How I reached 1 million views.

Luck plays a much bigger role in success than people imagine.

The way I see it, there are 3 unwritten rules to social media (and probably societal) success: 1. You need to be at least slightly photogenic, 2. Have a non regional accent 3. Be charismatic.

I have none of these three qualities. So how did I manage to wrack up 1 million views across social media in a relatively short space of time?

The short answer is that I got lucky.....

I am not going to sit here and pretend that I have some magic formula or secret hack that guarantees a path to success. Unfortunately, social media is replete with people claiming they understand how to hack the algorithm of YouTube or Instagram etc.

The truth is however, nobody except for the companies themselves know exactly how the algorithm is coded. For anyone else to claim they know the ins and outs of the software, is to put it bluntly, farcical.

The bulk of views that got me to 1 million were not strictly speaking original material that I created myself. But what was original was my interpretation of that material. The video that got me most views to date (778,000 as of the time of writing this article) was a Tik Tok that I made from an old Harrison Ford interview from the early 1980s. I thought it would make for a nice video, but nothing amazing. Obviously the "algorithm" thought otherwise and the video went viral : https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGeCjLuXS/

Other videos of mine that have done really well have been YouTube shorts about not so serious subjects, and more clips from interviews, hardly original stuff. But this is what the social media marketplace wants at this moment in time. My YouTube short form material has easily got me around 200K views, so they also did play a biggish role in getting me to that 1 million count. There are two types of YouTube content, education or entertainment. Most of the shorts that did well for me fall into the entertainment category. They say if you can provide some sort of value to the viewer then you will be onto a winner.

My own original material has done OK, nothing earth shattering, so in essence I learned how to play the social media game, producing what I thought would be quick wins. Needless to say, that strategy has paid off in getting me to a million view in a short space of time.

However, deep down, making satirical YouTube shorts or cat videos isn't really what I'm about. I like to make a mixture of content. Some pharmacy related stuff, other times it's about current societal themes, and recently I am tending towards more photography/videography content.

I recently watched a fascinating video that makes a good argument for luck playing a bigger role in success than people like to admit:

I think the video does make some good points, and luck does play a massive role in success. If more people realise this, then maybe they could optimise for maximising their luck in life.

So what does this mean for my own content going forward? Well, I am not about to completely write off short form content altogether, because I think some material lends itself perfectly to that sort of format. But I think in essence, I would like to get back to more long form content as well as create more artistic type videos, especially with my recent acquisition of the mighty Fuji XH2s which is proving itself to be a photographic and video powerhouse.

So while reaching a cumulative 1 million views is a fantastic achievement by any objective metric, I am at the stage now where I would be happy to sacrifice viewing figures in order to give me the freedom to produce more of the content that I want to produce. It's easy to make content that is mass appealing and trending etc, but essentially, if that's all I were to do, where is the originality in my work? Where is the avenue for creative expression and artistic freedom?

I have a huge amount of ideas for videos, so I will continue to make content and see what happens. Focussing too much on number of views/subscribers etc, is probably a mistake. I think the content has to come first. Anything else is a bonus. See you on a video coming to a screen near you soon!