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

I got 2.3 million views in eight days on a brand new faceless channel by taking a format that was already going viral (animated "most popular over time" data charts) and stacking a second trend on top of it, the drama in the beauty YouTuber community. Then I made the video easier to watch than anything else in the niche, with music matched to the data, clean fonts and a very simple thumbnail. It was purely organic: 94.5% of the traffic came from YouTube's browse features, which is the home page.

What the Channel Was and What It Did

I'll be upfront about two things. First, I wasn't a complete amateur who got lucky. I'd been doing YouTube for three or four years when I made this channel, and I'd already taken 15-plus channels viral from scratch. What I mean by viral is a channel getting 100,000 views a day, starting from complete nothing.

Second, this was a trend. I don't really like to run trendy channels anymore. I do much more evergreen, long-term content, because on a 5 to 10 year plan it makes way more sense. Things that rise quickly tend to fall just as fast.

The channel is called Data Doggo. I made it almost as a joke, and as a little science experiment. I never showed my face. It was just the YouTube algorithm.

94.5% from browse means the video went viral on the home page. YouTube wanted to show it.

Step 1: Find a Trend That's Already Getting Results

I'm an avid YouTube watcher. I always study the home page and what's popping up on it.

A year or two before I recorded this, a type of video kept showing up: data videos. They simply showed data changing over time as an animated chart. Very simple content, three to six minutes long, and they were getting an insane amount of views.

The channel doing it best was called Data Is Beautiful. They had 1.4 million subscribers and had only uploaded for something like six months before they stopped completely.

So I got to work. I googled how to make them, and it turned out you put data over time into a piece of software, it visualizes it, and you screen record it. I had a friend who was good at writing simple code to scrape data, so we partnered on the channel. He turned the scraper around in about two days.

Some of the data was missing, so we had to either fill gaps with estimates or refine the data mining.

Step 2: Study the Winners and the Losers

Before picking ideas, I did a lot of research. I watched the top videos in the niche, the ones at 10 million, 20 million and 36 million views. Then I watched the ones that didn't do well.

"Didn't do well" is relative. A video on that channel with 276,000 views would put a lot of people in heaven. But it was sitting next to videos with 7 million views, so for that channel it was a low performer.

I kept a checklist in my head. What is this video doing that that one isn't? What is this one missing?

The conclusion was that it mostly came down to the subject.

You have to pick something a lot of people are interested in. There's more on choosing topics in how to find viral YouTube video ideas.

Step 3: Stack a Second Trend on Top

I had two video ideas.

The first was most followed Instagram accounts from 2014 to the present. It wasn't an original idea. Someone else had made it, and I made mine better than theirs (which is the hard part when you take an idea that already exists). That video got 1.2 million views.

The second came out of a conversation with my girlfriend at the time, who watched a lot of YouTube. I told her the format was "the most of something over a period of time" and asked if she had ideas. Right then there was a lot of drama in the beauty community, and James Charles had lost a huge number of subscribers in a very short time. I don't know that industry well, but I thought it would make a really interesting video.

So we made most subscribed beauty YouTubers, 2013 to 2019. We pulled the statistics from Social Blade and ran them through the software.

The drama had happened three or four months earlier, so the attention and the audience were already there. What I did was take inventory of the big channel's videos and ask one question: what could I make that they haven't made yet, that the same audience (or an audience from another niche) would want to watch?

I took a format that was already getting insane results for other people and stacked another viral trend on top of it.

Step 4: Make It the Most Watchable Video in the Niche

Nobody else in the niche was making sense of the data. There was this dramatic drop in subscribers on screen, so I threw in a little clip to describe what was happening, so an outsider could understand it.

Then the music. I used a lo-fi song with a few seconds of voices at the start before the beat drops. I let the data sit still for those two or three seconds, and started the animation the moment the beat dropped. I matched the emotion of the song to the video.

You wouldn't put hardcore rock on a video about beauty YouTubers. It doesn't flow. Chill background music gets people into the zone, and five minutes pass before they realize it.

I also messed with the colors a lot and hunted for the best fonts, so the video looked clean and crisp. A lot of other channels in the niche used the software lazily, and I had a tough time watching them because the data wasn't very visual. What set Data Is Beautiful apart, besides covering topics nobody had covered, was that their videos looked enticing and colorful. I took their idea and applied my own layer of production on top.

There's more on holding attention in YouTube retention secrets.

Step 5: Keep the Thumbnail Dead Simple

The top performing videos on Data Is Beautiful had the simplest thumbnails ever. "Most popular TV series 1986 to 2019" written on the thumbnail, with an image from Breaking Bad so you knew what it was immediately. "Most popular websites" over a screenshot of the data.

The videos that performed poorly had the data filling one whole side with the font overlapping it.

Here's what I did on mine:

1. Scrolled through the video to find a frame where the data was representative and left a good blank canvas for text.
2. Tweaked the data in the thumbnail slightly to make room.
3. Erased the little grid lines in the background so it was even cleaner.
4. Added James Charles's channel profile picture, because he's an icon in that industry and that's what people were showing up for.

I spent a good hour on that one thumbnail. More on this in the faceless YouTube thumbnail guide.

The Question I Ask at Every Step: Does This Deserve a Million Views?

This is what I do for any channel, and it's how I've gotten to 100,000 views in a single day on 15-plus brand new channels.

Every step of the way: the idea, the thumbnail, the visualization. On other kinds of channels it's the script, the voiceover and the edit. If the answer is ever no, I ask how to fix it.

I watched that video probably 10 to 15 times before I uploaded it, asking how to make it better each time. Then compare honestly. Is your video the same as the ones that got 100 views, or the ones that got 10 or 20 million?

I also put myself in the viewer's shoes. I watched so much of that niche that I became a fan of the content myself, which is how I knew what fans of my own videos would respond to.

Last, I showed it to other people before I launched it, and I watched their face and body language. If they got bored within 10 seconds, I knew I needed to work on it. If they watched the whole thing without realizing it, I'd done my job. If someone who watches a lot of YouTube started skipping through it, I asked how to make it so they don't skip.

Why We Stopped Running the Channel

You don't make much money in this niche. When I recorded this, ad rates there were around $2 per 1,000 views, and on the Instagram video it was more like 69 cents. It's hard to make a lot of money even with a lot of views, and these videos are extremely difficult to make.

I wouldn't recommend going and making "most subscribed beauty YouTubers" yourself. You won't get the same result unless there's new drama. What carries over to any channel is the process: stack trends, feed into the emotion, do the market research, and hold every piece to the million-view question.

I cover more of what I'd learned by this point in lessons from 1 billion views.

Video Chapters

• 0:002.3 million views in eight days
• 1:01My background: 15+ channels taken viral
• 2:16Spotting the data video trend
• 4:00How the videos were made
• 5:07Researching top and bottom videos
• 7:18The Instagram video and the low ad rate
• 8:14The beauty YouTubers idea
• 10:34Music, pacing and retention
• 12:26Thumbnails
• 14:30Lesson 1: stack trends
• 16:28Put yourself in the viewer's shoes
• 18:01Does this deserve a million views?
• 19:34Show it to people before you upload
• 20:3794.5% of traffic from browse

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