How I Got 2.3MM Views in 8 Days on a Brand New YouTube Channel

Eight Days. 2.3 Million Views. Brand New YouTube Channel.

And…

I didn’t even show my face in the videos.

 How I Got 2.3 Million Views on a New YouTube Channel in Eight Days

Sometimes the world we live in just blows my mind. You can “accidentally” go viral on YouTube and “accidentally” make massive amounts of money. That wasn’t entirely what happened in this case… I just happened to hop on the right trend at the right time.

To be honest, I usually stay away from trends. I stick with the evergreen/long-term content because it makes a lot more sense in the bigger scope of things. Like the famous African Proverb says,

“What grows quickly, dies quickly.”

That is often true. But I had fun and got some pretty insane results in this particular instance, so I’m going to share with you some valuable lessons I learned throughout the process.

 Full disclosure, I wasn’t a complete amateur when I got these results. I’d been doing YouTube for like three or four years at this point and honestly, this was just an experiment that turned out to be wildly successful. I’d had success with growing multiple channels from nothing to becoming viral (getting 100k views a day per channel starting from complete scratch.) And I now have a team precisely for helping people become viral! You can join our free Facebook group here.

Anyway, this is my favorite success story to share, so let’s get into it. I will be showing you what I learned from this experiment, and giving you some practical tips to apply to your channel. Let’s go!

My Channel

The channel I got these results from is DataDoggo (go ahead and check it out so you can see for yourself then come back and finish reading).

Ok, you’re back?

😏

 Thank you for checking out my channel and adding yet another view to the millions I already have.

Funny thing is, I created this channel as a joke. I first saw this successful trend that was happening on another channel (Data is Beautiful). As a YouTuber, you tend to watch a lot of YouTube videos yourself and always keep an eye on the YouTube explore page.

One day I saw an interesting video concept that caught my eye. It was these little data videos that simply show data changing over several years, artistically made into a video.

It’s very simple content and usually, the entire thing is only 6-8 minutes long. I decided to do a “science experiment” of sorts and try to replicate it myself.

As you can see with the example, they consistently get an insane amount of views. Look at “Most Popular TV Series” with 22 million views. Whoever owns and runs this beautiful channel knows what they’re doing.

Look at how many subscribers they have! When I found them they were only 6 months old, but even since then they’ve grown dramatically. And then, I’m not sure why, but they stopped making videos.

Keep in mind the ad rates aren’t that good in this niche…. You’ll probably only make around $2 per thousand views but even then, this channel owner pulled around a half-million dollars off of this channel before they quit making videos.

 Full Transparency

With this content strategy, it’s extremely difficult to make videos that succeed and get views. But I’m going to break down how it all happened for me. Essentially I saw a trend and I got to work.

When I stumbled upon the channel “Data is Beautiful”, I thought to myself, “Holy cow, these videos are pretty simple!” and then I did some research and figured out how to make them. I found a helpful software to create these (honestly, I can’t remember what it was called… it was some software you just input screenshots of data over time and it compiled it all into a beautiful visual representation of the data).

I made the colors look pretty, then screen recorded it, and was able to get results!  I had a friend at the time who was pretty good at developing software and simple code to scrape data and I hired him to help me out. We partnered on this channel and we were able to make the video pretty quickly.

 Our Biggest YouTube Video Hits

The two videos that went viral for us were “Most Followed Instagram Accounts” and “Most Subscribed Beauty YouTubers”. I believe our turnaround time to create these was about two days.  

The first video I created was mostly inspired by Instagram accounts I followed and their growth from the time they began to present. The second one was inspired by beauty YouTubers. My friend simply just scraped together the data and then we threw it into the software. Of course, there were some issues like gaps in the data… we had to either fill it in with estimated guesses or we had to refine the data mining process.  

The way I came up with these ideas was from a lot of research. I watched a lot of these data videos, especially the top videos that were getting millions of views, and I compared them to the videos that weren’t getting so many views.

 And our videos blew up! Most people would be ecstatic to be able to get this many views on their channel or even on a single video, but here’s the thing. This is a low-performing video for this channel because there’s a lot of competition. Other videos right next to it are getting multiple millions of views.

I watched these videos and I asked myself, “Why are some of these videos not getting good results, whereas others are getting insane results?” I created a little checklist inside of my head and took notes on any little clue I could find as to why one video performed so well, and another didn’t.  Eventually, I concluded that it was dependent upon the subject.

What Makes Videos Viral?

Look at the video “Most Subscribed LET’S PLAY Gaming Channels.” This is for a very niche-specific audience to watch, whereas “Best-selling Video Game Consoles” is geared towards a wide range of an audience/anybody to watch.

Anybody in all demographics who’s ever played a video game could be entertained by the first video. That explains why it has around 7 million views. The more specific video focused on the brand “Lets Play” has only 276k views since it’s only appealing to a certain demographic.

With the Instagram Data Video I made, I honestly copied someone else who’d made a video like this. Of course, I made sure that my video was better. Whenever you copy someone else’s idea, the secret to success is ensuring that your content is better than theirs. My video went viral, however, it wasn’t that lucrative since the rate was only around $0.69 in that particular niche. This is why we didn’t focus on building this specific channel that much. But it was a fun experiment. 

With the Beauty YouTubers video, we made a bit more money off that and got significantly more views. This was due to several other factors. The girlfriend I had at the time I made this video was an avid YouTube watcher. I asked her for ideas and she told me about all the drama going on between James Charles and Tati. I don’t know a lot about the situation but you can get a 5 minute rundown in this YouTube Video “James Charles and Tati Drama Explained”.

James Charles lost more subscribers in a single day than any YouTuber ever had, so I thought this would be a perfect time to use his face in my thumbnail since he was creating such a buzz on YouTube. So we got a bunch of statistics and information from Social Blade and created this video with the software my friend made.

I explained within the video why the data was dropping and rising. This is something that very few people within this niche did. I also made the music, graphics, intro, and outro excellent in quality and suspense, and this video got about 5.6 Million views on YouTube. To this day it still gets 5-10k views a month.

I experimented with fonts, and colors, and focused on creating the best visual experience possible. I learned from other creators’ mistakes in this type of niche because their videos had weird colors and bad fonts… they just were overall not visually pleasing. I also used James Charles’s face in the blank space the data didn’t cover to grab viewers and compel them to watch since he was one of the trending YouTube creators at that time.

Data is Beautiful

If we go back to Data Is Beautiful, the first thing we notice is that the visuals are very pleasing. The graphics, colors, and fonts are all enticing and the subjects discuss statistics that not many people have talked about. This is extremely simple, but they were able to go very viral because of these things. Their thumbnails are also straightforward….they show the viewer exactly what the video contains. So I didn’t recreate the wheel in any shape or form, I just got inspiration from their ideas.

What can we learn from this example and these results? I feel like a major reason that my video was so successful is because I stacked trends. I took a trend that already existed and was already getting results (data collecting and showcasing over some time) and then I took another trend (James Charles drama situation) and used them both to create this video.

I also fed into the emotions of the viewer with my soundtrack. I used a hypnotic type of soundtrack which draws viewers in and keeps them hooked once they’re watching. The longer you can keep a viewer watching, without realizing he’s watching, the more your views snowball. I also really focused on putting myself in the viewers’ shoes and asking “What does my ideal audience like, and what do they want to see?”

 The next important thing is to do a lot of market research. I found the most viral videos in the niche and took notes on all the little details of what I thought made them go viral. I also found videos that didn’t perform as well and looked for things to stay away from with them.  I also optimized for virality.

I do this by asking myself “Does this deserve a million views?” I find the answer by asking this every step of the way, when it comes to coming up with the video idea, creating the thumbnails, compiling the visualization and data of the video, the scripts, the voice-over, and the editing. “Does this deserve a million views?” If the answer ever is no, ask yourself, “How can I make this better? How can I get it to the place where it does deserve a million views?” Once you can evaluate your video from a third-party perspective, it will change your outlook and help you to make viral videos.

Show Off Your Video

Another thing I did was I showed this video to everyone I could before I posted it. If they got bored within 10 seconds, I knew I had to make it better. Once I improved it to the place that they were engaged the entire video, I knew I had done my job correctly. Whenever I gave the video to someone to watch I paid attention to their face and expressions and if they were skipping through the video or not.

As you can see by now, it’s not that complicated to make a viral YouTube video. Maybe you already have a YouTube Channel and are struggling to hit your goals with it? Or maybe you always wanted to make money off of YouTube, but starting just feels overwhelming. In either case, we would love to help you.

Go ahead and book a call with my team of professionals. We can discuss your goals and work out a custom plan for the future of your YouTube Channel. If you would like more information about what we do, join our free Facebook group here!