How I Gained 2 Million Views in 8 Days (From Scratch)

Hey, what's going on, everyone? Devon Knopp here. And in this video, I'm gonna be talking about how I was able to gain 2.3 million views in eight days on a brand new YouTube channel without showing my face in the video and without really anything other than just simply using that YouTube algorithm. Kevin. So inside this video, like I said, I'm gonna be showing you guys this video that generated 2.3 million views. And here's the thing is I'm showing you guys how I got results off of a trend. I'll be honest, I don't really like to run very like trendy channels anymore. I do very much more like evergreen long term content because it's like a five, ten year plan for business that makes way more sense than doing things that make money today, but. But have no sort of long longevity to them. It's like one of those things where it's like, things like grow quickly. A lot of times they fall just as fast as well. So anyways, what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be hopping inside of my computer, I'm gonna reveal kind of basically everything and show you guys exactly how I was able to do it. I'll be honest, this didn't just. I just wasn't some like complete amateur and just got insane results on YouTube. I've been doing YouTube for like three or four years, but this is something that's really cool. I kind of just did it as a little experiment, kind of little side project, and it ended up producing pretty insane results. And then on top of that, like me, myself personally, I've done this multiple times actually. I've. I think right Now I've gotten 15 or 16 channels. I need to do them, add it up and do the math. But I've gotten like 15 or let's say 15 plus YouTube channels to go viral from scratch. And what I mean by viral is getting to the point where you're getting a hundred thousand views a day on a channel starting from complete nothing. And this is one of my kind of craziest little success stories as far as like starting a brand new channel and was able to get these results. And we're gonna jump in and evaluate it and I'm gonna basically show you guys, tell you guys what we can all learn from this and how we can apply it to any other YouTube channel that's out there. So we're gonna be hopping into my computer screen. Okay. So the channel that I'm talking about is called Data Doggo. So you guys can actually go look at this channel right now. Do it after this video. But I created this channel kind of just like a little bit of just kind of like almost like a joke, but also just as almost like a little science experiment of mine. I saw this trend that was happening. There was this YouTube channel that was like, really succeeding. So there's this channel that was like, really getting a lot of results. It was called Data is Beautiful. And I saw this. This trend. I was like, I'm kind of like an avid YouTube watcher. I always study the homepage. I'm always looking at video, like things that are popping up on the homepage. And there was this trend that was popping up around like a year or two ago of these little, like, data videos, essentially, like these videos where they would just. Here I'll click on one of them where it would just simply just show data over time on a video. It was like very simple content. And they would just make these videos that are like three to like six minutes long. And the crazy part is, is that they were getting an insane amount of views. Like, you see this one right here? This video got 11,000 views. So whoever owned and ran those data is beautiful channel, they were able to get some pretty insane results in here. I'll move my camera over to the left. They have 1.4 million subscribers, and they uploaded videos for the span of, I think like six months or so. It wasn't even that long. They did it for a short period of time and then they completely stopped, which I think is funny. But they were able to get a total of 222,000 views off of this channel. Now, the thing is, is this. The ad rates aren't really that good in here. You get like $2 per thousand views about. And so which, I mean, you do the math. This guy probably made like $400,000 off of the. Off of this little channel that he quit doing. I still see people to this day kind of running with this content strategy. I'll be honest, it's extremely difficult to make videos for. And I'm going to break down, like, kind of how it all happened. But essentially I saw this trend and then I got to work. I was like, holy cow. Like, these videos are pretty simple. And then I googled how to make them, and they were pretty simple to use. You would use a software. I honestly can't remember what it was called. It was like some software, you just input data over time and it would be able to visually represent the data. And all it would do is just kind of make the colors look pretty and then screen record it. And I was able to get results. And I had a friend at the time, he was pretty good at like developing simple little software or simple code to scrape data. And so I had him help me out. We kind of partnered on this channel and we were able to make the video pretty quickly. Like he turned around the software and like it was like two days or so. And I had two video ideas that I wanted to produce. The first one I did was most followed Instagram accounts from 2014 to the time of present. And then we made this other video idea. It was most subscribed beauty YouTubers from 2013 and 2019. So he simply just scraped together the data and then we, and I threw it into the software. And then there was like some issues. You know, I was like, there's like some data that we were missing. So we had to either like fill it in with just some estimated guesses or we had to like refine the data mining process. But anyways, so after that what I did was, is how I kind of came up with these ideas is I just did a lot of research. So what I did was I just like really studied all of like I watched a lot of these videos and I would watch a lot of the top videos, like the videos that were getting 10 million views or 36 million views and 20 million views. I would watch these videos that got the best results and. And then I'd watch some of the videos that didn't get that many results. Like that good of results. I mean some of these videos, yeah, 276,000 views. Most people would be like in heaven to be able to get this many views on a channel or on a single video. But here's the thing, like this is a pretty low performing video for this channel as they have like other videos right next to it that are getting 7 million views. So I'd watch these videos and I asked myself like, why are these videos not getting that good of results whereas these videos are getting insane results. And so I would basically create like a little checklist inside of my head and take notes as to like what this video is doing that this video doesn't have and what this video isn't doing that this video is doing. And so I'd kind of just go through and make this checklist. And eventually I came to the conclusion that, that it really was written upon like the, the subject and the topic. Like most subscribed. Let's play gaming channels. This is a very like niche specific audience to watch this video. Let's play Gaming Channels is very specific. Whereas like best selling video game consoles, anybody could watch this video. Like anybody that's remotely ever played video games, even people that have like played the old, played like the old NES systems, etc. Nintendo 64, whatever the saw, whatever the consoles were called, they could watch this and they'd be like, they would be entertained. Anybody, like in all demographics, people that are like newer gamers, older gamers, they could watch this video and they'd be entertained by it. Compared to like most subscribed. Let's play Gaming Channels. That's very specific. That's a very niche audience. And there's only so many people that like are in that audience. I mean, yeah, they got 276,000 views, but it's not comparative to 7.7 million views. So what I realized is that you got to pick something that a lot of people are interested in. So I did the Instagram one. I'll be honest, this wasn't even an original video idea. I just, I saw someone else that made this video and I made it, I made this video better than theirs. That's kind of the difficult part if you take an idea that someone else is already doing. But I made this video better than the video that they had. And that's why we were able to get pretty decent results, which I think now this video has produced. I think it's gotten like, like a few million views on it. Let me see. So this video has gotten total of 1.2 million views. As you can see, you don't really make that much money off this niche. Like I think the ad rates like $0.69 off of it, which is pretty bad. So that's kind of why we stopped doing this niche. Because it's pretty hard to make a lot of money even if you get a lot of views. And then, so then what I did was, is I had my girlfriend at the time of when I was running this channel a couple years ago, she was very into watching YouTube. And so what I did was I kind of was just like, hey, I found this idea where you just do like most subscribed whatever or like the most of something over a period of time. And I was wondering if you had any good ideas. And at this time there was like a lot of drama going on in like the beauty industry with like, I honestly don't know the beauty industry that much. So I apologize if I sound kind of uninformed. But basically it was like James Charles and whoever. I forget Jeffree Star and a lot of these other people, they're having like this drama going on. And it was like, I think, who is this? Jeffrey? No, this isn't Jeffree Star. This is James Charles. James Charles lost more subscribers in like a single day than anyone ever has. And so I thought it would make for like a really interesting video. So we got to work and we just pulled a bunch of statistics from like Social blade and threw it all together. And we created like a software just to pull the statistics from the Social blade site. And then after doing that, we created this. I threw this video into the software and I just made it look like really pretty looking, honestly. And then if you watch this video, like towards the end of it, you'll see like around the time of when this is all happening of here. Let me see. It's like, right. So it was right around this point of time. You see, like James Charles is like losing a lot of subscribers. And so there's a lot of emotion, a lot of drama behind all of this. And this is something that was kind of like just trending on YouTube. And this is what a lot of people, a lot of attention was on YouTube. So there was already an audience for this. This happened like, I don't know, like three, four months before I made this video. But they. There was all like, basically like, as you see, there was like all these, all this drama going on. And what I did was I just made sense of the data inside the video. This is something that nobody else was doing inside their videos. But because there was like this dramatic loss of like subscribers and everything, I just figured, figured to make sense of it for like an outsider perspective, for like a mass population to understand what's going on, I would just throw in like a little clip to kind of just apply to like describe the data, what was going on and what was happening. And so all I did was just make this video really entertaining. So what I would do is like, I started off like the song, you guys can go and watch this video. But I. I had like a two or three second delay. I did that for like a dramatic effect. I let the music kind of pick up and it was kind of like this very like lo fi vibe type of music. And so you can hear like some voices talking at the beginning. And I was. And then after like two or three seconds of the video playing, then the beat would drop and then it would do like the little lo fi thing. So what I did was, is I matched the emotion of the song with the video. So since there was this like, little dead space of like getting the song going. I let the data kind of sit there for a second, and then as soon as the beat dropped, then I would play the video and make it start performing. And then this video in result got about 5.6 million views on YouTube. And what's crazy is this video still gets like 5 to 10,000 views a month to this day, even after I've produced it a couple of years ago. So I made this video look really good. I messed with the colors a lot. One of the things was I was trying to make like really good, like, find the best fonts for the video, because you can like, change all the fonts and everything that's displayed, try to find like the best font colors and everything. That kind of just made this video look really clean and really crisp. What I saw in a lot of other videos in this niche is they would just lazily use the software and their videos were ugly. They were disgusting. Like, I did not. I had a tough time watching them because it was just the data was not very visual. And pulling one out of like, the data is beautiful book. They would kind of try to like, what the difference is of this channel versus any other channel is they made the videos look pretty decent. Other than just covering topics that no one else had covered yet or things that were interesting. They made the videos look pretty enticing and pretty colorful. So I didn't recreate the wheel in any way, shape or form. I just basically just took their idea and then just applied my own layer of producing the content on top of it. So that is. That's how I made the video. And then also what I did was, is I noticed that their thumbnails were really simple and really under. Easy to understand. Like, most popular TV series from 1986 to 2019. So they literally just put most popular TV series 1986 to 2019 in the thumbnail. And then they just had something that was applicable to the niche. So that way you knew what was going on immediately. So they did the Breaking Bad of the guys from Breaking Bad. And so a lot of these videos are most performing videos or their top performing were the simplest thumbnails ever. Most popular websites, they just took a screenshot of the data. Then it said, most popular websites, what a lot of like, really crummy videos that performed. They would have like, the data where it was like, it took up all this side of the screen and then the font would overlaps the data. What I would do is I would actually like tweak the Data in the thumbnail just a little bit, just so that way I would have the space to make the video. So I just tried to like I tried to find a spot where the video kind of had a good blank, good blank canvas to work off of. I did cover the numbers a little bit for this person, but I just kept it really simple. I just showed James Charles logo for his from his pro. His YouTube channel is the profile picture. Just made it really simple. And try not to overcomplicate it at all because this is what people are showing up for most subscribe youtubers and James Charles is like an icon in the industry. So that's pretty much all I did. I just tried to make it really simple, make it really appeasing. I probably spent, I'll be honest, like a good hour on this thumbnail just making it look really clean, trying different spots of the video. Like what I mean by that is I would just scroll through the video and then just find a good spot where the data was very representative of what was going on. So I think I took a screenshot from around this period. I didn't want one where it was like too much. See like this is a bad one to use because it's like there's not a lot of camp blank canvas to work off right here. And so I just kind of use this. You'll even notice I. I cleaned up the background of the thumbnail as well. Like you'll see these little like lines that are here. I erase those lines. So that way it was even more simple to see. It was just like these fine little details that I made it as like simplistic to click on as possible. And so what can we learn from all this? I know this is a trend and this is kind of hard to recreate as far as like I don't recommend just going to making most subscribed beauty youtubers. I mean maybe one or two of you could watching this video and you might get a result but you won't get the same result that I did because unless there's like some new drama or something that I've missed out on over the past couple of years and I don't understand the industry that well. So I don't know too much about it. But here's the first thing is you want to here we'll hop over into my camera view. What you want to do is you want to stack trends. So what I did was I took a trend that was already existing and getting insane results which was the most whatever metric over a time period and showing the data charts of the. Showing the visualization of the data. So what I did was I found that existing trend. It was already getting results for other people, and it was getting insane results for other people. And then what I did was I just took another trend and stacked it on top of it. So I took inventory of all their videos and I asked myself, what is a video that I can make that they haven't made yet, but the same audience would want to watch it, or an audience from another niche would want to watch it because they're like, oh, this is the new way of looking at a perspective of the industry and it hasn't been made yet by somebody else. So that the Instagram idea wasn't really all that creative, but it was like an updated version and I made it better than every, like everybody else at the time, I made the video like pretty good. I matched, like, had good music and I made it very watchable. But for the Most subscribed beauty YouTuber YouTubers, I got 5.6 million views. I was just stacking basically multiple trends that, that were like pretty viral. So on top of that, what I did was just feed into the emotion. So like I said with the music making it like super dramatic and like kind of like the dramatic pause and playing just a good song for like a background of the video. I shouldn't play like some hardcore rock music on top of a video about most subscribed beauty youtubers that doesn't flow well. Whereas like something that's like lo fi or something that's kind of like chill music, background music works really well because it's like it gets people into the zone and then they just like endlessly just watch the video without even realizing it. Before they realize it. Five minutes has already passed by without them even being conscientious of it. So the more that you can get people to watch longer without realizing it, the better average view duration that you're going to get and the better your video will perform. So also, another big thing is putting yourself into the viewer shoes. So I had two kind of suits that I had to put on to make this video. The first one was from a data perspective, like from the viewers and audience of data is beautiful. I had to ask myself, what do these people like and what do they want to see? So what I did was, is I kind of just figured out like I'd watch a lot of their videos and I became a fan of the content myself. So that way I can understand what the fans of my own Videos that I would put out, how they would respond and react. So I took notes of what was working and I'd watch other people in the niche that were just completely failing and I'd ask myself, what are they doing they, that the other channels aren't doing? And then what are, what are some of the things they aren't doing that the, the top performing videos are doing? So once I did that and created a quick little inventory, then I was able to get, then I was able to have a good overview of what I needed to do to make my video as engaging as possible. So the next thing is doing a lot of market research, kind of just running off the last subject I just talked about. So I just found super successful videos and then found failure videos. Most times it's because they weren't doing anything new or exciting. And then the next thing that I did was, is I optimized for virality. This is anything, this is what I do for any channel that I do. This is how I've gotten to 100,000 views in a single day on 15 brand new channels, 15 plus. And so what I do is I just ask myself, does this deserve a million views? So every step of the way, when it comes to coming up with a video idea, creating the thumbnail, compiling the visualization, the data of the video, or if I'm doing other types of content like the script of the video, the voiceover of the video, the editing of the video, I asked myself every step of the way, does this deserve a million views? Or whatever my metric is that I'm like going for, for that, that channel or that video and if I ever say, no, this doesn't deserve a million views, I would ask myself, how can I fix it? And until I get to the point where I'd watch like, I watched that video that I just showed you guys that I made that got 5.6 million views. I, I watched it probably like 10, 15 times before I ever uploaded it. I kept asking myself, how can I make this better? How can I make this better? How can I make this better? And eventually over time, I got to the point where I was like, okay, this is like the best that I can do. Maybe I can make it a little bit better, but this is pretty darn good. This is better than most of the other videos in the niche. So ask yourself, does this deserve a million views? And then watch some videos that got like 100 views and ask yourself, is this like, is this better than like, is, is this the same as those videos that got 100, 100 views? Or is this the same as the videos that got 10 million views, 20 million views? So once you can do that and ask yourself and just kind of evaluate from a third party perspective about the video, then you can perform better. And what I would also do is I would show this video to other people. Before I launched it, I was honestly insanely proud of this video because I poured so much time into it over the span of like two or three days. I got really excited about the project and I asked a bunch of people, I was like, hey, can you watch this video? And I would just show it to them and then I would just like watch their reaction to it. If they got bored within like 10 seconds, I knew I needed to work on it. Whereas if they were engaged for the whole video and they don't even realize they watched the whole video, then I knew that I did my job correctly. So. And you just got to. I just, I show the video. What I do is I show a video to someone and I just watch their face. Honestly, I just watch their body language. I watch how they engage and interact with the video. If there's someone that watches a lot of YouTube videos, sometimes they'll skip through it. And if I see them skipping through it, I ask myself, how can I make it so they don't skip through it and watch the video for longer? So that is pretty much everything. There's a lot more that I could dive into in this video. But this is a quick little overlay of how I got 2.3 million views on a brand new channel in 8 days. Purely organic. And actually I'll show you real quick, I forgot to show this part. But as you'll see right here, 94.5% of the traffic came from the browse features of YouTube. So this is the homepage of YouTube, which basically means that this video went really viral on the homepage of YouTube. That means YouTube loved the content and they really wanted to show off this video because they knew that it would work so well. So anyways, that's what I got. And make sure to hit the subscribe button and drop a like down below and I'll see you guys all in future videos. Peace.