My first 1 million view video!

...wasn’t on the platform I wanted it to be on.

If you head into the content creation game expecting to chase viral videos, you’ll waste an awful lot of time.

Viral content cannot be predicted or strategised - unless you’re Mr Beast, which none of us is. You can’t intentionally ‘make a hit’ on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or within the digital pages of Medium. If it happens to you, it’ll be a mixture of your unique personality (we all have one of those) and a massive dose of luck.

After three years on YouTube and having amassed an audience of nearly 100,000 subscribers (we’re almost there, folks!) I still haven’t experienced a viral YouTube video in the truest sense of the word. My highest-performing long-form video has 688,000 views, but they’ve gathered over a long period of time, and the most popular Short I’ve published has 92,000 views. These are not viral numbers, I’m afraid - you really have to break into the millions for that to be true.

However, I have had a viral hit elsewhere. Yup, I’m now smashing up the TikToks, bro. I’m down with the kidz and pulling in dem viewz. And it’s all because of a - very last-minute - video I decided to shoot where I casually reveal that I’ve decided to give the Samsung Z Fold4 a go - seven months after it was launched.

To date, that video has scored 1.3 million views on TikTok.

Why did it go viral? I think it’s for two reasons. Firstly, I make a quip about the UK pronunciation of the letter ‘Z’, which resulted in an avalanche of digital fights between UK and US users in the comments. Secondly, I noted that I was usually an iPhone user, which resulted in an avalanche of digital fights between iOS and Android fans in the comments. Some of them argued about the aforementioned pronunciation and the best mobile operating system in the same breath. Double points - yay!

I shot the 24-second clip on my iPhone without a proper mic or anything remotely resembling decent lighting (or framing). The content itself and the engagement it sparked (there have been over 1,000 comments added so far, and 44,000 taps of the like button) won the day and convinced TikTok to pump that video out to the masses.

It would have been nice for it to perform as nicely on YouTube, but it didn’t (it managed ‘just’ 29,000 views on that platform).

This brings me right back to the start of this newsletter. I could never have predicted the virality of that video on TikTok. I had an inkling it might perform fairly well given the iOS versus Android element, but the ‘Zee/Zed’ pronunciation bit was a total fluke.

As a full-time content creator, I can’t make a living chasing videos like that; I’d waste so much time trying to come up with similarly high-performing video ideas - time I should be spending on developing great, consistent content.

The more you put stuff out there, and the more you focus on being you, the more chance you have of the odd video going viral. But please don’t chase that stuff - viral videos are one-time wonders; they don’t help you build engaged audiences, and they have little to no impact on your ability to make money from this craft.

They’re fun when they happen, but that really is about it. And that’s fine!