The YouTube Formula

18Building a Community around Your Content

Over the course of my career I have looked at a lot of content online, some of it incredibly amazing and some painfully awful. I wanted to know why some content performed well and some fell flat on its face. It taught me to have an eye for patterns that worked. I began noticing that content from certain brands or people worked almost every time, so I looked deeper to figure out why. Of course, it mattered that videos were made well, but I discovered that what mattered most had less to do with the video itself and more with who was watching it. When content was built around a loyal community, it consistently performed better than content that wasn't.

Community is everything. Humans need each other; we yearn to connect in all kinds of ways. We need to feel a sense of belonging. We want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. We like to be a part of a team, become a member of a band's groupies, meet with like‐minded people at conventions and athletic events, and talk to others like us in groups online. These communities can be as broad as nations or as specific as men who like My Little Pony and call themselves “Bronies” (see Chapter 12 for this fun story). You can belong to a small, local service club that helps families in need during the holidays, or you can belong to the million‐strong Rotary International service organization. There is an amazing book about building an online community called Superfans. It was written by ...