Thursday, August 8, 2019

My First Video to Reach a Million Views on YouTube


"We noticed that the most popular videos at YouTube 
showed people making things. - Steve Chen”

Like so many others, this was a complete surprise.  I have many videos that I got excited to publish that I thought would be my next video to hit 100K views, but only to fade to a whimper.  It is true, you really have no idea which video will be watched by many.  As of today, I had a few that reached 1M.  Not one of them has a concrete formula as to why it attracted attention.  Yet I can only surmise a few reasons.

  1. Novelty and timeliness - it is new or there is not a lot of similar videos at the time.
  2. Fun - certainly we had fun during the process of making the video and that gets across to the audience.
  3. Popularity of the product - it is what people are looking for at that time.

I had the idea when my kids went to Chuck e Cheese.  They have a UV stamp that they put on your arm so you can come back in and out as you wish.  Then we bought a spy pen. My kids had fun with it for days but I thought it would be fun to make our own.  Most of the spy pen also uses a tiny tip and we wanted a good size tip like a marker.

I did search online and came up with the Noodler’s ultraviolet ink  I paid $13.11 back in May 2011.  For the pen, I chose a yellow marker because of all the colors, I thought this would be the easiest to get rid off and dilute in water.  The procedure is on the video below.

In terms of analytics, 68% came from suggested videos and 20% from YouTube search.  It was uploaded on March 3, 2015, and had its peak on September 27, 2016, when it was viewed 7,754 on that day, which is about a year and a half from when it was posted.  After more than 4 years, it still gets viewed about 100 times a day.

Other things and household products that glow on UV:




  • lemon
  • tonic water
  • milk
  • laundry detergent
  • urine (UV flashlights are often sold to help find dried pet urines on floors to see what part of the house needs cleaning)





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