Personal social media
So, there are many guides like this, and I've read/watched quite a few of them. When starting a new channel most of these guides base growth off of sharing your videos in personal social media. That would not work for me, as that basically amounts to social suicide here in Norway. I'm not vain, but ridicule is not what I'm going for. I'm sure others feel the same.
This may work for some people, others not. There are other guides that cover using Twitter, FB and the like well, and I will not go into it here.
Forums
So, we are going for exponential growth here, and putting all your cards into posting videos on forums such as this one, takes up a lot of time, and it yields few results. Most people on this forum are interested only in promoting their own content, and as such will mostly be inactive subscribers if they do sub to you.
My way
Many people talk about finding a niche when you create your channel. I started out making montages for FPS-games when I competed in ESL and the like, but it quickly turned out to be pretty futile, as PC was a very small platform for YT-montages when I first started, and so I gave up for a few years.
The past year I seem to have figured out how to crack the "formula" for growth, and I've achieved around 350,000 views with what was at the start of this year basically 0 active subscribers.
I figured out that wasting all my time on posting videos on forums that will get me 10 more views, was futile. So, I figured I would give reddit a go.
In the start I only shared some let's plays, and reddit is not the place to do that. I eventually managed to crack the code of reddit, though. I'm sure some of you know how it works, but most youtubers on here are very small, so I'll direct this to you.
First of all; long videos do not work well on reddit. If you for example have a funny clip in a let's play, link the video with a timestamp, at 5 secs before the event happens. However, you do in general not want to link videos more than a minute or so.
Reddit is all about appealing to the audience. If you analyze the videos on the large subreddits for gaming, it's mostly bugs and glitches, and really good/awful plays that get onto the front pages. This is what you want to go for to build an audience, and eventually you can start posting other types of videos when you build your subscriber base.
Funny glitches is the easiest way to get views, and possibly subs. This is mostly what I've posted, and a semi-successful post on for example r/skyrim with 10-15 upvotes, will yield about 1000-2000 views. My most recent reddit post, got me 5k views in a day or so.
If you look at my video-views(link in my signature) you'll see that they vary wildly. This is mostly due to what game subreddit I've posted it to, and how popular that subreddit is. Some videos have only a few hundred views, which are videos I have not shared on reddit. You want to map out the most popular subreddits for the games you play. Posting directly to the biggest gaming-subs that cater to all games will take a lot more effort into your videos, and you need a portion of luck to get through. Therefore I don't often post to r/gaming and r/pcmasterrace, as they are simply too big. A lot of people posting, means a lot of people auto-downvoting content to get their own up.
Good subreddits to post to
- r/pcgaming A great place to post your clips. If you post footage of new games on release day, this often yields success. To showcase the graphics, or performance issues and the like, this sub is awesome. Also use r/nvidia and r/amd for this.
- r/skyrim / r/darksouls2 r/leagueoflegends(big) r/globaloffensive(big) etc etc: Subs for their respective games. This is where you will find the most success, however the bigger ones for like LoL, Dota, Hearthstone etc will be hard to score on. The smaller the better. If you're on an unfamiliar sub, go to "new" and check how many posts there have been the past hour. If it's one or two, then you often have good chances to get a few upvotes. On small subs you often need only a few to get to the front page, which is what we want.
r/gamephysics: Small subreddit where simply posting will get you on the front page of the sub. Posts from here sometimes make the front page of reddit, and has a good chance of getting you a lot of views.
Find subs that are relevant to you. Post on several of them, but not more than once on each. If it fails, try again in a week with the same video, or tomorrow with a new video.
Titles
Now, this is probably the most important element of success, once you've chose what subs you post to. Reddit is largely based off clickbait, which is why you want to put work into your title. If you get a title that makes you chuckle, you know you've done good.
Ex: A video I posted to r/globaloffensive with the title "Is this the worst player of all time?", my most successful post, at 2,5k upvotes; which gave me 200,000 views in a day. Use titles like these. "Ridicolous game-breaking bug", "Worst glitch of all time?" etc etc.
Use time to research what fits your video the most. For example, I made a montage video of CoD, which is mostly very unpopular on reddit. Therefore I went to a Competetive CoD-subreddit for xbox, r/codcompetetive, and posted with the title "What do you XBOX players think of this?". It got me a few thousand views, on a video that is extremely hard to sell on reddit. I also posted a bit in the comments about how I mostly played on xbox, even though I'd never do that.. Appeal to your crowd, think out of the box.
So, that's it for now. I'll probably update if I have the time. Quite a bit more to go over.
So, there are many guides like this, and I've read/watched quite a few of them. When starting a new channel most of these guides base growth off of sharing your videos in personal social media. That would not work for me, as that basically amounts to social suicide here in Norway. I'm not vain, but ridicule is not what I'm going for. I'm sure others feel the same.
This may work for some people, others not. There are other guides that cover using Twitter, FB and the like well, and I will not go into it here.
Forums
So, we are going for exponential growth here, and putting all your cards into posting videos on forums such as this one, takes up a lot of time, and it yields few results. Most people on this forum are interested only in promoting their own content, and as such will mostly be inactive subscribers if they do sub to you.
My way
Many people talk about finding a niche when you create your channel. I started out making montages for FPS-games when I competed in ESL and the like, but it quickly turned out to be pretty futile, as PC was a very small platform for YT-montages when I first started, and so I gave up for a few years.
The past year I seem to have figured out how to crack the "formula" for growth, and I've achieved around 350,000 views with what was at the start of this year basically 0 active subscribers.
I figured out that wasting all my time on posting videos on forums that will get me 10 more views, was futile. So, I figured I would give reddit a go.
In the start I only shared some let's plays, and reddit is not the place to do that. I eventually managed to crack the code of reddit, though. I'm sure some of you know how it works, but most youtubers on here are very small, so I'll direct this to you.
First of all; long videos do not work well on reddit. If you for example have a funny clip in a let's play, link the video with a timestamp, at 5 secs before the event happens. However, you do in general not want to link videos more than a minute or so.
Reddit is all about appealing to the audience. If you analyze the videos on the large subreddits for gaming, it's mostly bugs and glitches, and really good/awful plays that get onto the front pages. This is what you want to go for to build an audience, and eventually you can start posting other types of videos when you build your subscriber base.
Funny glitches is the easiest way to get views, and possibly subs. This is mostly what I've posted, and a semi-successful post on for example r/skyrim with 10-15 upvotes, will yield about 1000-2000 views. My most recent reddit post, got me 5k views in a day or so.
If you look at my video-views(link in my signature) you'll see that they vary wildly. This is mostly due to what game subreddit I've posted it to, and how popular that subreddit is. Some videos have only a few hundred views, which are videos I have not shared on reddit. You want to map out the most popular subreddits for the games you play. Posting directly to the biggest gaming-subs that cater to all games will take a lot more effort into your videos, and you need a portion of luck to get through. Therefore I don't often post to r/gaming and r/pcmasterrace, as they are simply too big. A lot of people posting, means a lot of people auto-downvoting content to get their own up.
Good subreddits to post to
- r/pcgaming A great place to post your clips. If you post footage of new games on release day, this often yields success. To showcase the graphics, or performance issues and the like, this sub is awesome. Also use r/nvidia and r/amd for this.
- r/skyrim / r/darksouls2 r/leagueoflegends(big) r/globaloffensive(big) etc etc: Subs for their respective games. This is where you will find the most success, however the bigger ones for like LoL, Dota, Hearthstone etc will be hard to score on. The smaller the better. If you're on an unfamiliar sub, go to "new" and check how many posts there have been the past hour. If it's one or two, then you often have good chances to get a few upvotes. On small subs you often need only a few to get to the front page, which is what we want.
r/gamephysics: Small subreddit where simply posting will get you on the front page of the sub. Posts from here sometimes make the front page of reddit, and has a good chance of getting you a lot of views.
Find subs that are relevant to you. Post on several of them, but not more than once on each. If it fails, try again in a week with the same video, or tomorrow with a new video.
Titles
Now, this is probably the most important element of success, once you've chose what subs you post to. Reddit is largely based off clickbait, which is why you want to put work into your title. If you get a title that makes you chuckle, you know you've done good.
Ex: A video I posted to r/globaloffensive with the title "Is this the worst player of all time?", my most successful post, at 2,5k upvotes; which gave me 200,000 views in a day. Use titles like these. "Ridicolous game-breaking bug", "Worst glitch of all time?" etc etc.
Use time to research what fits your video the most. For example, I made a montage video of CoD, which is mostly very unpopular on reddit. Therefore I went to a Competetive CoD-subreddit for xbox, r/codcompetetive, and posted with the title "What do you XBOX players think of this?". It got me a few thousand views, on a video that is extremely hard to sell on reddit. I also posted a bit in the comments about how I mostly played on xbox, even though I'd never do that.. Appeal to your crowd, think out of the box.
So, that's it for now. I'll probably update if I have the time. Quite a bit more to go over.
