K atie c ouric

particularly valuable for the long haul because content lives there forever
and is easily searchable. If your content is solid, it can get picked up in
other places as well and you can start to build organically.
Content Discovery and Growth
Brownstein explains that people typically discover content in three ways:
(1) Everyone starts sharing your content and it goes viral—the best way, but
extremely hard to make happen on YouTube since it’s not an inherently
shareable platform. (2) Through search. If you hit metadata and trends that
people are already searching, it’s a great way to get discovered. (3) Through
other people’s content, which is a big reason collaborations come in handy.
Jonathan Skogmo, CEO of Jukin Media and creator of the YouTube
channel FailArmy, with more than thirteen million subscribers, has had
major success. In fact, when “Gangnam Style” was the number one most
watched video in the world, Skogmo’s company had the second most
watched video, “The Ultimate Girls Fail Compilation 2012.”
1
“Gangnam
Style” had four hundred million views in November 2012, and “Ultimate
Girls Fail” had 290 million. Skogmo shares that his company has seen
YouTube make all sorts of changes in their algorithms based on users’
behaviors and reactions. If you’re a content creator, you must be agile
enough to make quick changes and tweaks as YouTube changes. Study the
platform and continuously pay attention to what does well. This goes back

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to the idea of testing and learning, although being searchable is always
going to be one of the keys to growth.
Chris Williams, the founder and CEO of pocket.watch and former chief
audience officer of Maker Studios, where he oversaw more than sixty
thousand channels, says that the best way to grow on YouTube is a
combination of paid media, collaborations, optimizations, and playlisting.
He’s a big believer in using paid media to lead to organic growth. He adds
that follow-on views—the amount of content people watch after the initial
video they’re driven to—is the truest indication of organic growth coming
off paid media expenses.
He uses AdSense to track which videos his viewers watch. His team
determines the effectiveness of a piece of content by how much more
content it gets people to consume. This indicator dictates their strategy and
influences how his team uses paid media to fuel growth. It gives them
insight into both the content and the marketing strategy.
Jackie Koppell adds that she has seen people grow quickly with
giveaways. When she was at AwesomenessTV she saw people give away
fancy cameras or iPads. If you can do that consistently (which she realizes
most people can’t) your numbers start to skyrocket.