I started working on Lydia Violet’s channel shortly after she started it. At the time she was a successful Twitch streamer so she already knew the basics when it came to lighting, audio, and creating engaging content. During the time YouTube shorts content was being heavily pushed by YouTube as it was fairly new and so we decided to jump on this and create reaction content.
After thinking of some ideas together we settled on a regular upload schedule creating this content and again had a couple ideas to try out before settling on the final which was reacting to comments left by viewers and jokes. This proved to be succesful and stuck resulting in the channel quickly surpassing 75 million views in a month and almost 170 thousand subscribers.
I had seen Greg’s success with his own youtube channels and decided to see how he would do with a reaction channel. I couldn’t be happier! The short form content I created ended up blowing up on my tiktok account and youtube channel.
Lydia
However this wasn’t the end as while the viewer count was high and subsceribers were growing they weren’t as engaged as they could be. YouTube shorts and other short form content is easier to go viral with but each viewer may only watch 10 to 30 seconds of the video as opposed to 5 or 10 minutes of a long format video. So we decided to come up with ideas for long format videos to then funnel these shorts viewers to. Again we settled on reaction content as well as other fun video ideas like an AMA (Ask Me Anything – questions and answers format video) which again in only 2 months has reached 364 thousand views alone. The result of the long format videos was more ad revenue, but more importantly a much more engaged audience who stay to watch a lot more content regularly.
My key takeaways from this case study are to make the best use of anything happening in the moment like a platform pushing a new feature like YouTube shorts, and to ensure that viewers are engaged and watching your content regularly for longer by creating long-form content to supplement the views from short format content. Lydia Violet’s channel currently sits at 657 thousand subscribers and 382 million views and growing.