The camera angle is going to be a little strange
on this one, sorry. I’m on the sleeper train from
London to Scotland, and there’s not much room in here. Tonight, this train is going to roll through
the English Midlands and up through northern England, and
while we’re on our way, I’d like to tell you the story of one of the
biggest online hits I’ve ever been involved in. The north-south divide is an important thing
in English culture. If you’re northern, you’re supposed to
be proud of it: industry, school of hard knocks,
saying ‘bath’ instead of ‘baath’. And if you’re southern,
you’re supposed to be proud of… not being northern, I guess? You’ll see it in the northerners who move
down to London, in the south, for jobs. Complaining about the price of everything
down there, about how you can’t decent chips-and-gravy, and about how for some reason the locals insist
on wearing a big coat outside when it’s cold. I mostly grew up in the Midlands, so both
sides hate me. And I brought my big coat. My point is: the idea of being ‘northern’
or ‘not northern’ is relatable for a lot of the people
in this country. In 2013, I was working for a website called
‘us vs th3m’, and my job was to make web toys and games
quickly. So when one of our team came up with
an idea for a ‘How Northern Are You’ quiz, the whole office jumped on it. Occasionally, you might get an idea that arrives
fully formed in your head, like a bolt from the blue, a complete plan unfolding in your brain. Generally, I get those ideas when I’m in
the shower, when I’m not really thinking about anything, when my mind’s got time to start putting
together everything I’ve been thinking about over the last day. It’s usually a really good plan to act on
those ideas if you’re lucky enough to get
one of them. But as far as I can remember, this was
not one of those ideas. We workshopped this one in the office. All the team suggested questions;
we tested them on the folks around us. And rather than just using a regular
question-and-answer system for the quiz, I coded up a full-screen game
called the “North-O-Meter” that would give you a big arrow that swung
north and south depending on the answers to your questions. Another one of the team suggested that,
as well as giving you a percentage, it should give you a result that places you
somewhere in the country, in a town or a city. It was maybe a day’s work
to put that all together. Most importantly: the game had a big button
that let you share your results. Now, I should point out that we
weren’t doing any data harvesting here. Unlike certain other companies, we weren’t asking people to log into Facebook
and share their details with us, we were just using the
standard, simple sharing template that just posted a thing to your wall. Our mission was just to get people to visit
our site, to visit our projects, to pay attention to us. Our job was, literally,
to try and be popular on the internet, and asking people to log in would have got
completely in the way of that. So it was simple. See your friends, on Facebook or
Twitter or whatever, share their result, find out your own, share it onwards.
That was our goal. We knew we’d got a hit pretty quickly, but
the numbers kept rising, and rising, and rising. At one point, we had 13,000 people
playing this at the same time, and it only took a minute to play it. By four days in, it had been
shared on Facebook a million times. Not clicked. Shared. A million people had decided that they were
going to click the button to share their results
to their friends. We had made something relatable. No matter if you were northern or southern,
proud of it or not proud of it, that quiz gave you something that
you were probably willing to share. Now it helped that we’d spent a while
calibrating the questions and answers, bouncing cultural references and results back
and forth until everyone had something they
were at least happy with. But lots of people told us that their result had
identified the actual city they lived in, which was basically just a lucky guess,
but somehow it seemed better than that, for some people it seemed almost spooky. And anyway,
if it gave you a result you didn’t like, if it was too southern or
too northern or wrong, that would still cause a reaction, that was still fun enough that you might want
to share the results. We estimated that, even if they hadn’t
clicked through a link, the name of it had still been seen
by about 10% of the British population. It was the biggest thing we’d ever made,
and, if I remember right, it was the biggest thing
we would ever make. The secret to success there was connecting
with people: provide something they’re interested in
and give them a reason to show it to others. That is the same reason that people
put faces in YouTube thumbnails. Human connections, the desire to see and be seen, that’s what powers sharing online. Around the same time as the North-O-Meter
went out to the world, my YouTube channel was starting
to see some traffic. For years, I’d been ignoring YouTube’s advice
about building a channel, about regular uploads and brand identity, and I’d just used it as a dumping ground for any of
my projects that happened to include video. Usually, they were projects without my face in them. I was just an anonymous British voice
in the background, but in the year or two before that,
I’d started appearing in vision. And I’d been doing some videos with a
channel called Computerphile, who were already doing
some pretty good numbers, and they were happy to link their audience
to my channel. Collaborating with others has to be mutual, but that isn’t just about subscriber counts
or about money: it’s about what you can provide. For Computerphile, I provided the expertise, and they provided the audience. Soon after that, I’d start a little series
called Things You Might Not Know, and that’s where it really started
to take off. People connect with people, and now I was
on screen presenting, now I was putting out regular videos, now there were lots of similar things
to click on and a reason to come back, now that I was collaborating with others, now people realised that this
YouTube channel, this thing here, wasn’t just a thing, it was a person, people were starting to subscribe. The first thousand fans, subscribers, whatever,
they're the hardest ones to get. Back when I was getting started 15 years ago,
it was a case of emailing the right folks, of showing up in the right blogs and newsletters. And it was a case of persistence and perseverance,
of grinding your way through. It still is. At least, I think.
The catch is, I don’t know what the right techniques and
the right places are any more, I haven’t known for years because I’m
out of touch with that now. And what those places are will be different
depending on who you are, where you are, when you’re watching this,
and what you’re making. But as you make stuff, you will find out. You’ll bump into someone who’ll say, oh, 'I should send that there', or, oh, 'I like that, I’ll pass it on'. It’s about human connections. Not spam, not cold-calling:
human connections. I’d like to believe that everyone out there
already has some connections, some people who know you. A message board you post on,
people you’ve talked to in a comment thread, a WhatsApp chat you’re in,
a Facebook group with friends. Those are your first steps,
those are your first contacts, and yes, it absolutely sucks that there are going to
be genius-level pieces of work that aren’t making it out of those early groups -- and mediocre work that gets lots of praise
because it’s from someone well established. I’m not saying that’s right or fair,
and we should work to change that, but that’s the way things are now. There’s still a long way to go. Let’s not forget that a good part of the reason
that Things You Might Not Know took off is that people tend to trust a white guy
with a British accent. Anyway. The site I worked for back in 2013,
'us vs th3m', rode high for a long time on the North-o-Meter and a lot of similar projects
made by a lot of different people. Our Twitter and Facebook and email
subscriber counts continued to tick upwards, and the team expanded:
we gained more staff members, and a second full-time developer in the office. But while we had some
great ideas and great traffic, sustainable growth was tricky. Suddenly there were a lot of social media
quizzes out there. I’m not saying we were entirely responsible
for the fad of all those “What Magical Unicorn Are You”
quizzes that hit Facebook in 2014, but we were certainly in the vanguard. We were popular on the internet. And the question that everyone
has to ask for any project, though, is: how long can it last? Because 'us vs th3m' survived
for a couple of years, which was much longer than the initial experiment
that it was designed to be, but the site was sadly never able to pay its
way in the really harsh and expensive
world of corporate media. And even now, I’m aware that my
current big project, all this YouTube channel, could go away at any moment. So how do you go from just throwing ideas
out there to making it work long-term? Part of the solution to that is up at my destination. That was too loud.
