How Sambucha Escaped YouTube Shorts

samucha has quite literally taken over YouTube and chances are that you've probably seen one of his videos whether it be a short a Tik Tok or a long form it feels like samucha is everywhere now but things weren't always this way you see just a few years back samucha was working on Wall Street and really had no knowledge that he would ever even become a YouTuber so how did he go from no one even knowing his name to literally averaging 250 million views a month well before we get to that we have to start at the beginning samucha or Sam Burns was born on June 14th 1996 in New Jersey and as a kid Sam was pretty smart and had a really good memory and due to the fact that he had a really good memory he excelled in school and as Sam Grew Older he wanted to go and work somewhere where he would be able to use his academic abilities he wanted to go and work on Wall Street so when Sam graduated high school he moved to New York to go to college and study finance and management as Sam was in college he developed a sort of love for geography he began to play this game called geoguesser geoguesser was essentially a game where you would get dropped in a random location on Google Maps and by only looking at what was around you you had to try to pinpoint your location on a world map the closer you got the higher your score was Sam got really good at the game while he was in college because of his great memory he ended up graduating college after about 6 years and then he went to go and work on Wall Street Sam's job on Wall Street was great he got paid decent money and he had a decent amount of freedom with it so Sam took this opportunity to begin traveling all around the world because of his love for geography he traveled to different places such as Japan and Italy and when he came back to America he continued to play more geoguesser he was now getting really good at the game and he even started streaming geoguesser on Twitch because he wanted to share his knowledge with other people you see Sam was a big fan of this streamer named lwig and he had a small dream to maybe become a streamer one day but he had a pretty good job on Wall Street and he was aware that streaming fulltime was difficult so he kind of just did it for fun Sam would begin streaming different things like geography games memory test games and some other random stuff but Sam would get little or even no viewers and this wasn't because he was bad at streaming it was simply just the way that twitch was set up you see on YouTube and Tik Tok when a new Creator posts a video they get the same chance to go viral as every other Creator that's why you can sometimes find creators with only one video that has hundreds of thousands or even millions of views it's because they made a good video that people were interested in so YouTube promoted it but twitch isn't really like that it's nearly impossible for a new streamer to gain any sort of traction on Twitch because they don't really have an algorithm twitch really only recommends their top streamers and that's why you see a lot of streamers go to YouTube and Tik Tok to promote their streams Sam knew that this was the case so he created a Tik Tok account and began to post clips from his streams he posted a few different stuff like who Wants To Be A Millionaire Among Us and him reacting to other people's streams but nothing really gained any traction until one day he posted this Tik Tok of him doing a sequential memory test where he showed off how good his memorization skills are Sam didn't really think much of the video when he posted it he just thought it was a cool little clip but little did he know this video would actually change the trajectory of his life forever when he posted the video it started gaining views extremely fast and Sam started gaining a lot of TI to followers and a lot of people were also going and checking out his Twitch account Sam never expected this video to go viral but it did and it currently sits at 5 million views but this isn't even the craziest thing that happened though you see Sam received a DM on his account from a YouTuber named daily dose of internet and he was actually asking for Sam's permission to use a sequential memory clip inside of one of his videos obviously Sam said yes and on the 31st of December 2020 Sam got featured in an episode of daily dose of Internet he was on top of the world Sam loved going viral and also making content that people enjoyed watching Sam also realized that it wasn't a coincidence that he went viral either he realized that there was a formula to going viral Sam wanted to uncover this secret formula so he stopped posting random stream clips and he began to more knowledgeably plan out his videos Sam was going to post multiple times a day and try to discover what does and what doesn't go viral at around this time Sam also began began to post consistently on YouTube along with his Tik Tok well I'm using the word consistently quite Loosely you see when he posted his first YouTube short titled Wikipedia speedruns on the 21st of January 2021 he didn't post another video until a month later I mean to be fair I'm the last one to be talking about a posting schedule anyways at around this time Sam had posted almost 70 Tik toks okay now that's actually pretty good consistency Sam was getting pretty good at knowing what does and doesn't go viral on Tik Tok and he had a few videos sort of pop off in a similar way that the memory clip did Sam had also posted his first long form video on the 17th of February 2021 it was titled I beat the world's hardest geography test then he posted another short on the 24th of February titled how I finally hit the corner after this he began to post more consistently on YouTube he would post a video every 2 to 5 days and in March of 2021 he hit his first 1,000 th000 subscribers that wasn't a lot in comparison to his Tik Tok because he was sitting at around 200,000 followers at the time Sam was really good at short form content but he seemed to struggle a bit with long form he was able to get millions and millions of views on a Tik Tok and even a few thousand on a YouTube short but every time he posted a long video he would be lucky if he even got a th000 views Sam wanted to grow an audience on YouTube the same way that he did on Tik Tok but long form just didn't seem like the right way to do it so in April of 2021 Sam started consistently posting YouTube shorts essentially using the same methods to grow as he did on Tik Tok he would post things like Wikipedia speeduns geoguesser videos and some other pretty fun ideas and these videos were actually starting to pick up some traction Sam's Tik Tok was also performing really well and on the 25th of June 2021 Sam hit 1 million followers Sam continued to post consistently on YouTube and Tik Tok his YouTube shorts began to pick up in a similar way to his Tik Tok and on the 5th of July 2021 Sam hit his first 100,000 subscribers Sam was growing extremely fast on both Tik Tok and YouTube but twitch was kind of lagging behind this was mostly due to the fact that Sam hadn't been streaming because he was too busy putting out content on YouTube and Tik Tok and Sam didn't really even like twitch all that much anyways he didn't like the fact that if you subscribe to a streamer most of the money would go to Twitch instead of the streamer that you subscrib to and besides it was extremely difficult to grow on Twitch because they only recommended top streamers it just didn't seem worth it because why would Sam stream for 20 hours a week when he could have just used that time to make a few shorts and he would have reached a lot more people and made a lot more money it just didn't make sense for him to keep streaming with that being said Sam wanted to continue going viral and sustain the growth that he was already having on YouTube so he needed to innovate you see the difference between creators that have a quick rise and fall versus creators that grow for a very long long time is the ability to innovate if you take a look at someone like Mr Beast versus someone like Beluga Beluga 2 years ago was one of the fastest growing creators in the world gaining 4 million subscribers in 3 months and he was quite literally averaging 12 million views a video but today Beluga struggles to bring in even a million views a video this is because Beluga continues to use the same old Discord skip format that he's always used and people just Avent eventually got bored of it he didn't innovate but someone like Mr Beast will never use the same format more than a few times and he tries to come up with new and refreshing Concepts on a consistent basis and that's a big part of why Mr Beast is the biggest Creator on the planet you see Sam found a few formats that have worked really well in shorts such as I found blank and geoguesser and even though this format was doing really well he knew that it wouldn't last forever he eventually came up with the idea to go for a broader audience by reacting to videos instead of just making geoguesser content and even though his geoguesser content was doing well at the moment it was a pretty Niche down topic so his audience sort of had a cap to it because not everyone knew what geoguesser was Sam ended up posting a video titled if you smile you have to subscribe on the 7th of July 2021 and in the video Sam reacted to another video that was supposedly impossible to not smile at when Sam posted the video it actually did really well and it currently sits at 15 m million views Sam took notice that the format was doing well and he posted another video titled I found out how big space actually is and this video ended up getting 13 million views Sam continued to mix in these reaction videos with his geoguesser videos and it seemed like the videos that were doing the best were the size comparison videos those videos would consistently pull in tens of millions of views this was great Sam was doing extremely well on YouTube and Tik Tok and he was making a decent amount of money he was making enough money to live off of if he didn't have his job on Wall Street and even though Sam enjoyed his job he didn't like it nearly as much as he liked creating content and besides he would be able to put so much more time into making videos if he just quit his job so in August of 2021 Sam left his job on Wall Street to go 100% Allin on YouTube and Tik Tok Sam continued to post consistently on YouTube and Tik Tok on YouTube he mostly reacted to comparison videos because they did well and they were pretty easy to create cre8 and he essentially did the same thing on Tik Tok he started to grow faster and faster on YouTube and on the 4th of November 2021 Sam accomplished something on YouTube that very few people ever accomplished within their YouTube Journey he hit 1 million subscribers now Sam wanted to dip his foot into more of the long form side of YouTube you see this entire time while Sam was blowing up on YouTube shorts he continued to post long form videos every 1 to 5 days but unlike shorts Sam was struggling to build up a long form audience he sometimes wasn't even able to get a few thousand views on a long form video and this was kind of a bummer because long form pays so much more than shorts do so Sam began to experiment with this content he started off by posting a bunch of different reaction videos where he would react to different stuff like funny Tik toks or interesting clips and even though the videos had pretty decent quality his audience didn't really like them so the videos didn't really gain that much traction you see if you want to succeed on YouTube you have to have a great understanding of who your audience is and what kind of videos that they enjoy watching 99.9% of Sam's audience had come from his YouTube shorts and even though Sam was making some videos of him reacting to stuff he would mostly react to stuff like size comparison videos he was also stepping into a few other formats as well but he would never really react to random Tik toks or Clips he was attracting a certain audience on shorts so when YouTube tried to recommend that audience to his long form content no one would watch because it wasn't the type of content that they subscribed for Sam didn't really know what he was doing wrong with this content at the time he just figured that he had a short form audience that wasn't interested in watching any long form content so Sam came up with the idea to start posting long form videos on a second channel so that he could see how well it performs and if any of his audience on the main channel was interested in long form content they can go and watch the second Channel Sam had no idea how the second channel would do he started off by posting a video titled I became a million millionaire the video did okay he ended up posting another video titled am I smarter than a fifth grader and that video did a little better but it still wasn't where he wanted to be but then he posted a video titled everything you know is a lie this video was cool because it was kind of similar to the shorts that he was posting on the main Channel and what was even more cool was the fact that it performed significantly better than all the other videos on the channel Sam saw this sort of success and posted a few similar videos but nothing really too crazy happened until he posted to this video titled hidden meanings and famous logos this video performed significantly better than all the other videos on the channel and it currently sits at 1.6 million views it was at this video that something clicked for Sam he realized that he was going after the same audience that his YouTube shorts were going after and in turn the videos were performing really well and it wasn't because his audience didn't like long form content they just didn't like the long form that he was making Sam posted two more videos on the Sam toua Channel they he made the decision to go back and post long form on the main Channel you see the entire time that Sam was posting videos on the Sam Tua channel the only long form that he would post on the main channel was compilations of his shorts and surprisingly enough these compilations actually performed really well two of them had even gotten over a million views which was more proof that he could succeed on long form on the main Channel if he just targeted the Right audience so for his next video he was going to make a video about this game on neil. fun called absurd trolley problems not Not only was this an idea that his audience would be interested in but it was also a really mainstream idea at the time Sam ended up posting the video on the 27th of February 2023 and this video performed extremely well and it currently sits at 1.4 million views Sam posted a few more videos that he knew his audience would like and that coupled with a super clean and recognizable thumbnail Sam was pulling in some really solid views on long form and short form content doing this while also posting super consistently has made Sam much one of the most successful creators in the world today Sam continues to post some of the cleanest videos on the platform and is sitting at a staggering 7.5 million subscribers on YouTube and 3.9 million followers on Tik Tok speaking of followers it would mean the world to me if you would mop that subscribe button because I really want a silver play button anyways bye [Music]

Channel: tree

Views: 22,859

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Id: yBzY887ZBaI

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 13 2024