well played countdown channel well
played you've just engineered the
perfect 100-day rickroll
into
one of these and while the story may
infuriate most creators you have to
applaud the ingenuity
if you've ever wondered what the date is
100 days before april the 1st now you
have your answer
[Music]
that's because this countdown channel
has just published 100 videos in 100
days
just like this counting down from a
century to zero premiering the final
video to tens of thousands of viewers
who tuned in to watch this the channel
has racked up an astonishing 3 million
plus views from videos that are 5
seconds long and take no more than
probably 60 seconds to create i know i
get where you're coming from you're
probably eight hours into editing your
latest gaming video that's going to get
100 views and you're asking yourself why
do i even bother
i sympathize i really do but i think it
is worth investigating why this channel
has been so successful with what seems
to be such minimal effort and the first
thing we'll start with as with all
channels that are successful it required
a little bit of patience and
perseverance while the launch video does
now have a quarter of a million views
and now gets over a thousand views per
hour that wasn't always the case if you
look at the historical data of this
video and the momentum of the countdown
series as a whole it pretty much
flatlined for an entire month but the
creator kept plugging away posting every
single day and come the 31st of january
and beyond business started to pick up
if you're interested in this type of
stuff by the way views per hour
historical data download vid iq and you
can use it on any video on youtube
so was this yet another one of those
random events that trigger the algorithm
as is often the alleged argument in
these types of videos
as always the answer is a firm no in
this case it had very little to do with
the youtube algorithm and much more to
do with human intervention word of mouth
from a creator with an audience and
influence time works is a channel that
hunts down the oddities of youtube such
as videos that are 200 billion years
long and channels with verification
badges yet no videos and it just so
happens that this countdown channel came
onto their radar on january the 31st
there is a mysterious youtube channel
called countdown you see this channel is
just an hourglass profile picture
looking thing that says countdown and
they have all these videos and you'll
probably notice something they're all
just numbers now this video on the time
works channel got 200 000 views in its
first seven days so as you can imagine
that pushed a lot of direct traffic to
the countdown channel which is fantastic
but what that also does is trigger the
youtube
recommendation system because here's the
thing according to the data in our
youtube studio the time works channel
creator insider think media vid iq and
so on and so on all of these channels
share similar audiences and so the
connections start to be made once loads
of people watch time works video about
the countdown channel and go and watch
countdown's videos
our audience here at vid iq start to see
countdown's videos on their home feed
because youtube thinks they may enjoy
the video and you know what youtube's
probably right this is the somewhat
unnerving way that youtube seems to know
what you want to watch before you even
know what you want to watch and because
of all of this research i've been doing
into the countdown channel youtube now
seems to think that i have a fetish for
countdown channels which is why it's
showing copycat count up channels on my
home feed as well
damn anyway happy days for the countdown
channel views jump from 10 000 a week to
hundreds of thousands a week but how
does the channel maintain this momentum
for a couple of months well here's where
three more important elements come into
play and we'll start with the most
obvious one consistency i know it sounds
a little odd to say this but someone
still has to create these 100 videos and
then upload one of them every single day
for three months
that could get very boring very quickly
and i know this doesn't sound very
exciting and probably seems very easy to
do but the consistency of the thumbnails
title and video format ensure a high
level of subconscious brand awareness if
you've already seen one of these videos
you instinctively know it's the next
video in the series this type of
commitment actually takes more
discipline than you might think and then
weirdly this channel has built up a
community how do five second videos get
hundreds of comments
well when the viewers take it upon
themselves to joke about how epic the
storytelling is or the journey all the
numbered characters are going through
and well you get the idea everyone is
simply embracing the absurdity of it all
i won't be surprised if people spend 10
minutes plus just reading through all of
the comments they've got a reason to
come back and that's another little
trick the creator has used to get
viewers to come back through easter eggs
most of the videos sound like this
but sporadically the video will have an
easter egg sound
that was for christmas day and this was
for well you know what
[Music]
what the creator is doing here is
inserting the simplest of secondary
story arcs from a viewer's point of view
is there going to be a secret sound in
this video i'm gonna have to watch to
find out you know what the best thing
about this idea is
it's incredibly simple but critically
the creator
kept it incredibly simple if i would
have come up with this idea for sure i
would have over thought it i would have
made the videos too long added too many
secondary ideas and every video would
have been slightly different in some way
but no that's not how you do it all you
need to do is simply make one video a
day counting down from 100. i know this
is going to sound a little strange but
making something
this simple is actually really difficult
the idea and the message is uncluttered
pure
instinctive and it can be so easy to
blur the idea and smudge the message
once you take the idea through its
process which takes us to the final
countdown and a very intelligent move by
the creator to set the video as a
premiere this one deserves a build up in
anticipation also give this comment a
thumbs up
and in the end after more than three
months 100 videos 3 million views 100
000 subscribers
over 15 000 live viewers tuned in
for this
[Music]
yeah can't show you any more than that
we'll get a copyright claim oh and if
you do want to learn more about the
youtube recommendation system not the
youtube algorithm i highly recommend you
watch this video over here and have you
ever fooled anybody on youtube with a
video on april 1st let us know in the
comments below