I analyzed 1218 videos or eleven years of MKBHD's
YouTube activity. Here's what I found. There were two main factors that helped
propel him to where he's now. Before we cover the specific techniques that
Marques used however, it's very important for you to understand that they wouldn't
have had nearly the same effect that they did, were it not for these two key
ingredients that make up the foundation of his channel. Number one, his character
Have you realized that he always comes off as a genuine person? He's honest and
cares about his viewers, regularly warning them about viruses, scams, or bad
deals they should steer clear off. He isn't afraid of calling out big
companies for deceptive marketing tactics and doesn't clickbait. People
land on his videos because of a specific topic they cover but they choose to stay
subscribers because of him as a person.
Key ingredient number two: his consistent
dedication to improving the quality of his content as well as its delivery.
Apart from increasing the overall viewing experience this also helps set
him apart from other tech reviewers in a very crowded space. Now that we
understand the foundation of his channel and appreciate that he's a very likable
person that got to the heights he's at thanks to his consistent hard work, we
can go ahead and cover the two specific factors that incredibly sped up the
growth of his channel. Let's start with factor number one: timely videos. Rewind
back to February 24th, 2009.
It was on this day that Apple had released a public version for
its Safari web browser for Windows and exactly in this day that Marques posted
his video tutorial on how to set it up.
Regardless of his channel still being very small,
people were searching on YouTube for guides on how to install it
and his video with its relevant title, keywords and tags naturally ended up
being discovered.
The more people clicked and watched his
video the more people YouTube would show it to. Here's just the effect it had.
Marques: "I'm going to scroll down a little bit here and show you my top videos because this
is really my favorite part. I did a tutorial on downloading and installing
safari 4.0 beta when it first came out and that was the first video on youtube
about safari 4 beta and I got about sixteen seventeen thousand views,
that's actually my most viewed video as twenty five percent of my total video views in
the last six months."
The lesson he learned was, if you're one of the first
to provide information when people are searching for it, you're more likely to be discovered.
From this day on Marques consistently tried to post timely videos
on topics in the peak of their popularity as much as time allowed. He still had his
studies and extracurricular activities on a side after all. Now if we jump back
to our graph, 2012 doesn't really look interesting but that's specifically why
we have to look at it closer to find out what made MKBHD's channel really explode.
The red annotations mark MKBHD's videos that were posted exactly on the
day of a tech release or product announcement. Only one out of the nine
however, brought him an interesting spike in subscribers. At this point, with 25,000
subscribers, MKBHD was still too small for YouTube's algorithm to list his
videos high up in the search results, this was especially the case with
popular topics that already had bigger YouTube creators covering them. By the
beginning of 2012 it had already been three years since he'd incorporate
technique number one of quickly releasing videos on trending topics into
his YouTube strategy. He saw slow, but steady growth. So what else could he do
to further speed up the growth of his channel and reach new audiences?
The answer to this question brings us to factor number two:
Collaborative giveaways. Let's take a closer look at December 4th, 2011. By this time, Marques
had already done one collaboration with his friend and fellow tech reviewer
Austin Evans and four giveaways with his humble group of subscribers. He had seen
the effect each of these had on increasing his subscribers and could see
small spikes in his analytics. What he had done differently this time however,
was combine both. From this moment on with collaborative giveaways in his
arsenal, his channel would no longer grow at nearly the same pace anymore.
After his first successful test in December of 2011, 2012 would be the year when he'd
really master this strategy and reap its rewards.
Literally multiplying his subscriber base. Let me show you just the effect it
had: the width of the green areas represent the length of Marques's
giveaway. Pay attention to the sharp spike in subscribers on the first
day of the giveaway, and how it trickled down to several smaller, yet still
considerable spikes until the end of the giveaway period. It's an excellent way of
both incentivizing viewers to subscribe and potentially rewarding them for it.
Best part about it? You're not begging people and you're surely not
coming off as being needy. The way it worked was very simple. To join his giveaway
Marques would ask you to leave a comment and be a subscriber of his channel,
except that this time, he would also allow you a second entry into the prize draw
by doing the same on the video of his collaborator. The immediate effect
collaborative giveaways had in 2012 is very noticeable. See how his other videos
were now getting in more and more subscribers? After the first
collaborative giveaway in April, some of Austin Evans 32 thousand
subscribers came in and subscribed to MKBHD's channel. In July it was
Wilson Lammar's 100 thousand subscribers and Austin's 40 thousand. In September
some of Unboxtherapy's 120 thousand. In October, some of Jonathan Morrison's
154,000 and finally after the 5th giveaway in December with Austin again
some of his now 87 thousand subscribers came in and subscribed. You get the hang
of it! Apart from reaching new audiences that
are also interested in tech, the giveaways sent strong positive signals
to YouTube's algorithm. First of all, lots of comments meant lots of engagement and
secondly, people watching the entire video and subscribing at the end of it,
meant an excellent audience retention score and subscriber conversion rate.
Both increasing the likelihood of YouTube promoting the giveaway videos on
people's home pages. With techniques one and two implemented
in his overall YouTube strategy, Marques would keep growing and it would only be
a matter of time until he got big enough for one of his timely videos to REALLY
go viral. Fast forward to November 19th, 2013
and he releases his famous LG G flex video. The video amassed over 2.7 million
views in only a week, echoing across the entire tech industry as more and more
news agencies and blogs around the world shared his video, catapulting his channel
to over a million subscribers. Well, let's recap what we discovered
thanks to some of MKBHD's data! 2012 was the year that completely changed it all.
He went from 23 thousand subscribers on January 1st to 150 thousand subscribers
on December 31st. The two key factors that made it possible for his channel to
really start snowballing were: number one, timely videos and number two
collaborative giveaways. That's it for this video guys thank you very much for
watching! I hope you found it interesting. If you did, please let me know by leaving
a like and subscribe to this channel if you want to be the first to discover
unspoken, data-driven strategies that helped famous content creators like
MKBHD explode in popularity on YouTube