The brief life of a 'Viral Video Hit' (Patreon)

I thought you might want to see the impact that having a video reposted on a popular blog has and it's not as great as you might think.

I was in a fast food restaurant killing time whilst my car was getting serviced when an email came through on my phone from one of the youtube subscribers excitedly telling me that my Nixie watch video was on Gizmodo, and I'd hit the big time. From experience I knew that it would be a flash in the pan. I'd seen this happen a few times over the years and carried on eating my KFC.

The graph above shows what happened when the Nixie watch video got reposted on Gizmodo. The first peak is the views from the usual subscribers to the channel and the second peak is the Gizmodo views. The inlaid grey box shows subscriber numbers generated by that video.

On Peak Gizmodo views day (April 19th) the video received 33,000 views. On that day the video generated  just 17 subscribers.  

On the same day the total new subscribers to the channel was over 300...as it usually is on most days. So despite the brief viewer bump - the video was statistically insignificant when it came to introducing new subscribers to the channel.

As far as revenue goes - there's been  very little impact. The income from that video is only about a quarter of the way towards paying for the postage and import duty to get the watch to the UK. The Nixie watch was a free sample from Cathode corner, but I offered to pay for the courier costs. 

I'm pleased to report though that Cathode corner have reported a five fold increase in orders after the video was posted...so the video did it's job at getting the news out there. 

I've been posting videos on youtube for ten years now and I know that subscribers are built up slowly from recommendations, word of mouth and organically from people searching for a particular review and then hanging around to see more.  There's no way to force things to happen, it takes it's own time, and I'm perfectly prepared to wait.

The increased views generated from a video being featured on a top blog, the Australian news, The Daily Mirror or the New York post (all of which happened in the last couple of months) - really don't amount to a hill of beans at the end of the day.

I'm not here for the celebrity, this is more of a long term job...and one that I really enjoy.