Karunakar Gautam
Think of reaching millions of views as a four-stage process because YouTube treats it like that.
Stage 1: Seed Testing (0-5k views)
YouTube will push your video to an initial seed audience of 1,000 to 5,000 people and will test your metrics. The key metric it looks at in this stage is your viewed versus swipe-away rate. If it is below 60%, then there is a very high chance that it is never going to push that content forward, and this entirely depends on the hook of the video. Most successful creators use a triple hook, which is:
If your videos are not crossing 5,000 views, it means that your hooks are failing. I can bet that your viewed vs swipe away rate is less than 60-70%.
Think from YouTube's perspective. It has billions of videos that it could show to its viewers. It wants to keep them on the platform. If it shows a video that most of the people are going to swipe away, then it creates a bad experience for the viewers and they might leave.
Now, even if your retention is pretty good for those thousand views, it means that your packaging is bad but the product is good. To succeed on YouTube, both of them need to be really, really good. So if you want to reach 100K views, you just need to pay attention to three things for now.
How to fix hooks ?
To fix your hooks, focus on creating a very strong curiosity gap in the first three seconds. Pause your video after three seconds and ask yourselves, "Do I have an open question in my mind that can only be resolved by watching the rest of the video?"Am I itching to watch the rest of it?"If you honestly answer that no, there is no incentive for a viewer to watch the remaining video, then rewrite the hook.Study some viral videos in your niche and pause their videos after 3-5 seconds, and ask yourself, what did they do to open this curiosity gap ?
Stage 2: Broader Testing Testing (5k-50k)
Once youtube determines that your hook is able to stop people from scrolling 70% of the time it pushes your short to a broader audience of 10k-50k people. You will see a sudden spike in views.
At this stage, it focuses on the second key metric, which is your average view duration, and it completely depends on your video length.
On YouTube, for videos less than 30s, you need 100% or more AVD. This means you need people to watch it more than once. And its really hard to do.
Few tactics to do this are,
- easiest is to use a looping script, where end of the video loops perfectly into start.
- create a controversy or a relatable/emotional moment, so that people go to comments to argue or see what others are saying, while the video plays in background.
This is why most viral videos are in the range of 40-80s. because there, the requirement is 80%+ AVD. And you can get this with really tight script, with no dead-space. Most LLMs can help you write a good script and remove fluff.
Stage 3: Exploitation Stage (50k-500k)
If your metrics of swipe rate and AVD stay relatively healthy, which is swipe away rate less than 30-40% and AVD greater than 80%, it now pushes it to an even larger audience.
At this stage, To cross 100k+ views, your video needs to follow a structure which is proven in youtube. e.g. here's something that is working right now:
Hook starts with: "What if Nikola Tesla time traveled to ancient Greece ?" then use Day by Day storytelling structure to retain people.
This is time & niche dependent. In every niche, there are are certain storytelling structures that are working right now, and you need to look at successful shorts in your niche and observe that structure in their scripts, and incorporate it into your shorts.
Stage 4: Broad Push (1M+ views)
For this, your short needs to be in a niche which has very high TAM (Total Addressable Market). Which is a fancy way of saying that it is relevant to potentially 10M-20M+ people. This is why videos related to history, business, mystery, horror, cats/dogs, relationship drama etc keep getting millions of views.
The best way to see if your niche is high TAM is to look for videos in your niche which have crossed 1M+ views. If there are several of them, then it's a very good sign.
But these are also niches where everyone else is also competing in. Nothing wrong with competition, but the best unique niches are formed by combining 2 existing high TAM niches. But, you can choose to compete in existing niches as well, because its better to be in a proven niche and rather waste your time in a niche where nobody cares.
So, that's it. This is relatively high level, but I feel it's actionable enough for most people to diagnose their own issues and dig deeper.
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