How to grow your YouTube viewership from existing editorial channels

Youtube is an essential social pillar for gaming news, gameplay videos, and other longform video content in the scene. Growing the Clocked channel on Youtube (via Happy Mag) has been a huge priority, and developing the channel from a standpoint of Clocked’s best performing editorial content has proven effective.

What this means is that when deciding upon the games Clocked was to cover with video content, it was imperative to locate the articles that receive the strongest weekly hits on the channel. By embedding YouTube videos in these articles, and placing backlinks, each video would be given a leg-up over the competition (of which there is plenty in the world of gaming).

Guide content

Articles and videos such as Returnal: How to Beat the First Boss, Phrike or Outriders: Beating the First Boss, Gauss have seen extremely high conversions from web traffic to video hits, with up to one in three users playing these videos from the articles containing them.

Players are constantly searching up strategies to beat in-game bosses such as Phrike, Gauss, or the ultra-difficult Ophion, so priming them with both an explainer article and illustrative gameplay makes perfect sense.

Guide videos can also be extremely valuable outside of the gaming realm. If you knew how many people watched instructional videos on how to tie a tie every day, you’d probably fall off your chair.

Why It Mattered

One of Happy Media’s longest running and most popular editorial series is Why It Mattered, which are deep dives into some of the most significant albums in music history. Almost 100 Why It Mattered articles have been written to date, and many of them are receiving constant traffic.

Essentially, it was the perfect base from which to start a video series. The content was there, as was the research, as was the results.

Happy Media have since been adapting Why It Mattered into a video series of the same name, inviting artists and other creative professionals to bolster the content with their own insight. Below you can find what’s been published so far:

• Tame Impala – Currents
• Alanis Morissette – Jagged Little Pill

…and the rest

You can’t always rely on receiving exclusive content – as Clocked did with their best-performing video depicting pre-release DOOM Eternal gameplay – you must investigate your existing networks and examine how you can leverage them.

In preparation for the launch of Clocked’s video The Best Bit of Bloodborne, research was conducted and content was created around the topic at hand – FromSoftware’s award-winning video game Bloodborne. With multiple high-ranking articles on file, including Bloodborne 2 will never happen and here’s exactly why and Bloodborne PC: how to play it now, and is an official port even coming?, success of the video was not guaranteed, but far more likely.

Similarly when publishing footage of Supergiant Games’ Hades on the PS5 console, embeds and backlinks in articles such as Clocked’s Hades weapon guide or list of PS4 games with PS5 upgrades, the video will climb in views consistently.

For the latest gameplay from Clocked, be sure to check out how to kill the cop in Twelve Minutes.

At Happy, we’ve also started a new series of videos called Engineering The Sound, where we trial and review some of the hottest new gear in music. We’ve recently reviewed the JHS Overdrive Preamp and EarthQuaker Devices Special Cranker, two of the best new pieces of hardware on the market.

Check out one of our most recent videos below.