Not sure if this is GQ or even IMHO, so mods please move if necessary.
A couple of years ago I made a video doing some Irish music with a some friends which we flung on YouTube. Now, over a year after we first uploaded it, it has suddenly got a whole load of views (like 12K or so, not much in the great scheme of things, but it’s enough to be exciting to us). I was just wondering if anyone has any idea why. I have done similar things in the past, and got about 300 views max, just friends and people who have seen me play in real life.
The song hasn’t been in the news in any way AFAIK and we even checked if any of the commenters has some kind of Internet clout, but nothing. Is it just luck, where a bunch of views makes the algorithm push it onto more people and it snowballs from there or am I missing something? I don’t really want a YouTuber style career, but I am curious about what’s happening.
Youtube does change their algorithm from time to time, with a big change every year or so (you can tell because the entire internet suddenly starts complaining about it) and your video certainly could have been pushed up to the top of some people’s or become a ‘related video’ that shows up at the end of another video.
It also could have been posted on a place like reddit for any number of reasons. And those reasons could be entirely unrelated to what you’d have guessed. For example, you were trying to see if the music was in the news, but someone might have posted to ask if anyone recognizes the brand of shoes someone is wearing or asking what the thing on the floor is. A lot of videos and pictures show up on r/WhatIsThisThing for exactly this reason.
I’ve also noticed a lot of older videos that just suddenly show up on people’s Recommended feed. Lately, this has often been rather short videos with some relevance to old pop culture.
Searching in that way showed that it was mentioned on FB once, but not on a page with enough subscribers to explain the numbers. However, it has permitted me to figure out that what makes the video stand out is probably the use of “lilting”(singing an Irish melody with nonsense syllables) instead of singing words. So that was useful!
Now, what’s interesting, is that after you posted the link and I googled it, the only hit I came up with was where you posted it to another board a few days ago with the same question. When I googled a video of mine that randomly got something like 10k views (when everything else just has a handful), I got nothing (except links to related videos) even though I know for a fact I posted it here.
Just now I checked the video’s analytics and saw that about 3k hits came from here. Which makes sense because it’s posted to youtube with little more than a title. It’s described here so people using the correct search terms will end up here and IIRC, the thread has been bumped from the grave like a dozen times now.
That was the singer asking the same question - that one came up for me too, but I already knew about it. The answers from here were more useful, though.
The answers from here were more useful, though.