What makes a YouTube video gain views? What type of videos make it into your feed instead of being buried in the 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute? To try and answer some of these questions that face the Sightline staff every day, let’s look at the video that has gotten the most views in the history of Sightline: The Types of People During a Fire Alarm.
To everyone’s surprise, the video is almost at forty thousand views. Clearly, the majority of the people watching this video are not from the Bethany community because only about one percent of the viewers are subscribed. This means that this random minute and forty-second video popped up in people’s suggested boxes as well as in searches about fire alarms.
Something that was especially surprising about the statistics of this video is the geography of its viewers. As you would expect, the vast majority of the views came from the United States, however, there were a few views here and there in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Germany, Thailand, Indonesia, Hungary, and Vietnam. It is also noteworthy that it was popular among different age groups. Most of the time, these comedic videos are appealing to teenagers, but 57.5% of the people who watched this video were between the ages of 35 and 44.
So what made this video stand out to the Youtube algorithm? It’s tough to say because it is far from the highest quality project on the Sightline channel. I believe that three major factors played into the success of the video. The content, the duration, and the initial viewership. There are not many sketch comedy videos about fire alarms to be found on Youtube, so the originality of the idea likely increased its popularity.
Duration is also very important when appealing to people on Youtube. Most of the time, people will not watch a video longer than a few minutes if they are not immediately interested in it. Even though this video is only a minute and forty seconds long, the average amount of time that someone would watch it was 51 seconds.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that this video did not take off immediately. On its first day of being posted, it only received 26 views. It has been more of a slow burn to get to this point. Most of the time, Sightline videos will get around 100 views on a good day. After this video slowly surpassed that amount, the viewership increased exponentially. Youtube likes to recommend things that people are watching. The more views something gets, the more it gets recommended.