How to get seven billion views On YouTube

[Music] [Music] we're going to talk a bit about not so much about the Yogscast although we will inevitably mention it we're going to try and show you how to get seven billion views on YouTube yogscast has seven billion views that's why we use that number but it has taken a few years and we don't expect everyone to get straight there what everyone always thinks about how to get a lot of views straight away on YouTube is to make the thing you're talking about a different color maybe get a nice arrow on it arrows are really big the matter is a really big yes and and then make it even bigger however there are we're gonna we're going to try and be a little bit more nuanced in how we tell you about the different ways to to work to work on

YouTube and get more views it's not complete click bait but click bait does come into it so that's one way to help so who we mark you've already been if you were in the room already you've already been listening to as well as a Content crater which is what he was mainly talking from perspective of he's now there has been for quite some time the CEO of the yogscast as well yeah and rich is the chief revenue officer of the odds cast also managing director a fourth-floor creative the agency that handles all of our direct brown relationships so we don't know the odds cast which is possible we have we do have a video and that hopefully gives a flavor of it there's always gonna happen at the sound is really it some really cool music going you just sort of imagine it yourself dude it's probably three and just talks right yeah yeah yeah play Ron owns

battleground that's us playing a Star Trek breach crew I should probably talk about the actual facts shouldn't be seven or eight in it and one things different to mention on this as you're having loca the different kinds of content is that it does mention the amount of money with various charity yeah and just to it was slightly misleading out there it said six million dollars raised sadly this is an old video it's now eleven million dollars we had an absolute mammoth charity month so every month every year sorry during December we run a charity month and this past month we raised five point two four million dollars for charity thank you it was mostly me other people helped but in truth you know we were given this amazing platform and you know we work with a lot of games publishers and developers we put together a big old Humble Bundle and then we promote it across a whole month of activity and so that's fantastic really to to be able to use this and I think displays their kind of

the power of YouTube and twitch and their sort of connection you have with an audience indeed there are developers who want to be part of the Humble Bundle actually yeah please do get in touch with mark commanding me so anyway so one of the one of the big things about about growing anything but especially a YouTube channel or a big audience is timing and getting getting the timing right now in your casts example a lot of that timing is around luck and it's often happens that way so the u.s. car started when when this man Louis Brinley who's one of the co-founders when he met the other co-founder who is Simon and they they met online and that was a lucky piece of meeting just well playing a video game right playing World of Warcraft and basically back in the day with water Warcraft it used to be a very challenging game thank you and you used

to have to coordinate your activity usually via voice chat and these guys were chatting away hanging out a voice chat and Lewis has just amazed how funny Simon was all the time to a grand audience of maybe like three other people and he thought were hang on I should just record Simon being funny and then upload it and then everyone could enjoy it and really that's the kind of the genesis Simon is one of the most work-shy people you could ever meet he would never have thought to record himself being funny and Lewis is one of the most hard-working people you ever meet and that kind of Odd Couple relationship resulted in the birth of the yogscast and everything that followed from there but what was important for the timing was that right at that time this is ten years ago the YouTube was just just about happening YouTube we forget now we have conference tracks that is just about YouTube and and the other platforms that followed it for YouTube was pretty new then it was pretty pretty early for people to get on

but everyone wanted their own YouTube channel at that time even the Queen had our own YouTube channel it's now closed she wasn't very good no stuff it's tough business and those two guys one of the other lessons around timing was just getting out there and doing it which was important for them so this was the first video nearly ten years ago and you can see you can really see the quality from the gap I set the tone having you right from the get-go the real quality of the yogscast that would make them huge pretty good right i mean they're really kicking it right you knew that they would end up with seven billion views obviously we cleared the rights to this music as well you know even back then we were very much on trying to make sure that copyright was abided by but from those inauspicious beginnings then another another piece of amazing timing happened happened for the guys was they came across minecraft so

minecraft was in early access at the time and as everyone knows with any indie game is there's no tutorial a guide on how to play is always a bit tricky so coming from doing world of warcraft boss guides we started playing around with a guide on how to survive the first night in Minecraft [Music] hugely upbeat but they're getting there right there's when the music is happening it's that sort of passion really kind of grips the audience what actually happens I mean there was some sorry I'll just make him go quiet and what crucially happened there there was there was an awful lot of luck in their timing and meeting each other of getting on YouTube at the right time of finding Minecraft at the right time well what starts to happen here is actually is they start understanding the craft of what people want and and starting giving giving people what they want in this case wasn't just the game

it really wasn't it was about making stories out of that game and telling those stories on YouTube yes so we basically subverted a guide series into a narrative series so we used as the game developed and as mods were made for the game we could introduce new story elements and that basically people came along for the information quickly discovered there was none of that but stuck around for the entertainment and it was really this personality driven content that people come to the yogscast for now lesson two is around teaming up you can't do it on your own you saw the influences are pretty earlier they all they all have just their name on their channel but actually they've got teams around them it's what I'm do the yogscast as well they teamed up with with their friends they've been playing games with including Terps another guy it's now all of these all of these have a million-plus youtube channels do they all have subscribers not all of them right now now now four of those up there but we

won't name the fifth that doesn't but that's fine Duncan as an interesting picture there isn't it he's the one singing into a microphone we can't quite make that out from this angle anyway so yeah teaming up hugely important because you can't do it all on your own the other big thing that happened for the yogscast which is important is around around building for growth about underst about taking that journey and then as you get bigger he's building for the yogscast that came when when you convinced them to come to risk yeah so early 2012 the company had been formed and it was just starting to get to the point where this was a full-time job which was a bit surreal I also was was very draining took up a lot of people's time is very hard to separate the work-life balance when you're working from your bedroom the whole time so we decided to come to Bristol it's where I grew up it's fantastic city but it gave us the

opportunity to have a office space that was a place to go to work do work and more importantly walk away from work so this is what people think that youtuber's office looks like I wish look at that as comfy as anything well yeah well when they first moved to Bristol this was what you built wasn't yes so back in 2012 we took the basement of a service office building in Bristol and divided it into lots of tiny little spaces to try and create our own little recording bedrooms in in the basement there and it's fantastic great home for us but as with all homes you you grow and we now have a much nicer studio space still in Bristol this time on the top floor of a building so we've gone from the basement to the top and this is for example our live room here is a huge big old space very comfortable air conditioning lots of soundproofing and treatments and it's just allowing us to

have a more comfortable experience whilst creating a better product so building for growth the other key thing and we've talked about the fact that girls were lucky to get on YouTube and YouTube has has grown and honestly these numbers are already out of date but it's not just about YouTube for for us anymore and it can't be so we we look at all the other platforms we can be on for us we got onto twitch pretty early and we've seen huge growth and both for us but twitch generally over the last couple of years and that's important to to make sure that you can see where things are going and beyond those platforms as well I think right now if you're just thinking about YouTube especially if you're in games that's a really difficult landscape for you and there are easier places to grow an audience so quickly no scars today is pretty big audience is growing with us they're getting they're getting older every year plenty of channels plenty of views but

what we're trying to do is is build an entertainment company we're not trying to build just a place for some influences to make a few fun videos we have a big audience as does a lot of people in the same and the same same spirit us and we think that there's a platform there to build it much bigger and just to give you a quick idea of the sorts of content that we're now making these days that the way we see the the business going is quick clip from a video we made recently [Music] [Applause]

[Music] [Music] [Music] so there you go that's basically us having a challenge in tribe ants if anyone is looking for a trip man we're actually selling that beautiful beige model there that's the one that engine works so doesn't need to be pushed around by Range Rover but we get an opportunity to do a lot of fun stuff now and I think that you know we look at every opportunity in a question as to kind of what will it allow us to do where can it take us and so with this you know we you know we've loved watching stuff like Top Gear in the Grand Tour and so we get to dabble making car videos and doing silly stuff

you know we raced a Tesla around a racetrack against a super bike you know we get to do fun things but across lots of different things including we have our own animated series in the works at the moment so hopefully that gets properly greenlit we'll see but you know it's it's amazing kind of all the different doors that get opened as you continue on so we will we will get on to our top 10 tips' very soon I just wanted to quickly talk about I was going to talk more about it but it wasn't quite a lot in the panel last time actually about they had had and they had pocalypse the fact that one of things if you are trying to build a youtube channel and you now want to build it out of just making the money from from google adsense it's gonna be really hard there's so much less money there now than there was 12 months ago than there was a few years ago and that's a real thing luckily and there's lots of reasons for that luckily there are other

ways to make money now again that got talked about an awful lot on the influencers panel so I won't I won't go on about it apart from to say there's real reasons why working with influences is a really good idea because it is how people make make purchasing decisions looking at what happens and yes you've got mentioned before I've looked through this but full-floor is our in-house influencer marketing agency please use us if your brand or you're an influencer we do lots of things and work with some cool people right okay so here's so this isn't clickbait we've got ten things that you absolutely must do and so if you don't get seven billion views you missed one of these steps okay so again you didn't read the Asterix there and the tiny small print but that's the problem you've already watched most of the video so we've got our view we're happy next patience it takes a long time

success certainly if you're creating your own brand or your own channel is certainly not overnight every overnight success on YouTube has been years in the making so you will find even on Twitch put up your hands if you heard of doctor disrespect you heard of him okay some of the ladies yeah he for example blew up last year but that was something that he had been doing on and off for a very very long time and it's just again with that kind of perseverance and patience you can find success if you're lucky and part of that patience is being consistent and that is making sure not not not just that you stick at it which is super important but that you put videos out consistently not just you keep putting them out but you put them out on the same day at the same time and roughly about the same thing so the audience knows what they're coming for and the algorithm will talk a bit about the algorithm as you go through these which is all important on YouTube understands what it's going to be

showing to people otherwise you just won't show your videos to anyone so you have to build that consistency into what you do as well as the video content the look of your channel the look of your thumbnails or how your descriptions talk about you and your own personal brand and be consistent around that be seen basically is talking about get out there do collaborations social media those sorts of areas as well anyway you can get your brand out don't be shy about yourself you know you need to use all the tools you've got available to you in equally from a Content perspective don't neglect things like facecam and ways to get your personality across again if you were brand sometimes having a person that's very closely aligned to your brand can help bridge that kind of human gap it's also that the the algorithm as well to gain about the algorithm of YouTube it responds when

your content is being shown at other places where the embeds of your content are being shown on bigger on other media and sometimes this leads to two problems so people can do super controversial things and get covered and their videos end up getting more views please don't do that that's a terrible way to go about it but you can see that that's how the platform works if it sees you being viewed and talked about elsewhere and linked to then it will start showing show more of your videos to more people so understand the platform we talked about YouTube but this is the same for all of the all of the platforms and they are all different and you can't just make one piece of content and cut it up for different maybe the same piece of content and put it on to the different platforms you've got to make specific for that for that platform so just to delve a bit further insert into the YouTube platform and the algorithm just to give some actual tips so you walk away with some real things

that would help you the some some quick algorithm tips is concentrate on watched I'm not views it's an amount of time that your videos are being watched is so much more important than the amount of views you get you should be that consistency thing you should be doing at least three videos a week a video every day works much best for the algorithm the guy was doing three videos a day doesn't work for the algorithm but don't tell him that it's making loads of money so it doesn't matter yeah the your video length should be somewhere between seven and sixteen minutes sounds really simple but more service equals more viewership but lots your views will come from yourselves it is an important thing to build subscriber numbers and give subscribers what they want relevancy is key it's not just about trying to find topical things you've got to make sure that everything

around your video is relevant to what's happening on your channel and what's happening in if it's gaming what's happening gaming and that embedded views is the is the point I made earlier around the algorithm really likes to see your your videos being watched off platform and that brings people onto the platform for a couple of really good people you should you should have a look at there's lots of other people out there but these are a couple of great people if you are looking to build build your channel Matt Gillen is is a genius about YouTube you should follow him read everything he writes game theorist Matt Pat he's pretty good on on the youtubes as well and and this videos about how the algorithm works a really really good yeah it's nice guy I understand the value of content that's what that says just so most most of your value will come not in how much that's worth so I know Tom's running out but in

a lot of it will be about your time and the amount of time it took to make that content and you've got to think think a lot about that when you're planning what you do on your channel editing sound it is important as much to be joke about how crap our original videos are you can't imagine that everyone is always watching every second movie video but often they are listening to every second you might be in another tab in a different window so really don't neglect sound if is a bit rubbish video quality and the sound is bad you're very unlikely to see that video do well bad video is more forgivable than bad sounds but equally keep it concise nice and neat good quality blah then appoint the subs already made up here once already is that you have to enjoy it if you're going to be if you can have that patience you're going to be consistent you've got to be enjoying what you do know that you can carry on doing it and you're still doing a year from now two years from now personality we said a lot basically it's the only thing that you

have that is unique about you if you think you have another thing that's unique about you sadly you're wrong there are a lot people in the world you are you put that out there you will find an audience how big that audience depends on how you are and personalities so important that gets to and that counts it still counts that's nine just really important personality but ten we mix it up a little bit the big personality it truly is the most important thing so that's how you just feel a list feature like this of ten things you need so thank you please do make sure you like this video tell your friends and subscribe don't forget to click the bell it's very important you get notified about other talks we're doing so please do that alternatively you can email us or you can tweet us or you can talk to us if you're pretty old-fashioned thank you very much

we are already as late as we can be like the the conference is gonna end and we're gonna still be here so do you have any questions I give up no questions we go we've got a question yes about about seven to fifteen minute videos how long would you expect someone to watch what is it good ideally you want to hear more than 75% watch time exactly and so 10 minutes is great because it unlocks post-roll so in terms of monetization you'll find a lot of videos and lot of people trying to hit that 10 minute thing I would always suggest that the content is good so if the content is a is a great eight minute video or an eight minute video but in theory 10 minutes to 15 minutes is a sweet spot you can go longer if your content suits [Music]

[Music]