What I have realised rather late in the day is that if you want to get a video watched on Youtube then you have to give it a sensational title.
I do feel some responsibility for the plethora of over-sensationalised, over-dramatised, cringeworthy caving videos currently garnering huge views on YouTube. In fact, let's be honest, it's probably all my fault.
When I uploaded my
‘Tight Cave-Larger Caver' videos, they were only intended as a piss-take, but they got loads of views.
Around the same time a caver by the name of Rob Spangler produced a series of videos titled ‘Best Extreme Caving Video Moments’ on YouTube 2012-14. They were very popular at the time. This led to me producing a series of annual roundup videos titled
‘UK Caving Video Best Bits 2012-2014’. I couldn’t bring myself to use the word, ‘extreme’. Each gained a few thousand views. I renamed the 2015 and 2016 videos to
‘Highlights of the Caving Year’ as I felt it more accurately reflected the content of the films and the view count dropped a little.
Several postings of mine are (imo) better of some caves than others getting bigger hits so perhaps I should retitle them all!
In 2016 I saw a Red Bull video titled 'This 60-second clip makes you feel claustrophobic'. At the time, I was recovering for a small caving related incident, nothing too serious, although the Major Trauma Unit at Southmead Hospital in Bristol might disagree. For several months I was confined to the house, so for something to do I found all of the horrible clips from the previous 5 years videos and produced '
Caving Claustrophobia - Kill or Cure'. It was used for a UKC competition - name the caves where the clips were taken, but it became the first caving related viral video on YouTube. It has been watched 19 million times!
Based on the success of this video, and purely as an experiment, I called the 2017 annual roundup
‘Best Extreme Caving Video Moments 2017 with Dudley Caving Club’. It’s had 2.2 million views!
In my experience the view count has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the video. The videos that I am most proud of invariably have the lowest views. The only thing that matters on YouTube is giving your video a click-bait title and backing it up with an equally shocking thumbnail image. That’s the formula that has been adopted by the ActionAdventureTwins! and they have the viewing figures to prove it.
These days when I upload a video, I’m lucky if I get a few hundred views. The heady days of being able to boast that mine was the most popular caving channel on YouTube have long gone, but I have a plan! Look out for my next video. The working title is
‘The very best, most extreme, most claustrophobic, caving video there’s ever been in the whole history of YouTube, where a caver gets wedged tight and almost drowns’.