GUEST POST: How It Went Viral: YouTube Edition

Unpacking how Riki Lindhome's recent music video for her song 'Middle Age Love' reached 320,000 views in the last month.

Hello! I’m David Zucker, a former data analyst at TikTok that now helps comedians grow their audience. I also run a mailing list of my own, where I recently shared how SNL got their most viewed TikTok ever, and discussed how every app is copying TikTok, except for the ones that should be. I’ll be releasing a New York Comedy Festival Guide over there tomorrow, so be sure to subscribe if you want to receive that in advance of next week’s happenings.

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I recently realized that despite this column already being in its ninth edition (!!), we hardly ever touch on the “why” behind viral YouTube videos.

So I wanted to deep-dive on an instructive video from musical comedian Riki Lindhome (Garfunkel & Oates, Wednesday, Knives Out), whose solo show Dead Inside made me weep amongst 90 other teary-eyed punters at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.

Riki Lindhome – Middle Age Love

Quick Stats (at time of writing):

• 320,000 Views, 16K Likes, 767 Comments

• Like PCT: 5.0% | Comment PCT: 0.2%

• Video Length: 3 min 18 seconds

• Text Hook: none

• Hashtags: none

Although Riki has 300K+ followers on her Instagram, her YouTube channel currently sits at 18K subscribers.

Meaning at least 300,000 views came from people who don’t subscribe to her channel.

Which begs the question, How did people discover the video if they don’t subscribe?

The first suspect, as always, is shares.

And with such a relatable subject matter, that was definitely a factor here.

While I don’t have visibility into the exact share count, it’s easy to envision lots of people sending this to their partner because it perfectly nailed their sexual dynamic.

But on YouTube, the majority of views actually come from two other places, instead: