Viral YouTube video & getting onto the front page of Reddit. (Case Study)

Korean kid video on Reddit

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In the marketing world, they often say that getting content to go viral is a “stroke of luck”. But this weekend, one of the videos that I’d published on one of my YouTube channels back in 2014 has gone viral again. I’ve previously published a post about doing YouTube SEO and what I’d seen with that same video gaining traction on YouTube.

Here’s the video below.

Since April 28th, I started to get notifications in my Gmail with people commenting on the video and subscribing to the channel. The YouTube channel “Lollivia” has been dormant for a while as I’ve focused my energy on developing my agency’s YouTube channel.

A friend of mine that I used to work with in London sent me the following message.

“Mate, you’re on the front page of Reddit!”

Here’s the screenshot below.

Korean kid 1st page Reddit
Korean kid 1st page Reddit

It was 6am when I received the message, so I actually missed the video being on the front page. But I took a screenshot of the video on the second page of Reddit.

Korean kid video - 2nd page Reddit
Korean kid video – 2nd page Reddit
Korean kid video on Reddit
Korean kid video on Reddit

You can click here to see the original link that was shared on Reddit.

When I checked the link, there were over 900 comments on the Reddit thread.

In 48h, there’s been over 250 additional subscribers and probably another 100 comments added to the video.

What made this video go viral?

To be honest, I don’t know. When I first uploaded the video, it only had less than 100 views. Then I checked it a few months later and it had jumped to 8000. Then it went viral somewhere. Then it went quiet. Then it had another viral spurt. Then it went quiet. And now this is a much more significant viral spurt.

Here’s an image showing the first viral spurts.

Video view growth on YouTube
Video view growth on YouTube

Here’s an image showing the latest viral trigger.

New viral trigger on the video
New viral trigger on the video

At the moment, there’s a lot of news about the North Korean crisis, so it is possible that the information trend has contributed towards this.

I have previously published a Reddit advertising case study on this blog, which talks about how I tried to get some traction on Reddit, but unfortunately it didn’t succeed.

The person that shared this video was obviously an engaged Reddit user and it might have been that the sub-reddit community that they shared it to resonated with the content and made it go viral.

I wish I could give you more insight into how to make content go viral on Reddit, but the only thing I can definitely say is that the content that you produce needs to resonate with an audience.

Increase in referral web traffic.

I also noticed a spike in my Lollivia.com website’s referral web traffic as a result of people clicking on the link from the video. You can see a screenshot of my site’s analytics below.

Traffic from viral YouTube video
Traffic from viral YouTube video

Takeaways.

One of the things that I can definitely say is that it is important to publish content that resonates with an audience. This video is almost three years old, but in the last 48h, it has received over 600,000 views. Publishing content is important in order to create opportunity for exposure, sharing and links. Sometimes it happens quickly and other times (as in this case) it takes a long time for things to start kicking in.

Below is a screenshot showing some of the places where people shared the video directly from the platform.

How many people shared the video?
How many people shared the video?

In the screenshot below, you can see how the video has been shared on several sites on the web just by doing a Google search for the video.

Google search for Korean kid video
Google search for Korean kid video

The video is still going viral. I will share as much insight as possible.

If you have any thoughts, please leave them in the comments section below.

Thanks for reading.

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4 thoughts on “Viral YouTube video & getting onto the front page of Reddit. (Case Study)”

  1. Pingback: How To Rank YouTube Videos - 88 SEO Experts Share The Best Strategies

  2. Pingback: Viral YouTube video & getting onto the front page of Reddit. (Case Study) – Digital Marketing Tips and Updates

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