Going a little viral

I have three youtube channels. The first, which I called ThreeStepsOverJapan, was created close to 14 years ago, and focused primarily on activities in Tokyo, anime and manga-related events in and around Akihabara, and Gakken Adult Science kit reviews. A couple years later, I set up the second channel, Curtis Hoffmann, to be more about the Gakken kits, and math and science stuff, but I kept forgetting to switch accounts when I uploaded new videos, so it ended up being a catch-all for everything; from live music events, to my Java synthesizer demos and my Kagoshima fastwalks. The third channel, The Black Chamber, just went live 3-4 months ago, and is only for my cryptography tutorials.

Every so often, I would check my channel stats to see what kind of activity I was getting. I have a LOT of videos between the first two channels, but on average I'd have no more than 10-15 views each. The real exception was with my Java software arpeggiator demo. That was at maybe 600 views the last time I looked, about a year ago. I didn't really like checking that one, because most of the comments were negative, either about my mispronouncing "arpeggiator," or the fact that it was essentially a "tutorial for demonstrating a programming technique in Java," and not a music video. Anyway, I stopped reading the comments for "What is an Arpeggiator?", and there weren't any real comments on any of the other videos. If I could get the occasional 50 views on one, I'd be happy.

Then, when I set up The Black Chamber channel, I discovered that it was a lot easier to switch accounts than I'd remembered, so I went back to the ThreeSteps channel and found that it had picked up about 79 subscribers. I felt a little guilty in not having uploaded anything there in years, and I wanted to let everyone there know that the second channel was the active one. I wanted to make a channel-wide announcement, but Youtube doesn't provide that feature if you have fewer than 1,000 subscribers. My only choice was to record a "what's new" video, which I did for ThreeStepsOverJapan and Curtis Hoffmann, mainly to try to get people to subscribe to The Black Chamber, too. Three people responded in the comments in the ThreeSteps channel, which was nice (better than no comments at all).

If that's all there was to write about, I wouldn't have bothered with this blog entry. So, last week, I was logged in under Curtis Hoffmann, when the "What is an Arpeggiator?" video suddenly popped up in my recommended list. That seemed strange, since I'd thought that one had been uploaded under the Curtis Hoffmann channel name. Turns out, though, that I'd uploaded it as ThreeStepsOverJapan, and that it was suddenly up to 100,000 views.

That blew my mind. I started digging into the view stats for the two channels, and the numbers for the top five videos for each one were staggering (to me, anyway).

ThreeStepsOverJapan Channel
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What is an Arpeggiator? - 100,000
Jass demo 1 - 6,900
Kaossilator Pro as an effect - 6,000
Fudan Juku 122108 - 3,800
duo rama - 3,600
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Number of videos with over 1,000 views - 17

Curtis Hoffmann Channel
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Yukata Matsuri, 2015, Yuria, Part 2 - 12,000
Kumo Gassen, 2014 - 9.2000
Karuta Competition Sampler - 8.900
Yuria, 150315 - 5,500
Synth Tutorial, Part 5 - 5,400
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Number of videos with over 1,000 views - 18

This is all well and good, I guess, except that I've never monetized either of the channels, and The Black Chamber is a lot slower at gaining subscribers than I'd like. I would like to know what it is about the Arpeggiator video that's suddenly made it so popular, but it is a nice feeling to see that something I've done has gotten more than 50 views, and I'm not going to complain now that it's happened.