JAMIE RAWSTHORNE: THE SECRET FORMULA FOR GOING VIRAL ON YOUTUBE

Morning!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about how video content is changing the way we consume… well everything.

Every platform is adopting video.
Every creator is adopting video.

It seems like we have entered the age of video content.

But no matter how well people master short-form videos for TikTok and Instagram reels, it seems like people are still struggling to master YouTube.

It’s the most powerful (and lucrative) video platform, but I’m yet to see anyone in my network truly master it.

So this week I found someone who has mastered YouTube.

Not once, but multiple times.

• He built his first channel to 900,000+ subscribers

• Helped Codie Sanchez scale hers to 650,000+ subscribers

• And generated $100,000’s in Adsense in the process.

I just spent 6 hours diving down the rabbit hole to understand the ins and outs of his YouTube strategy.

Now it's time to expose them just for you!

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Breaking Down The Strategy

If you asked a marketer in 2023 what platforms you should be on, most would rhyme off the classics: TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter.

But they’d completely ignore YouTube.

Even though it’s a platform where:

• The strongest audiences are built

• The most money is made

• The majority of people consume content

It ticks all of the boxes.

But there is one big problem with YouTube - it’s insanely hard to be successful on the platform.

Very few are able to make it work. But I’m about to show you someone who did, and he has all the secrets for you to do it too.

Meet Jamie Rawsthorne.

In 2018, he and his friend Zac Alsop started a YouTube channel called the Zac & Jay Show. At the time they were pretty much nobodies, but like most people back then they fancied their hand at being YouTubers.

3 years later, they’d amassed 55M+ views and 900k+ subscribers.

Going viral on YouTube was a weekly occurrence for them. But it wasn’t by chance or luck.

It was because of Jamie’s genius method for analysing and deciding what will go viral on YouTube.

I spend the last week digging into it and here are the 5 major pieces of that viral YouTube formula:

1) Find a popular channel in your niche

Jamie says that he always starts by analysing what the best are doing in the space.

They’ve put the time and effort in to iterate and fail, and you can save years of iterations by learning straight from them.

When he finds popular channels he asks himself 3 questions:

What performs well?
Why does it perform?
What else could perform around this?

2) Find their most popular videos

Once he’d found the top channels in his niche he’d scroll through their most popular videos and see what was working for them.

For his original channel, the main player in his space was Yes Theory.

They were putting out similar entertaining storytelling content and garnering millions of views doing it.

One of the most popular videos Jamie found was them going to an abandoned city with no laws, which got 28M views.

3) The extrapolation

Once he’s found a popular video within his niche Jamie has 3 different methods of taking it and turning it into his own video:

Way 1: Direct extrapolation – This is where you change one simple aspect of the title or concept and then do it yourself.

With this method, you’ll often get views, but really struggle to build a strong audience due to how unoriginal your ideas are.

Way 2: Indirect extrapolation – When you change a combination of several aspects of a video but keep the main core idea.

Jamie says that this is probably the easiest and most popular method.

Below is a prime example of this.

You see that videos where you “survive X amount of time somewhere” perform well. So you remake it, but this time without being buried.

Way 3: Abstract extrapolation – Where you analyze the qualities of what made a video successful and apply them to your videos.

With the Yes Theory example, Jamie said that he saw this video and noted down the things that could have made this video successful. He noticed it was:

• Curiosity evoking

• Had shock value

• And included characters throughout

So he began searching for things in the UK that made push people to feel a similar way, and he found this thing called “Bog Snorkelling”.

It ticked all the boxes.

• He was curious about it - so the audience probably would be too.

• There was clear shock value - people were literally snorkelling through a bog in Wales?

• And people flew in from around the world to do it - so the video would have unusual characters.

They went ahead and filmed a video for their channel titled “We entered the world’s strangest sport”.

That video currently sits on 1.3M views.

But like I say, it wasn’t by chance or luck, it was engineered to go viral.

4) Extrapolation Part 2

One video going viral wasn’t the end of Jamie’s analytical strategy, in fact, it was barely halfway.

Because once he knew his audience enjoyed a video, he would run his whole extrapolation process once more - but this time on his own video.

They had the viral bog snorkelling video and they just used indirect extrapolation to create:

A video trying “The World’s Most Dangerous Football Game” - 3.2M views

A video trying “The World’s Most Dangerous Sport” - 1.1M views

He then used direct extrapolation to create another 10+ videos around them trying new sports:

All of them have 100,000’s of views, some even with millions, and all of them were reverse-engineered from that original Yes Theory video.

Today, Jamie is using those same tactics to help Codie Sanchez, Morning Brew, and many others achieve similar results through his process.

Reverse engineering virality.

Pretty darn incredible.

Now, it’s time to give it a go yourself.

But for now, that’s all from me!

I’ll see you next Sunday.

— Niall

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This has been a breakdown of Jamie Rawsthorne’s YouTube marketing strategy. I hope you have learned something and can implement a similar strategy in your business!

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