- Well played, Countdown channel. Well played.
You've just engineered the perfect 100-day rickroll
into one of these.
And while the story may infuriate most creators,
you have to applaud the ingenuity.
(whooshing)
(clock ticking) (upbeat music)
If you've ever wondered what the date is
100 days before April the 1st, now you have your answer.
(bells tolling)
That's because this Countdown channel
has just published 100 videos in 100 days,
just like this, counting down from a century to zero,
premiering the final video to tens of thousands of viewers
who tuned in to watch this.
The channel has racked up
an astonishing 3,000,000 plus views
from videos that are five seconds long
and take no more than probably 60 seconds to create.
I know. I get where you're coming from.
You're all probably eight hours
into editing your latest gaming video
that's gonna get 100 views,
and you're asking yourself, "Why do I even bother?"
I sympathize. I really do.
But I think it is worth investigating
why this channel has been so successful
with what seems to be such minimal effort.
And the first thing we'll start with,
as with all channels that are successful,
it required a little bit of patience and perseverance.
While the launch video does now have
a quarter of a million views
and now gets over a thousand views per hour,
that wasn't always the case.
If you look at the historical data of this video
and the momentum of the countdown series as a whole,
it pretty much flat-lined for an entire month,
but the creator kept plugging away,
posting every single day,
and come the 31st of January and beyond,
business started to pick up.
If you're interested in this type of stuff, by the way,
views per hour, historical data, download vidIQ,
and you can use it on any video on YouTube.
(ding)
So was this yet another one of those random events
that trigger the algorithm,
as is often the alleged argument in these types of videos?
As always, the answer is a firm no.
In this case,
it had very little to do with the YouTube algorithm
and much more to do with human intervention:
word of mouth from a creator
with an audience and influence.
Timeworks is a channel
that hunts down the oddities of YouTube,
such as videos that are 200 billion years long,
and channels with verification budgets, yet no videos.
And it just so happens that this Countdown channel
came onto their radar on January the 31st.
- There is a mysterious YouTube channel called Countdown.
You see, this channel is just
an hourglass profile picture looking thing
that says countdown,
and they have all these videos,
and you'll probably notice something.
They're all just numbers.
- Now, this video on the Timeworks channel
got 200,000 views in its first seven days.
(ding) So as you can imagine,
that pushed a lot of direct traffic
to the Countdown channel, which is fantastic.
But what that also does
is trigger the YouTube recommendation system,
because here's the thing.
According to the data in our YouTube studio,
the Timeworks channel, Creator Insider,
Think Media, vidIQ, and so on and so on,
all of these channels share similar audiences.
And so the connections start to be made.
Once loads of people watch Timeworks' video
about the countdown channel
and go and watch Countdown's videos,
our audience here at vidIQ
start to see Countdown's videos on their home feed
because YouTube thinks they may enjoy the video.
And you know what?
YouTube's probably right.
This is the somewhat unnerving way
that YouTube seems to know what you want to watch
before you even know what you want to watch.
And because of all of this research I've been doing
into the Countdown channel,
YouTube now seems to think that I have a fetish
for countdown channels,
which is why it's showing copycat count-up channels
on my home feed, as well.
(splatting) - Dan.
- Anyway, happy days for the Countdown channel.
Views jump from 10,000 a week
to hundreds of thousands a week.
But how does the channel maintain this momentum
for a couple of months?
Well, here's where three more important elements
come into play,
and we'll start with the most obvious one: consistency.
I know it sounds a little odd to say this,
but someone still has to create these 100 videos
and then upload one of them
every single day for three months.
That could get very boring very quickly.
And I know this doesn't sound very exciting,
and probably seems very easy to do,
but the consistency of the thumbnails, title,
and video format
ensure a high level of subconscious brand awareness.
If you've already seen one of these videos,
you instinctively know it's the next video in the series.
This type of commitment actually takes more discipline
than you might think.
And then, weirdly, this channel has built up a community.
How do five second videos get hundreds of comments?
Well, when the viewers take it upon themselves
to joke about how epic the storytelling is,
or the journey
all the numbered characters are going through,
and, well, you get the idea.
Everyone is simply embracing the absurdity of it all.
I wouldn't be surprised if people spend 10 minutes plus
just reading through all of the comments.
They've got a reason to come back,
and that's another little trick the creator has used:
to get viewers to come back through Easter eggs.
Most of the videos sound like this,
(bell tolling) but sporadically,
the video will have an Easter egg sound.
(sleigh bells jingling) That was for Christmas Day.
And this was for, well,
you know what. (cackling laughter)
What the creator is doing here
is inserting the simplest of secondary story arcs.
From a viewer's point of view,
"Is there going to be a secret sound in this video?
I'm gonna have to watch to find out."
You know what the best thing about this idea is?
It's incredibly simple, but critically,
the creator kept it incredibly simple.
If I would've come up with this idea, for sure,
I would've overthought it.
I would've made the videos too long,
added too many secondary ideas,
and every video would've been
slightly different in some way,
but no, that's not how you do it.
All you need to do is simply make one video a day,
counting down from 100.
I know this is gonna sound a little strange,
but making something this simple
is actually really difficult.
The idea and the message
is uncluttered, pure, (snaps) instinctive,
and it can be so easy to blur the idea
and smudge the message
once you take the idea through its process.
Which takes us to be final countdown
and a very intelligent move by the creator
to set the video
as a premiere. (ding)
This one deserves the buildup in anticipation.
Also, give this comment to thumbs up. (laughs)
And in the end, after more three months, 100 videos,
3,000,000 views, 100,000 subscribers,
over 15,000 live viewers tuned in for this.
(bells tolling rapidly) ("Never Gonna Give You Up")
Yeah, can't show you more than that.
We'll get a copyright claim.
Oh, and if you do wanna learn more
about the YouTube recommendation system,
not the YouTube algorithm,
I highly recommend you watch this video over here.
And if you ever fooled anybody on YouTube
with a video on April the 1st,
let us know in the comments below.