How this viral video ruined his channel

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3 years ago

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How this viral video ruined his channel. 👇

Attention is like hot water, without the right container to conserve the heat, it will escape.

This creator managed to do something 99.999% will never be able to achieve in their lives: Hit 2.6M views with their very first video. I suggest you watch it before reading the rest. youtube.com/watch?v=i4hST2p0NyA

In itself this video is close to perfection: 👉 Attention jacking from an established big attention niche (Dream's followers) 👉 Exposing a piece of information very few ppl from this niche know 👉 Excellent hook in the first secs of the video 👉 Solid story-telling structure

You start to know me now and I bet you can see me coming with this one: If you have no content strategy you will either never succeed 🚫, or get crushed under your own success ☠️.

(hopefully, this example will finally end the obsession of many with thumbnails & titles 🤦‍♂️)

After such a performance, he kept capitalizing on the concept by 👉 Same format 👉 Same audience target 👉 Same topic 👉 Same video structure The curiosity gap of this one was less powerful, but 134k views is still a great achievement at his size (4k subs).

At this point, he probably starts to realize he won't be able to milk the Dream's audience forever as he ran out of secrets to unveil. So he tried something else:

This time: 👉 Same format 👉 Broader audience target 👉 Different topic 👉 Same video structure Which was the RIGHT thing to do. From my perspective he's still in huge profits here, he had around 5k subs at that time and managed to keep 10k views (+100% of his audience).

It's not the ideal scenario for sure, but as a newbie with a small experience, it's miles away from failure.

But when you've hit a bullseye 🎯 of 2M+ views on your first try, this can be a hard pill to swallow (no pun intended). It hits the motivation to create content really hard. It's like giving a lollipop to a little kid and taking it away from him right after.

At this point, I don't know if he lost hope or made a huge mistake, but since we're here to learn for our content it doesn't matter, we'll treat it as it is: A huge mistake.

This is his next upload: 🚫 Different format 👉 Same audience target 👉 Different topic 🚫 Different video structure 🚫 7 hours video

And the next one: 🚫 Different format (again) 👉 Smaller audience target 👉 Different topic (again) 🚫 Different video structure (again)

Way too confusing for the algorithm. It went from: 👉 "wow people love his content, it should be more suggested as it has the power to keep them longer on YouTube!" to 👉 "nvm it was a fluke"

This is what his channel looks like now:

Let's use my creator's attention cycle to understand what happened here visually:

This is what happened in his case:

Hitting virality with your very first video does more harm than good when you're not ready. Without a proper content strategy, instead of riding the wave, you will be crushed against the shore.

Attention is like hot water, without the right container to conserve the heat, it will escape.

The lessons to learn from this: ➡️ Make sure your core concept/topic is exploitable. Can you find 10-20 different ideas from it? If so, do it beforehand to not trap yourself.

➡️ Don't build several audiences on one channel with different content, make a second channel instead or focus on building one audience only. ➡️ Search creative topic/concept ideas, that's 70% of the work. This is the real gold when it comes to catching attention.