When YouTubers want to get more views for YouTube, it really helps to understand the economics of how YouTube views work. I think both YouTubers and YouTube strategists think about this in slightly different ways, but I've made this diagram to help you understand my own theory of YouTube.
There's a few unique concepts here (in addition to all the other stuff which is more straighforward) which may be a bit confusing because I've arbitrarily define them, that I'd like to explain. 1// IRL demand vs. YT-demand ...is the first example. Every now and again, there is a video that is insanely crazy/good/timely that it somehow pulls people from outside of the platform to watch it. MrBeast Squid Game is the single example I can think of, off the top of my head. YouTube feels so deeply integrated into society that we just make an assumption that most everybody in on the platform watching it. But, people might actually be spending the majority of their watch hours on other platforms, or in rare cases, actually touching grass. The other reason for separating this out is that, for example, a product or event happens that never was even in the public's consideration before but is now sharply thrust into people's attention. Examples of this include major weather events, product launches, and even broader social or political trends and feelings. In short, YT-demand refers to the amount of demand that already exists on the platform itself. Whereas IRL demand reflects people on and off the platform. 2// Topic vs Idea I've separated out topic and idea, because topic feels like a broader economic thing, and idea is closely to the specific implementation of that concept. Just as an example: a topic of great interest to people might be "travel" or even specifically "AirBNBs". But the idea of "I Visited Every 'OMG' AirBNB" exists as its own specific version of the topic. The idea drives the title/thumbnail/storytelling, but a superb idea rarely saves a topic that was never in demand in the first place.
If you haven't checked it out already, I wrote a free 5-day email course for helping YouTubers grow their channel faster, which you can take at storytellingprimer.com. It gives you specific ways to optimise for a lot of these things and, I'm biased, but I think it's useful!
