Welcome to this blog series where myself and Intern Zac investigate some of the biggest, most watched videos on YouTube and ask... "Why?". What is it about these videos that drives millions and millions of people to spend so many precious minutes of watch time with them?
Each month we'll share our first impressions, plus I'll give you my expert opinion on what I think is really going on and what makes these videos stand apart.
Kylie Jenner, To Our Daughter
The number 1 most watched on YouTube in 2018 with over 80 million views achieved over 11 month at the time of writing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhIEIO0vaBE
Liz Says:
"Kylie Jenner has a ready made audience of millions of online fans so the views were always going to be huge. However, this video did particularly well because her fans want to see EVERYTHING about her. I honestly thought this video would make me want to throw my laptop into the sea, but I actually found it really sweet and touching. Cutting real life footage from the birth into edits of Kylie's life with messages filmed for the baby made it feel like we were getting access to something highly personal and special. The smattering of celebrities throughout also worked really nicely!"
Intern Zac Says:
"Although I would be the first to admit I’m not an expert when it comes to Kylie Jenner’s YouTube channel, from what I do know this video has a much more personal feel to it than the make-up tutorials and behind the scenes videos do. Another point of the video that I think Kylie fans will appreciate is a snippet in to her relationship with Travis Scott. Although the world famous rapper says little throughout the video their interactions with each other are not something that can usually be seen on her other videos."
Liz's expert opinion (the Why!):
Kylie's channel has very little optimisation in terms of titles, descriptions and thumbnails, but I suppose with 4 million subscribers hanging on for any scrap of video she uploads, then who needs to waste time optimising?!
So let's get our geek on a sec, and figure out how people are finding this video. Well first up it was shared liberally across all of Kylie's social profiles, and then picked up and shared some more by all of her fans. She has included a handful of very important keywords as tags including pronouns "Kylie Jenner" and "Travis Scott". The video has captions enabled which are feeding the big YouTube machine with even more keywords e.g. "baby", their names, "birth". These pronouns and core relevant words all help this video to rank highly in searches for things like "Kylie Jenner birth announcement".
But there's more to this. This video has achieved far more views than any of her other uploads, hitting over 80 million views in 11 months compared with a channel average of around 110K views per day. Why?
Well Intern Zac got this absolutely right (with extra chocolate biccies coming his way!). The highly personal nature and the insight into her life is what is so compelling, particularly compared with her other videos. Her fans clearly care more about getting to know her and her relationships than they do about her touring or beauty tips. She teases the birth footage right up front so viewers know what they're getting with this video from the first frame. The sentimental piano music also helps to set the scene. This is going to be mushy! And we love it!
I'd love to see some branding across this channel that gives all of her videos a more cohesive feel. Despite frequent uploads the channel is really inconsistent. Having a branded look and feel would encourage more fans to watch more of her videos for longer and help increase her daily view rate. Talking to the fans as if they are there and asking them questions would help with engagement, make the fans really feel part of something and encourage a thriving community on this platform.
But hey, 80 million views at the time of writing this. So amazing!
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