Get Popular On YouTube Through Mediocre Content

Content, of course, is king, but I have long maintained that what “quality” means in reference to it, is a matter of personal taste. Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder. And, without getting too deeply into the rights and wrongs of the collective psyche, it has been my experience too that what the general populous wants and responds to, is to some, very mediocre indeed.

I mean, look at the huge popularity of LOLcats - cat images with captions in superbly bad grammar and that appear to serve no useful purpose. While some of the images are funny, they are not exactly “works of art” either.

If you stop to think about it for a moment, you come to the realization that people are going nuts over, what? Yeah, mega mediocrity.

The same could be said, I think, over soap operas and reality TV!

Showing the example of a Tetris video that got over 2 million views, Neil Patel at Pronet Advertising blog, I think hits the nail on the head as to the reason, “The video was so mediocre that it became popular because others wanted to show how they could play Tetris on the piano better than this person.”

Things that suck so much do make others want to respond. It’s the “it’s so awful, it’s brilliant” aspect, where people just cannot help but pass things on to their friends, exclaiming “Have you seen this?”, in disbelief, but I think, more importantly, mediocre things also give people a sense of worth and power, because it gives them a chance to look good compared to it.

The response is their rise to the challenge to do so.

This might also account for the relative popularity of my cooking blog. The suckiness of my culinary experiments is only surpassed by the total crapiness of my photos, but then I don’t actually want to put people off with photos of perfect “food porn” that makes them think, “Oh, I could never do that!”

Conversely, you could say that “too intelligent” content is way too much of a challenge for some folks egos, but it does go some way to explaining why these types of content gain such universal popularity. When you understand that (a lot better than my potted psychology can explain :), you can harness it with your own content that sucks just enough to gain mass popularity!

PS: For some really seriously mediocre content on YouTube (though I doubt it will ever be popular), you should see Tailslash - The Movie