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Why a video goes viral
I mentioned recently that one of my videos had gone viral nine years after posting it. I thought at the time that some influencer had picked up it and that was the trigger, but I've been looking at Google Analytics and apparently the boost came from within YouTube.
This is the Analytics page showing what proportion of hits come from inside and outside YouTube - less than 1% is external.
We actually owe the success to Miss Moonshine!
Henry's dance was shown on the sidebar of videos you might like to watch, and that's when the rise began. It's the 'talented, but slightly quirky' dance niche.
The first, fairly gentle increase, began with a video of an American broom dancer on his sidebar and that got a bit of traction, then YouTube showed it with Miss Moonshine (a much more popular video than the American broom dance one) and Vroom! the graph is really clear..
Now, YouTube is showing it on the sidebar of more videos, and also putting in on people's home pages of 'videos suggested for you'
Once I realised what was happening, I composed a playlist which included the broom dance and four of the best Anonymous Morris dances that are on my channel. That's now producing a noticeable rise in hits on some of the Anonymous Morris dances - with most hits coming via the playlist . Too soon to say how far they will go - they're less 'quirky' than the broom dance. But I notice that I was being offered two of them on a sidebar when I went to look again at Miss Moonshine. I expect them to have a gentle rise, but not the 150K hits that the broom dance now has!
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Getting onto the 'sidebar' is a very powerful way of spreading your audience; that was how I initially discovered Geoff Castellucci and thence Voiceplay, thanks to his penchant for covering music of an era old enough to interest me ("old and boring", as he likes to put it :-p) And of course the more views the video gets from people who see it suggested and click through and then actually 'like' the result, the more likely it is to get promoted on other people's sidebars...
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I wonder how YouTube's algorithms select things. I'm guessing a video has to get a certain (but not necessarily massive) number of views from searches, and then it looks for things like music of a certain era to predict where to place it.
I expect goes mostly on 'liked things that people already have in common' and hence tries other things that fit the patterns. A bit like Amazon's book recommendations.
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