Modern technology has made building notoriety on YouTube (of either kind!) very easy to do. Once upon a time, to access YouTube you needed a PC and quality of internet that only 15% of the country had in 2009. Compare that to today, where the average household has almost 20 Wi-Fi enabled devices. There is unlimited audience potential!
With the advent of Vine, TikTok, and other brain-rot inducing shortform content – The bar for the metric of engagement (content view) has dropped to the lowest it can go. Longform content is easier to consume in bits – thanks to features like “Continue watching” and automatic timestamp saving. To maximize audience exposure it’s best to best to mix both forms. Long video (10+ min) makes clips, clips make shorts.
Here are five content templates to maximize engagement and subscribers when starting your YouTube channel:
Commentary
Commentary videos are when you provide informed insights on a subject. Most of the work is done before you hit the “Create” button – so if you consider yourself a great writer, commentary videos may be the easiest way to showcase your talent. Try to tell an interesting story when creating your script. Visuals aren’t as important as most viewers will “listen” to your content while doing something. Image slideshows and gameplay videos are easy “filler visuals” to start with as you evolve.
Streamer
Most of the work done here is after you hit the “Create” button! If you’re charismatic, quick-witted, and comfortable in front of a camera – you’ll succeed as a streamer. It takes time and consistency, but YouTube’s algorithm guarantees you viewers and subscribers if you are interesting. It doesn’t even matter what you do. Entertaining people doing boring things gets views, but the opposite does not. It helps that the “Live” tab on YouTube is generous with what they showcase. Scroll through it and you’ll see viewer counts ranging from the thousands to the single digits. The main categories you’ll see are:
- Hangout – Usually a Streamyard with up to 10 guests on stage. Sometimes the panel is open for audience members to join.
- Talk Show – Providing commentary or reaction to a particular subject
- Hobby – Gaming, sports, etc.
- Misc. – static camera feeds, audio only, special presentation
The hardest audience members to recruit are your first five viewers. It’s helpful to have genuine interactions with others who have similar interests. If your streams are interesting, those who know you will hang out and watch. If there’s a handful of people engaging with both your stream and each other, they’re likely to stay longer. A passerby who may have only stayed for a few minutes may stay for several times as long interacting with other members of the audience. This creates a cascading effect, so make sure you’re emphasizing audience retention as much as audience attraction.
Twitch is a more rewarding platform for established streamers, but two advantages YouTube has is looser moderation and easier means of exposure. Take advantage of both to rapidly build your YouTube subscriber count!
Reaction
Reaction videos are when you give your immediate thoughts and insights to a recent event or piece of media. Unlike commentary, these are usually unscripted and may even just be you playing a video and pausing for interjections. As you may suspect, cunning creators can plan or script their videos and create commentary disguised as reaction content.
Reaction videos are great if you’re knowledgeable on a subject consistently sees “breaking news” or “major updates.” YouTube’s algorithm loves channels that provide interesting insights on new developments. Even though these are “reaction” videos, the best creators are proactive – planning their content in advance by predicting the twists and turns.
Drama
A successful drama channel will have a mix of commentary, streamer, or reaction elements. Your content is only as interesting as its subject. When considering who to cover, there are a couple categories that guarantee you a faction of viewers:
- Anti-bully – subjects that mistreat or take advantage of others. People enjoy seeing a jerks get what they deserve.
- Pick a side – Take up one side of a conflict against the other. Play fast and loose with the truth. Benefit from both love-watchers and hate-watchers.
- Bad Man Bad – Tell your audience why some person, entity, or idea is the worst thing ever. If you have ideas contrary to popular sentiment, consider doing a “Good Man Good”
- Exposed? – Share an idea or revelation that has not been widely discussed. People like being in the know.
Shorts
By far the easiest path to engagement on YouTube. If you’re going to do a mix of videos and shorts, keep in mind that the overlap of consumers for both is non-existent. Content-wise it doesn’t really matter what you create, it will get views. From a creator standpoint, the demand (10 seconds of attention) is much greater than the supply (an interesting short). Add in a Skynet-tier algorithm and the massive amount of information that Google has on people’s search habits, and it’s all but guaranteed that any decent short you make will be scrolled through thousands of times.
It doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it – being genuine, putting in effort, and striving to improve will bring views to your channel. (unless you’re making shorts!)