This is Part Three of a piece called Clickability, How to Make Viral Content.

Part One addresses what causes Burnout in the industry so you may better understand how to avoid it. You can read that part --here.

Part Two discusses what ways you can play the system to make your content more likely to Go Viral. You can read that part --here

In the final part, we will learn The Secret to viral videos.. Let's do this!

~ Clickability ~

How to produce viral content

Part Three -- THE SECRET..

In part two, we learned that Youtuber sensation, Mr.Beast tends to have a knack for spotting, and creating viral videos. But How does he do it?

His secret, according to Derek of Vertasium, is a simple formula. "You need two things" Mr. Beast explains:

1. Average Watch Time... you need to have quality content to keep the audience reading/watching long enough.
2. CTR -- as the click-through-rate percentage on a piece increases, the odds of that content going viral increase exponentially!

and that's it! The title and the thumbnail of your content are EVERYTHING when it comes to making it.. Sure you need great content, but if you don't have an amazing "hook", it's never going to go viral.

"Click-Through-Rate is King!"

If you are unfamiliar with CTR, click-through-rate, it's basically a metric used to measure the efficacy of an AD campaign or other digital marketing techniques. The CTR is a percentage found by dividing the number of clicks the content gets by the number of impressions, or overall number of netizens who shown the the AD.

It's only one metric among many that business and digital marketers use, but in the realm of making it big on YouTube, it is currently reigning supreme.

As Derek points out, "Your Audience only knows you're there is they see your thumbnail."

For the majority of the traffic that lands on the site, they are only seeing whatever is rising to the tippy top of the ice berg. That's likely to be whatever the algorithm is promoting. "YouTube make their money on ad revenue and watch-time. They aren't going to promote what people aren't clicking on."

For Derek, this means that less sensational thumbnails and titles don't get high CTR, and therefore won't get shown. He believes this foreshadows a drop in the popularity of educational content on the platform, and influences ultimately what type of audience will be attracted to the site.

Like it or not, at this time, CTR is vital to viral.

The key is to create eye-catching thumbnails and titles that convert to clicks, and therefore to views, which will catch the attention of the algorithm, which then promotes your content and helps you soar to stardom!

Derek says that many popular content creators and marketers experiment with A/B testing. Creating multiple thumbnails and/or titles for their content to see which ones get the highest click-through-rate.

He also says that another practice in the industry is photoshopping a copy of your title and thumbnail into youtube's homepage, recommended videos, and suggested videos. Try different positions and styles to see how it will look to your audience when they are perusing the site. Think about what they see.. Would you be intrigued enough to click on your content?

It is clear that not all content creators are happy with the fact that they feel they must resort to click-baiting to survive, but Derek offers a bit of hope. He says that Youtube has expressed a desire to shift the direction of the algorithm yet again. According to him, Youtube wants to start optimizing for "Long-Term, Satisfied Watch-Time." are viewers coming back? Are they watching for longer periods of time? and are they happy with what they are getting?

_{[In order to measure the satisfaction metric, the site has begun to toy with different types of user-friendly surveys.]}

While no one can be sure what will happen in the future, what is clear now is if you want your content to be seen by a wider audience, you should probably spend some more time working on your catch!

What do you think? Have you ever tired A/B testing with your content? What were the results? How much do titles and thumbnails influence YOUR decision on what to click? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments!

Until Then...

• Note-- all images in this piece are from this source