Wrote a much bigger tweet but it didn’t save properly, so here’s the short version of something super niche. How do you make $70M USD in a weekend with YouTube? Long story short, Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle had the highest grossing opening day of Japanese box office history, at $11.1M. In the US, it did $70M for its opening weekend, which is absolutely bonkers for an anime movie. It beat even Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away. But a niche part of their promotional strategy is no longer able to be studied — because the YouTube strategy in question has been taken down! Essentially, Crunchyroll (a massive company that streams anime episodes) usually requires a subscription to watch their anime episodes. They do have an ad-supported free version too. But they streamed the ENTIRE Demon Slayer anime series on YouTube, before the premiere of the movie. You can’t watch them anymore because they’ve been taken down, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. But it really was the entire series, from start to finish, of every episode that people would usually have to be on Crunchyroll to watch. Now to go into the niche YouTube strategy part of things. This should be obvious/intuitive, but the longer a viewer spends engaged with something, the more invested they are. This is both a correlation and causation thing, and in the mainstream, has been partly responsible for the outcomes of major elections. Regardless of your views on politics, from a purely social media perspective, one party absolutely steamrolled the other. So live-streaming full series has many great effects that directly contributed to box office: 1. Expose Demon Slayer to brand new audiences 2. Re-expose Demon Slayer to older audiences who may have watched it in the past And by sheer virtue of the insanely appealing enticement to watch an entire series for free, some people would absolutely take them up on that offer. Amazingly and also super niche, but the company VISUAL ARTS in Japan had done something extremely similar with Clannad for their Key25th anniversary. These videos are also taken down, but I’ve attached a screenshot. In summary: a super niche but effective strategy to massively promote an “event content” (i.e. a movie) is to: 1. release an entire series of something for free that was previously paid, and 2. it helps if it by definition was long/well produced all the way Not exactly the same, but I’ve had minor success with a 1.2 million view video on one of my own channels, basically stitching together a previously paid course into a mega YouTube video. So it’s cool to see the anime equivalent. Sadly, I did not get a screenshot in time for the Demon Slayer livestreams, so you’ll really just have to believe me that it happened — as I don’t know if anyone else would have nerded out about this kind of promotional strategy publicly. Of course, Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle has many more reasons why it did spectacularly well in box office. It’s an incredibly popular series, the story was in the right place, and this arc was therefore hyped massively. But there is no doubt their YouTube strategy had some effect. At the writing, it’s $470M at the box office which is insane for a movie that cost $20M to produce. I’ve no doubt they will (or should) use this strategy again. I figured this strategy is a bit niche since it namely applies to movie releases where a previously existing series is OK to be uploaded to YouTube. But I’m sure if you’re on this side of Twitter, you’ll be able to figure out some analogy for how it applies to your channel/niche/IP.
tl;dr super niche but: 1. If you’re a studio releasing a movie and you want it to do extremely well at box office, consider uploading your ENTIRE series to YouTube as a livestream in the few weeks leading I’ll to the movie release. 2. The specific case study is Demon Slayer’s promotional strategy by Crunchyroll for a $70M opening weekend at the US box office for ‘Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle’z
