We're hearing this a lot lately: it's
2018 and the YouTube ship has sailed.
How can I compete against channels with
millions of subscribers on a topic that
I'm passionate about with my 10
subscribers? It's too late for me.
Absolute nonsense. First of all, more
people are using YouTube than ever before
and even today we're seeing channels
with breakthroughs of a magnificent
proportions. Why do we say that? Well
today we've got the channel, with the
strategy, and the analytics to prove it -
in one of the most competitive spaces
on YouTube. Let's do this. Now of course
we can't let this question linger
without throwing it out to our community
which is of course a you folks. So do you
think it's too late to start a YouTube
channel and be successful in 2018? We'd
love to hear your thoughts. Better yet, if
you have any personal experiences of
starting a channel this year let us know
in the comments below. Hello folks as
always it is awesome to see you. My
name is Rob. If this is your first time
here at vidIQ we are the YouTube
tool and channel that aims help you get more
views and save time in the process.
Any of the wonderful analytics and
screens you see in this video that you're
not familiar with come from our Chrome
extension which is, of course, free to
download. All right then on to the topic
at hand, a case - study we know you love
case studies. A channel with barely any
traction, a few hundred views a day,
suddenly leaps to ten thousand views a
day, with a single video and then manages
to follow up with more content getting a
similar amount of views, all in one of
the most saturated genres on YouTube
right now, Fortnite. How did they do it?
Let's take a lool. This is the
channel at the centre of our case study
Marcelinios, I hope I've got your
pronunciation right. The channel banner
doesn't necessarily suggest a focus or a
topic for the videos and the description
confirms this: a 15 year old kid trying
to become someone in this platform. I
make different videos about different
topics. So we already potentially we have an
issue of what the focus of this channel
is in terms of what it's bringing to its
audience. And the statistic
for April of this year confirm
that. It was a channel that was getting
maybe a couple of hundred views when
they released a video and subscriber
wise they weren't picking up any sort of
audience at that stage. The content
seems to match the description. Random
videos, random topics. If we take a glance
of the videos prior to May and June we
have a tricycle review here, something
about being hacked on apocalypse, a Rice
Gum and Logan Paul video, reacting to diss
tracks. So generally speaking, pranks,
maybe reviews of youtubers, but certainly
what you might describe as a lack of
focus for a small Channel trying to find
their niche. And then all of a sudden,
three months ago, we happen across this
video here which gets 23,000 views and
seems to be on a completely new topic of
Fortnite. This is where the
investigation gets deep.
Ok let's briefly talk about Fortnite. It
is one of the most popular games on the
planet right now. As you can see it's
getting 15 million plus monthly searches
and if you do a search just for
Fortnite on YouTube you will see at the
top of a search term channels such as
Ali-A with nearly 15 million subscribers
and millions of views on each of their
videos. If you were to try and break
into just the Fortnite search term as a
smaller channel you will find it almost
impossible. Look at the sizes of the
channels here. One with 100,000
subscribers and more with a 20,000
subscribers, 6 million subscribers, 11
million subscribers. It's going to be
very difficult for you to just use
Fortnite as your focus. You need to
drill down even further. Now one of the
things many gamers want is the best
performance from their games when
they're playing online and that brings
us on to technical aspects such as
frames per second. To briefly explain
frames per second it's the number of
times the screen refreshes when you're
playing a game and gamers want this as
high as possible for a smooth experience.
So if we do a search for this in the
search box here for YouTube just look at
the potential options that come up here.
Fortnite frames per second boost, frames-
per-second mode.
Frames-per-second drop, frames-per-second
boost 2018. This is a highly searched
area of a specific topic, and this is
where you can start to niche down. If we
do a search for Fortnite frames per
second, look at how this changes the search
results. We now see monthly searches,
around 800,000, much less than the 15
million for Fortnite in general but the
keyword score here is where it gets
really interesting. High search volume
but less competition, which means that
there is more demand for this search
term than there is supply and that is
represented in these search results. At the
top, instead of having millions
subscribed channels, we've got hundreds
of thousands of subscriber channel and
then if we go to 4th in a list look at
this one here. A channel with 2800
subscribers has had a video with a
hundred thousand views and we're gonna
get back to this channel little later.
But if we scroll down the list a little
more what do we see here? Our hero
Channel Marcelinios with a video that
has 37,000 views with the title:
Fortnite Increase frames-per-second
boost performance season 5. So a
really specific, niched-down title which
is very successful for the size of his
channel. There are millions of gaming
channels on YouTube right now so how do
you stand out from the crowd? When it
comes to the games you need to be able
to answer questions that nobody else can
answer, faster than anyone else, or better
than anyone else.
This strategy comes from a video we made
literally weeks ago about how to start a
gaming channel on YouTube in 2018 and
this case study is a perfect
representation of elements of that. The
channel hasn't necessarily answered the
question faster than anyone else or even
better than anyone else but there is
such a hungry audience out there. We've
got so many searches on YouTube and not
enough videos that supply the answers
that this channel has had the
opportunity to break into the top of the
search terms. Let's drill a little deeper
now into the videos to see why they may
have got to the top of the search terms.
There is only one place you can start
with and that is the video title and
thumbnail. So I'm at back here on Marcelinios'
channel and which thumbnails
stand out for you? For me it is these
two which look better
than any others in
terms of the thumbnails. How to get old
snapchat back. It seems like a good title,
a functional one and a good thumbnail.
Unfortunately that didn't get any traction
but this one here, The Ultimate Fortnite
frames-per-second boost 2018. Functional
title in one sense, it does exactly what
it says on a tin. But it has that tease
of the ultimate suggestion and the
thumbnail here with a character from the
game and some nice, big, blocky text and
even when reduced down to a smaller size, this
thumbnail has a good impact so it
already has an enticing title and
thumbnail that you may want to click on
if you want the question of getting
higher frames per second on Fortnite
answered. As for optimization and
metadata, on the video itself, there are
some good aspects and room for
improvement. What I do like is that the
video tags are very specific so we're
not looking at general Fortnite, Battle
Royale, video game tags. We're focusing
down on the topic and the subject which
is these frames-per-seconds and how to
boost them. So we have here Ultimate
Fortnite frames-per-second boost
which is ranking number 5 for that
search term. Now when we go to that
search term it doesn't have much search
volume itself, so it's a very specific
keyword, however the channel has done
well in ranking right here at the top of
the search terms, but there's still room
for improvement. If we look at the top
result here a channel with only 700
subscribers has a video with over 200
thousand views and look at how specific
the tags are here and where there could be
room for improvement. On Marcelinios'
videos he could use some of these tags
to enhance his and there's also some
options here down in the top search
keyword suggestion in our search
companion. More opportunities with
potentially more tags just to add more
focus to their video itself if possible.
Now we need to take a little bit of a
step back here... thanks. This video itself
didn't perform that well to begin with,
same as all the other videos, on the
channel.A couple of hundred views, but it
did focus the channel creator onto this
concept of trying to improve
frames-per-second on Fortnite, a very
specific topic. And there were some more
videos that he made. Then something
amazing happened and this is thanks to a
trending topic. Within this game of
Fortnite there are different seasons and a
new season was just about to be released
on July 12. So Marcelinios
updated his video to
Ultimate frames-per-second boost
for season 5 of the game. Let's have a
look at that video. Here are what I think
are the key reasons why this video was a
very successful one for the channel. First of
all, the title is again very alluring,
with the Ultimate Fortnite frames-per-
second boost. But now it includes that
trending current event season 5 and as
we said the season 5 version of the game
was released on the 12th of July and
look at the release day here. The 9th of
July, just before that release date. So as
the topic was starting to trend, get
really hot, and this is reinforced by the
tags which are more refined than ever. We
have boost FPS season 5 ultimate season 5,
FPS boost Fortnite, FPS boost season 5,
and you can see that they're all
rankings to a certain degree in the
search terms. And if we click on one
of these search terms and use the vidIQ
keyword inspector look at the trending
interest over time. Just as it hit the
12th or the 13th of July interest was at
its peak so Marcelinios released this
video at the perfect time and this is
what happened to it.
Now it took a couple of days for the
video to take off but remember that
graph I showed you earlier of interest
over time? The symmetry here is almost
unnerving. Now I need to stretch out the
graph a little bit but look how the
video peaked in popularity versus
interest over time, it's identical. This
is a classic case of prepping your
video for a trending topic that's about
to happen and absolutely nailing it on
the day of launch. Now as we've been
doing this case study we've seen other
small channels having breakthroughs with
Fornite as well but why haven't I
covered those channels? We'll take a look
at that now. The first one was Ikkons and this
channel had a very successful video on
frames-per-second on Fornite 200,000
views.
The big question is what did they do
next? Another video on how to win at
Fornite Battle Royale and something
about a personality's best moments and
then something completely different on
black ops 4 before disappearing from
YouTube. So they didn't follow
up on similar content. It's the same
situation with Waves, a channel with a
very similar number of subscribers to
Marcelinios. They had a video here
Insane frames-per-second boost three
weeks, ago over a hundred thousand views.
But what did they do next? Something
about you'll never see this again in
Fortnite, I'm not sure what this middle
video is about mid laners season 8, free
season pass battle pass on a Fortnite
there, and only now, three weeks after
their very successful video, have they
gone for another video on improving
performance for frames-per-second so
what they didn't do, crucially, was
doubled down on successful content. On
the flip side what our case study
subject did was not only follow up with
more content, they made a lot of it
immediately to strike that trending
topic. Ao here is the Ultimate Fortnite
FPS boost season 5 video that
kick-started everything. That was two
weeks ago, and look at the number of
videos they've made since then. All on a
very familiar similar topic. Fortnite
how to lower your ping three new methods,
Fortnite best way to do frames-per
second. How to run Fortnite on a low-end
PC 2018 season 5 with it frames per
second plastered all over the thumbnail.
And look at the transformation in
thumbnails as well. This was how the channel
looked beforehand, five months ago...
this is how the channel looks now. Very
familiar, focused topic, thumbnails that
have a lot of consistency, branding, a lot
more powerful, vibrant colors, always
focusing down on that frames-per-second
niche topic. And look at the view counts
here: 4,000 views, 8,000 views, 10,000 views,
39,000 views, this channel has absolutely
smashed it by following a simple
strategy of doubling down on your best
content. So what sort of impact does
having a successful video and then
doubling down on it more than ten times
over a two-week period have on a channel?
Well here are the results. As you can see,
there's a graph here which is barely
moving then all of a sudden whoosh, we're
into the tens of thousands of views. At
one point this channel was getting 18
thousand views plus a day. That's an
increase of thousands of percent. It's
tailed off a little bit but compared to
where they were and where they are now
the transformation is unrecognizable.
Another interesting analytic we can now
look at thanks to the YouTube creator
studio beta is impressions and
click-through rates. This is where it was
before and look at the transformation.
Once those videos took off, not only has
impressions raised by a
significant amount but
look at that click-through rate. I've
never seen one so high for a channel
getting thousands of views at a 17%
rnage is astronomical. People are just
eating up this content and the channel
creator is just creating more and more
as quickly as possible it's a recipe for
success. Now there's just one more
analytic we want to show you today and
that's from vidIQ's very own channel
audit. Boom. Thousands of percent growth.
If anybody has a better set of numbers
than that let us know, we want to do a
case study on your channel.
As for what Marcelinios should double down
on? Well you can see it right here, it's
pretty obvious and he's already doing
that. Now then, despite the success this
channel has flourished in over the last
two weeks, as always, with any YouTube
channel, there is still room for improvement.
So Marcelinios, if I got your channel
name I'm sorry. Is it Marc Elinios or
something like that? Here are some tips
to help you improve your channel even
more. First of all I think it's pretty
obvious what your target audience and
value proposition is. Your channel
is for gamers who want to
improve the performance of their gaming
experience. You want your channel to
reflect that, so a brand new channel
banner with graphics and a message that
reflects what you do on your channel.
Those thumbnails are absolutely awesome
we want to see a that level of quality
and message throughout your
channel. Also your description, if you
search for your channel on YouTube this
is what you get: I'm a 15 year old kid
who's doing random videos, random topics.
Update that to reflect your content.
Secondly it obviously appears that you
have no problem getting people into your
videos with awesome impressions and
click-through-rates, but how can you get
them to stay there longer? Your audience
retention is at around about 35%, watch
time one minute froty. How do we up that?
You've got to think of ways to keep
people engaged in your content, whether
you're asking them questions, giving them
more information as the video continues,
maybe not paying off of your solution as
early as the first minute or so. These
are all things you will learn and craft
as you improve your videos as we've
already seen with your thumbnails so good
luck with all of that. All right then
let's rewind to the very beginning of
this video and ask that same question
again: do you think you can start a
YouTube channel in 2018 and be
successful? If the answer's still no, I
just need to make another video. If, on
the other hand, you found this case study to be
really informative, we've got another one
right here on a channel that got more
than a million views on a single video
in the horror genre. And if you really
just dig that channel audit tool that we
briefly showed you we've got a full
tutorial down. Here enjoy the rest of
your video making day and we'll see you
on those other videos right now.