How to Make Viewers Choose YOUR YouTube Videos Over Everyone Else's

Top bloggers, whose videos consistently rack up massive view counts, know one simple secret to succeeding on the platform: you don’t need to conquer the YouTube algorithm — you need to win over your audience.

That’s why big channels often don’t worry too much about optimization. Their creators understand what their audience wants — and that’s enough.

If one video on a channel goes viral, it might just be random luck. But if it happens regularly, that’s a pattern — it means the creator has figured something out better than the rest and developed a winning strategy.

And any such strategy will always come down to one thing: understanding what your audience wants, what motivates them to click on a video, and watch it from beginning to end.

So today, we’ll briefly talk about how to consistently tap into your viewers' interests, expectations, and pain points.

But the question is: what exactly should you do to achieve this?

In fact, the task is quite simple: start by identifying the most outstanding videos in your niche — the ones that got the most views and engagement on other creators’ channels.

There are two key categories to evaluate these successful videos by. The first is the topic — what the video is actually about.

Certain ideas and topics naturally gain more views at certain times because they’re in high demand among the audience at that moment.

For example, the topic “How to earn your first million?”

If you search for this phrase, you’ll see that the topic itself is what’s trending — not any particular blogger. Both big and small creators, recent and older videos — all get high view counts.

To confirm that it’s the topic doing the work, check out smaller creators’ channels and see how their other content is performing.

The second criterion for a successful video is the format — how you present your topic. This refers to a recurring style or video structure that consistently brings in views.

A classic example is challenge videos. MrBeast made this format popular and still gets massive views regardless of the topic. Many creators have followed his lead, including Russian YouTuber Dima Maslennikov and his show.

But there are other formats that blow up and stay relevant for years. A great example here is book blogger Anthony Yulay.

He started with basic vlogs — book reviews, reading lists, and so on. But real fame came after he discovered the format of trash reviews — critiques of low-quality books. That became his main series and the signature content of his channel.

Now that he’s built a loyal audience willing to watch anything he puts out, Yulay can afford to experiment with more vlog-style content.

He also continues to evolve his main trash-review series — covering fanfics, visual novels, movies based on cringe books, and more.

In the end, the key to fast growth is understanding which topics and formats are most popular and using them as inspiration to create content that resonates with your specific audience.

So, what else can help you get to know your audience better?

• First, analyze which other creators your viewers are watching.
  All the information you need for this can be found in your channel analytics in YouTube Studio, under the “Audience” tab.

This will help you understand which topics and formats your regular viewers prefer to watch.

• Second — evaluate which videos perform best on your own channel.

Like it or not, studying analytics is essential — but to figure out which videos resonate with your audience and which ones don’t, you don’t need to dig through every single graph.

All we're interested in is:

• Viewer reaction — specifically, which videos got the most or fewest clicks — that’s the CTR (Click-Through Rate).
• How well viewers watched the video — that’s audience retention.
• And how often your returning viewers clicked on the video — you’ll find that in the “Audience” tab.

That alone is enough to help you drop certain topics and formats and focus on others.

Comments under your videos can help you catch the finer details when analyzing overall stats. Viewers will definitely tell you what they didn’t like — and if they stayed silent, it likely means everything was just fine.

• And third — don’t rush.

Effective and meaningful research takes time — and that’s perfectly okay.

It’s better to invest effort once into studying topics and formats and hit the right target, than to waste years going in the wrong direction — leaving YouTube confused about your audience when you don’t understand it yourself.

Going through all these steps just to become truly interesting to your audience is hard and unfamiliar work at first.

But if you put in enough effort early on, over time you’ll start to see the value in it — and most importantly, you’ll feel the difference. Because you’ll know that the success of your videos isn’t random luck — it’s the result of hard work.