Full disclosure, I am not a fan of YouTube as a medium for intellectual growth. My children, on the other hand, find deep meaning in watching game videos that they find humorous, engaging, and that I find to be crude representations of teenage idiocy (you kids get off my lawn!)
But I always find a measure of brilliance in anyone who can figure out how to game a system in order to optimize their results. Enter PewDiePie…
So a young swedish guy plays video games on Youtube, does and says ridiculous things and becomes the number one Youtube Channel… Sounds like a hack, in the classical sense of the term, right?
The Game Theorists YouTube channel did a remarkably astute summary of how to use Youtube’s algorithm’s to create a cycle of new views, explaining PewDiePie’s success. You can watch it here:
Interesting way to drive engagement. Too bad I can’t go back and video marathon gaming sessions from the late eighties and early nineties to capture crude juvenile humor and make YouTube video stars out of my own group of geeks…