This is a story that I wanted to tell a couple months ago but my brain didn't want to do it when the likelihood of people reading would have been low. So here we are.

Some people know the 1st part of the story. Back in June I made some viral content around Markiplier and his editor Lixian on Facebook and Twitter. I had lots of fun so I wanted to do a video.

So I made a 3 minute compilation video of some of their best moments in Minecraft. It did very well for someone who only had 700 subscribers, getting 3.7K views in it's 1st 10 days. Then it went viral.

Things got crazy. It quickly started getting 5K-20K views per day. Then less than 3 weeks after being uploaded, it had a 4 day period of 783K views. Had it gone that viral when I released it, it would have been on the trending page.

So I did what any logical person would do. I made a sequel. I posted the sequel like 3 weeks after the 1st and it started hot with like 300K views in it's 1st 24 hours. But the views aren't what I liked about this. When I checked, there were no other Markiplier X Lixian videos on YouTube. Either that or they all had so little views.

But after the success of mine, the floodgates opened up and a month after my 1st video went up, so many people started creating their own, to the point where I was seeing like 5 new ones per day. Mark himself even acknowledged them in a stream.

That ended up being a pretty cool achievement for me, the fact that this one video I created sparked a new trend. Not only is my video the 1st, but it also is still the most successful of all of them, closing in on 2 million views.

It even got to the point where people were using similar titles and strategies as mine. One person basically used the same title with like 2 changed words and a similar thumbnail.

That is an amazing accomplishment. It's so very hard to get a lot of views with a YouTube video, even if the video is one of the best ever. Even more impressive that you were able to create a trend and draw attention from a big name YouTuber.

I find this all very inspirational since I have been putting YouTube on the back burner for so many years and recently started to finally pursue it.

Davideo7 : I learned so much about Youtube in the year since the original video first went up. I tried Youtube a couple times in the past but then when I did this, I learned how to use things like end cards and links to make these viral videos bring more views to my own personal videos.

I eventually got to the point where I was making 5-8 videos a week and doing a ton with editing, thumbnails, and the SEO stuff, but with them only getting like 50-100 views each, it became too difficult to keep up since everyone only wants these edits now.