in your face like, "Click! Click! Click again!" You may be wondering why. Why did this particular

video

go

viral

? Well, that's what I'm going to explain in this

video

, but I'll start with something that seems unrelated, which is YouTuber burnout. Now, it's no secret, t

here

have been a lot of YouTubers talking about burnout recently - people like Casey Neistat, Superwoman, Ryan Higa, Grace Helbig and many, many, MANY more - and I think when you have all these people with different channels from YouTube, different experiences, they all say something similar;

I think it's worth understanding that t

here

may be some sort of common factor at play between all of them. So what I'm really going to present is sort of the theory of everything when it comes to YouTube; everything from YouTuber burnout to videos going

viral

; Why are videos going viral on the platform right now? Okay, so, you know, I think as a viewer your response to burnout might be to say, "Well, these YouTubers are just entitled," or "They're soft," or, you know, "Boohoo, you have the best job." in the world" or your other answer could be that burnout happens in every industry, so why should we care about this YouTuber thing?

But I think YouTuber burnout is a more specific phenomenon; I think here it is something particular happening. and it all starts with the life cycle of the YouTuber. I mean, if you think about a YouTuber who complains of burnout, you know that they have had some success on the platform where their views are increasing and of course that is it. exhilarating, it feels great and you're working pretty hard but you see that it's worth it and then at some point your views start to fail so maybe you work a little harder but things don't really change and the views, you know, continue to drop.

I think there's something to do with the psychology of anchoring here, you know, once you have a certain number of subscribers, then, you know, a hundred thousand views, which can be incredible. At first, it feels like a horrible disappointment. So there's a real problem between kind of expectations and reality, and to me, this is a big part of why YouTuber burnout happens. Now, if you look at what YouTubers are saying about this, you'll find that a lot of them are taking responsibility themselves and also establishing some clear cause and effect relationships, which, as you know, they seemed to do.

Sense: Okay, so in this idea we assume that the views reflect something about the quality of the video, we kind of make that assumption, and when there are, you know, fewer views, that means the video is of lower quality. I think this is instinctive, but I want to question it. I also want to question these YouTubers who essentially blame themselves and say, you know, they just don't make videos that good anymore. I think there's something else at play, and it's the system. So every once in a while, I like to go to Google Trends, where you can basically search any search term and see how much traffic there is, how many people are searching for that term at any given time and if you search for "Veritasium" basically since 2004 you see, well , this kind of curve, which might make you ask, "Where in the YouTuber life cycle do you think I am?", and of course, this little peak here is from my black hole. videos, these here must be some Harry Potter fans who have bad spelling.

This is the number of people searching for me, which I think correlates with the number of videos shown on YouTube and the number of people watching and enjoying them. Now let's look at a similar channel to compare. How about the Numberphile channel? It's also an educational channel, but it's, you know, very different, created by very different people with very different schedules, very different topics that we've covered, and yet these graphs look pretty similar. Uhh, let me have a look one more. This is the AsapSCIENCE curve. Here you have Veritasium, Numberphile and AsapSCIENCE: three educational YouTube channels, which follow a fairly similar pattern in Google Trends.

So my question is: you know, why is this happening? Why should we follow a similar trend? Well, the obvious answer is the algorithm. And the algorithm has a very important job, because not so many works are produced in traditional media. I mean, in American theaters last year there were about 800 movies shown. 800 movies. That's all. 500 scripted television programs were broadcast on television. But when it comes to YouTube, it doesn't even compare. I mean, I don't even think they advertise the number of hundreds of hours uploaded every minute. The obvious analogy is that you're really only seeing the tip of the iceberg, but in the case of icebergs, you see, you know, almost 10% of the ice on the surface.

In the case of YouTube, you are seeing only (the tip of) x5 of the iceberg. Basically, statistically speaking, you ignore everything on YouTube. And yet, YouTube claims that it has this algorithm, which can be thought of as the brain of the platform that can connect an audience (who knows almost nothing about what's on the platform) with the particular types of content that they're interested in. they like. And at best, they would argue, YouTube would argue, that the algorithm is basically the audience. You know, the audience decides what they want to watch and the algorithm just reflects that, but of course we're not in this ideal world, and the audience themselves are always changing and changing who they are and what they like to watch, so You can consider that the algorithm follows the audience, the algorithm follows this audience and tries to reach it.

Now, what YouTube doesn't consider much is that YouTube creators use their content to try to follow the algorithm. So these YouTubers who would love to create content about, you know, what they're most passionate about anyway, they also see what's popular on the site and try to create content that satisfies the algorithm. And then there's a way in which the content chases the algorithm, the algorithm chases the audience, and if the content actually manages to catch up to the algorithm, you get a kind of perverse situation, where the algorithm is the content. I mean, what do I mean by that?

Just a crazy thought experiment: if YouTube wanted more snail videos, they could make it happen; They don't actually have to go out and make snail videos, if they just, you know, promoted videos with snail in the title, tomorrow there will be a bunch of them on the front page and they will trend and then the creators will be like, "Oh, snails are what's new!", and they are going to make a lot of videos about snails. YouTube would love to believe that, that creators don't care about the algorithm, but they do! It's like the core aspect of how creators decide what content to create.

Just as a more realistic example, I can show you a graph of the length of my videos from 2011 to today. And what you see is, in the beginning, all of my videos were an average length of 2 or 3 minutes, but these days, I'm quickly approaching an average video length of 10 minutes. YouTube never came to me and said, "Derek, you have to make longer videos"; All they said was, well, videos that are longer and have longer watch time will be promoted more on the site, so people like me and, you know, all the other creators who wanted to be seen, we made longer videos. .

It's just what we did. We now know that the algorithm is always changing; They always try to optimize it so it works better, but they also change what it's trying to optimize for. At first it was simple: just views, but they quickly realized that of course a 20 minute view is worth a lot more than a 5 second view, so the real metric should be watch time. And this, uh, was an advantage for people like gamers, because people like to watch people play video games for long periods of time. They also reduced the latency of the algorithm, meaning it updates every 10 minutes instead of, say, every day, and that's beneficial for news content and things that are really urgent, and for me as a YouTuber, I find it what this means.

Is it impossible to be a YouTube expert? If you look at what it takes to become an expert at anything, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, it takes, of course, many, many hours of practice. Effortful and deliberate practice. And on YouTube I would say we understand it. You also need timely feedback and, again, on YouTube we have many tools to be able to see the performance of our videos; but, when it comes to a trusted environment, this is an environment in which the rules of the game do not change: so you can think of something like chess, it is possible to be an expert in chess, because in the middle of a chess game , the rules don't change suddenly.

Now, on YouTube, that's not true. We don't play by the same rules all the time, because the algorithm is constantly changing. And that puts us in this position, where it's almost impossible to be experts and instead we're a little more like caged pigeons. Well, go with me on this. Hey, there was a famous experiment where, you know, pigeons were put in a cage with a lever and if they pushed the lever they would get some food, and very quickly they learned that they needed to push the lever and the food. it would come out, so it's okay.

But in another part of the experiment they disconnected the feed lever and simply supplied food to the cage, more or less at random, and what did the pigeons do? Well, they started doing the types of behaviors that they did when food appeared, so if one was grooming then he kept grooming, with the expectation that the food would arrive, and this one, maybe he was pecking at the ground; So the point is that they started engaging in these superstitious behaviors, um, because they had linked some kind of cause and effect, but there wasn't actually a cause and effect there, and to me, this partly explains the whole YouTube burnout. . phenomenon, because you have these creators who go out of their way to try to follow that algorithm while the algorithm is constantly changing and so you never feel like an expert and you never know exactly what's going on even though you're constantly trying to relate cause and effect .

Now I can understand why the algorithm has to change. I mean, in the early days of YouTube, it was a situation where if you had subscribers you were golden because the next time you uploaded content, YouTube would show it to all your subscribers and you would get a ton of views. YouTube was like "oh this is a popular video", show it to more people, getting even more subscribers, so the next time you release another video, you'll get more subscribers, more views and it was just this positive feedback loop where you would grow and you would grow and growing a channel so that the rich got richer and the small channels stayed small, so obviously we needed something to break the cycle, so YouTube started doing some experiments where they essentially changed what was recommended to their audience to stop showing some of the content. of certain subscribers and saw what happened to the views, so they started disconnecting these subscribers from the channel.

It was no longer a subscription like "I want to see all of this person's videos", it was more of a suggestion that maybe something this person creates is something I would like to see and what YouTube found when it did that was that the number of views on The platform and the amount of watch time increased dramatically, so in order for YouTube to achieve site growth, they discovered that reducing the importance of subscriptions was essential and This makes sense if you think about it. I mean, if you make a great video, that doesn't necessarily mean that every video you make will be great, so it makes sense for YouTube to step in and play some role. in terms of determining what is shown to which audience members.

Now, as MatPat noted previously, moving away from subscriptions brings YouTube back to what it was like selling newspapers on the street: you really had to inspire people to buy on the spot. you have to deliver really sensational news. This is also called yellow journalism. Only when newspapers built subscription models could they make sober journalism a reality, something they focused on because they already had your eyes, they didn't have to fight for that kind of attention, they didn't have to be so sensational, but YouTube is going in the direction On the contrary, reducing the importance of subscribers means increasing the importance of sensationalism and click thumbnails, so a few weeks ago I was at the creator summit in New York and met MrBeast.

I showed him some footage from this video I was working on about the shadow balls at LA Reservoir and MrBeast took a look at it and told me it's a blast, which I think is pretty funny, but I think he clearly knew that. This was going to be a video that took off and we talked about titles and thumbnails. You may have noticed that the miniature borrows a little from his work with cereal and Orbeez in the backyards and I told him I wasThinking of calling it something. like, Throwing shadow balls and he said, "No." He suggested, why are there 96 million black balls in this lake?

Now I changed it to deposit because I mean, let's face it, that's what it is, but it just goes to show how important the title and thumbnail are. What I learned from talking to MrBeast was that. Going viral can be summed up in two metrics: you need to do two things with your video for it to go viral and I mean tens of millions of views, as his channel shows. Well, the first thing, perhaps not surprisingly, is the viewing time. So when people click on your video, they actually have to watch an important part of it.

It helps if it's seven or eight minutes, that's the actual time they watch, so you need a longer video than that, let's say 15 minutes. if you want the average viewing time to be around that 7 or 8 minute mark. Now, for me, watch time isn't that exciting of a metric to hit because I know most people already watch most of my videos, so for me, the big idea came with number two: yes. If you want a viral video, it should have a high click-through rate, so it's the total number of clicks on your titles and thumbnails divided by the number of times that title and thumbnail have been shown. that's your click-through rate and MrBeast showed me this graph that shows that as you get closer to 10% 20% 30% click-through rate, the number of views and the number of impressions that that video is going to get just skyrockets.

It jumps dramatically now, on the one hand that makes sense because you know that people click on a video, you'll obviously get more views, but it's such a dramatic increase that it really turns the site into a place where the title and thumbnails are everything. which you can have in a great video, but unless you have a great hook to draw people in, it's not going to go viral, so it was amazing to hear all these different YouTubers talk about how they optimized a thumbnail, a lot of people told me that When they were working on a thumbnail for a new video, they actually Photoshopped it onto a screenshot of their current YouTube home screen in various positions and just saw how eye-catching it was.

They're really working hard to make these thumbnails as clickable as possible. like turning the thumbnail into a weapon and that arms race will only increase with the introduction of real-time click rate coming out in a month or two, so what you can bet will happen is that the creators will release a video and then I'll be sitting there with all these different variants of thumbnails and they'll swap them around and see what that does to the click-through rate and then choose the one that leads to the highest click-through rate that you can imagine. , if you don't do this, you will be left behind because all the other creators are sitting there swapping their thumbnails to get as much engagement as possible on their videos and if you don't do that, then your videos will end up getting buried.

So, recognizing that this is the reality of YouTube, I want to outline to you my plan for what I will do in the future. First of all, I want to keep making high-quality videos because if you don't do that, I'm not going to be happy, I'm not going to be satisfied and neither are you, but second of all, I'm going to have to choose topics that are easier to click on because frankly If I'm going to work for days and weeks and months on a video, I'd like that video to get, say, 10 million views instead of half a million, so a lot of that comes down to "is it clickable?" this topic?" So, or number three, I'm going to have to use some clickbaity titles and thumbnails and I apologize for that, but it seems like it's an existential threat that if you don't, your channel won't exist for long and you'll be in that kind of fall.

I'd love to know what you think, whether you think it's a good idea, a bad idea, I'm totally open to hearing from you. CaseyNeistat talked about how you have to trust your audience, you know, you have to get back to him, the truth is the audience only knows you. I'll be there if they see your titles and thumbnails. I

went

to buy something at B&H a while ago and the guy was like, "Oh, I love your videos!" and then he said, “are you still making them?” and I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm making them. How do you not know that?" and I also see comments on my videos where people say, "oh great, here's a veritasium video, see you again in six months," but I'm like, "no, I'll do them every week, every two weeks, like me ".

When you make them, you just have to know that they're here, but you can only know that they're there if they surface to the tip of the tip of the iceberg, which is now a click rate game. On one hand you might feel a little disappointed with the way the game works right now, but on the other hand I challenge you to think of a better way because they have limited space to show people potential videos that could be interested and of course they want to put the videos there that people are most likely to click on and then they're more likely to watch them once they've clicked and part of me is like, yeah, I guess that's what It's pretty fair, don't you think? argue that you should put some videos in there that people are less likely to click on.

No. I mean, that doesn't seem to make any sense. So I feel like this is the inevitable and rational end point for any algorithm trying to optimize what people see. We want to give you the things you want to see, and you indicate your desire by clicking on them, but by doing so. It also means that things that are less catchy and less sensational don't reach this level here and, more generally, I wonder: how does that affect us? How does that affect the YouTube platform? If the YouTube platform becomes a real clickbait site, who wants to go there?

What kind of audience will come there? Will there even be an audience for educational content? I think it's all these decisions about the system and the algorithm that determine what real media looks like, what content is created, what people visit the site, what audiences they receive there. And I think this is a broader issue than just YouTube. I mean, now everywhere we can help ourselves to the things we really want. but what is that world like? I mean, you might have thought it would be this utopia, but I would say it's not. because it silences all these voices that you would otherwise know in a more curated market if you're just looking for the things that generate clicks.

That's a very skewed view of the world and I'm not sure it's the best thing. But there is a way on YouTube to at least short-circuit this effect and that is to ring that bell and say, "Oh, the point of this video is to get to this point and tell you to ring the bell!" I mean, no, if you want to ring the bell, I encourage you to do it now because I feel like I never encouraged people to subscribe or ring the bell on this channel because it seems needy and I think you can do whatever you want. , whenever you want, but in this ecosystem where click rate is king, where millions of black balls in a reservoir is what's going to rise to the surface, the only way around it is to have people who are Notify me every time I do something, so I want you to think about the videos that I have introduced you to in the past and so far this year and think: do you want to know about each one of them? and if you do, I encourage you to click the bell and the more people who do that, the less I will be driven to create clickbaity titles, thumbnails and videos because I will know that I can reach my audience without having to appeal to, you know, the most basic instincts of people.

So if you want to see more of what I'm doing, click to subscribe, hit the bell, and if you don't, unsubscribe because it's good to keep YouTube clear. as many signs as possible, but I think there's a little bit of hope for the future because what I've described is the way YouTube seems to be working right now, but I think we know that the algorithm is always changing and what I do . What I've heard is that the direction YouTube wants to take is to optimize long-term, satisfied watch time. That has three parts. You have to see if people come back again and again.

If they watch someone's videos, they come back again and again for months. That would be a sign. Are they watching for a long period of time? That's also a sign that people are enjoying it. And finally, there is the satisfied piece. Are people satisfied with the things they have seen? This is a new metric to add. And how is satisfaction actually measured? Well, YouTube is experimenting with surveys. Surveys like this one. And hopefully they will allow us to get to a different place where the algorithm is not just about click-through rate and watch time, but also about satisfaction.

How much it drives you to come back. How much you really love the content. So my big hope is that if we move in this direction, there may come a time in the future when click-through rate is no longer king. I'd love to know what you think, so let me know in the comments and I'll help you out. jump directly to the final screen here. I'm going to post some video thumbnails that aren't particularly clickable, so feel free to click on them. I mean you'll look at them and say, "I don't want to click on that," but that's exactly the point.

These are seemingly good videos that may not be as catchy in terms of titles and thumbnails. If you want to subscribe, you can click here and thank you for listening to the rant that I have given many times to anyone who will listen.