GUEST POST: Why These Comedians Went Viral in May

An analytical breakdown of some recent, viral comedy videos.

Hello! I’m David Zucker, a former data analyst at TikTok that now helps comedians grow their audience. I incorporate data-driven analysis to make my global roster of clients go viral with purpose. I also run a mailing list of my own, where I rant about digital marketing, break down viral videos. and recently conducted an audit of Matt Rife’s social media profiles.

Today, we’ll examine a few recently released specials and clips from a variety of comedians and comedic styles.

The first section of today’s analysis will be available for all subscribers, but the rest will be for paid subscribers only.

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Dan Licata: For The Boys

Released on May 30th, NYC-based Dan Licata’s special was performed in front of an audience entirely made up of 15 year-old boys at his former high school in Buffalo, NY.

It’s already racked up 53K+ views at the time of writing this, but I think there is a ton of ways For the Boys could reach an even wider audience.

I’m reminded of Fred Armisen’s 2018 Netflix special, Stand-Up for Drummers, in that these uniquely specific premises lend themselves to some really fun marketing ideas.

Working backwards, I would ask Dan - who is the ideal audience for this special? And how can you meet them where they already are, both digitally and in real life?

What other comedians do they follow, if any? Where do they spend their time? Where do they spend their money? The more information we have on our ideal hypothetical superfan, the more likely it is that we can actually reach them with the marketing.

Based on his other most recent YouTube video – a 45 minute livestream speed-run of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 – I imagine the ideal Licata-heads are every friend group of six dudes who took edibles before seeing Jackass Forever in theaters two years ago.

The good news is two-fold, in that this audience exists, and that this special is funny.

Additionally, a high-level glance at a few YouTube specials from Dan’s contemporaries in the alternative comedy space prove there exists a demand on this specific platform for this specific type of format (Joe Pera, Conner O’Malley, and Australian Dan Rath’s recently released hours come to mind).

The challenge lies in figuring out how to reach those people digitally.

The first strategy comedians tend to employ is leveraging other social media platforms – such as Instagram and TikTok – to drive traffic to their YouTube special.

But too often, comedians overestimate the potential for organic conversion, especially when they haven’t established themselves on these social media apps as “fellow users”.

A brief look at Dan’s TikTok (9 total posts, all posted in the last 2 months) shows that there was an effort to directly promote the special on his newly created profile.

I’ve taken the liberty of pulling the underlying data, take a look at some of the metrics.

What jumps out?

For me, it’s a few things.

• Solid Engagement Despite Low Reach: The average Like PCT across all videos was 8%, if we remove the trailer outlier. In other words, 1 in 12 people who saw any of Dan’s videos pressed ‘Like’, signaling, “I’d like to see more videos like this”.

  • Not bad, considering these were all posted from a fairly new account.

• Official Special Trailer Had Lowest Engagement: There is essentially no point in posting anything on TikTok that can be labeled as “direct promo” without the intention of putting paid spend behind it. This makes sense if you think about it from TikTok’s perspective. Why would we organically allow you to promote traffic towards – and, in turn, make more money for – our biggest competitor?

• Video Length: All nine videos were 60 seconds or less. The average video length was 42 seconds. As our previous write-ups have shown, longer TikToks are positively correlated with increased reach, without sacrificing engagement.

• Hashtag Strategy: Opportunity for optimization. E.g, #fyp was used on 8/9 videos. This might have worked in 2020-2021, but not so much anymore. Take a look at what your peers are doing on their recent, successful videos and emulate them.

• Caption Text: Using several no-no words in the caption like “YouTube” and “link in bio” that are commonly correlated with low view counts / view suppression.

• Most Recent Six Videos Were All Direct Promo: Something said all the time internally at TikTok to brands on the platform was “Don’t make ads, make TikToks”. While this is easy to roll your eyes at, it’s one of the truest things I’ve heard, and applies to comedians, too. If you’re posting on TikTok, make TikToks.

One of the reasons I harp so much on defining your audience in advance is so that this intel can be incorporated when boosting organic videos on social media. Knowing that your ideal fan on Instagram has liked Facebook pages in 2011 called things like “Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 Remix”, “Bam’s Unholy Union”, and “RIP RYAN DUNN” allows us to take some of the guesswork out of targeting the right users.

The more you can bake this level of intentionality into your approach, the more likely you’ll drive conversion (in this case, YouTube views) with your digital marketing.

Tess Tregellas: “Girl Code”