Saturday, May 01, 2010

I Was Suprised, But I Shouldn't Have Been

I have been monitoring my viewership on my YouTube channel. The chart shown here shows my viewership from the time I first became a YouTube partner, up to yesterday. Now before the partnership, I was getting between 100 and 200 views daily without any video uploads. When I got the partnership, I decided to make a lot of my videos (including some very popular ones) private to give my channel sort of a clean start. As you can see on the chart, my viewership declined as a result of that. Everytime I upload a new video, you see a big spike on the chart, and then the viewership trends down again.

I want you to look at that huge spike all the way on the right. That is from the Justin Bieber video I put up. It's an enormous spike, and compared to the viewrship I had before the partnership, it's among the biggest spikes I've had since October 8, 2007 (the biggest spike was 499 views.) It's impossible to know how it compares to videos earlier than that date.

I've tried and tried over the past year to have something that would generate a large spike in viewership. I'm happy I found something, but only now has it become obvious to me why this Justin Bieber video works (and it's not just because Justin Bieber has lots of screaming girls falling for him.) There's a lot of people who are annoyed about Justin Bieber due to his music being a little too pop. In other words, it's entirely manufactured for the sole purpose of selling, and nothing else. I think that's pretty obvious, and many people resent it, so they start saying nasty things about Justin all over the internet. His die-hard fans see this and go the extra mile to defend him. My video is about Justin Bieber haters on the internet, and that subject strikes a chord with a lot of young people. If you play to people's emotions, you will surely get a big response out of it.

I might experiment with videos similar to this in the future to see how people react. It certainly worked for Daxflame. It is important to do it in the interest of my audience though. After all it is you, my audience, that makes this happen in the end. So thank you for helping bring some more life to my channel.