Engagement Amplified: Exploring Livestreaming 24/7 in Youtube

"The secret to success is not just about playing the game; it's about understanding the rules better than anyone else and using them to your advantage." - Warren Buffett

Successful Youtubers have cracked the code of recommendation algorithms through years of trial and error. From ranges of titles & thumbnails that work, to what constitutes an optimal length of a video (hint: 10 minutes), there is no shortage of public knowledge that has been collectively acquired through years and years of battle tested, crowdsourced experiments.

It can feel hopeless watching everyone optimize everything down to each pixel and play the attention game beyond substance. Many give up, erroneously hoping that the content alone will win. Yet their despair is understandable too - when everyone is chasing the same tricks in the book, you wonder if all that effort is even worth it. Neither extremes are good. In order to stand out, you have to look for unconventional, unpopular and untapped opportunities.

Such opportunities arise often through major shifts in the platform. Youtube Shorts was a recent phenomenon (and it still is, but to a much lesser degree). Keen observers quickly noticed the immense boost (x1K-x100K) Short form videos were getting in contrast to classical long-form videos.

In order to compete with Tiktok, Youtube boosted Shorts on the platform immensely. For those paying attention, it was a free gift ready to exploit. Creators who falsely believed they could ignore such shifts, paid an unfortunate price of seeing their growth either stall or stagnate (e.g. just researching videos on Youtube alone will bring many creator testimonies who realized this too late). Because in the end, we are competing for a finite audience. No matter what niche you are in or how loyal your audience is, if you can’t adapt to your environment fast enough, sharks around you will eat your traffic alive. You may not seek the competition, but the competition will seek you. It will destroy your years of your hard work when it finds you.

Shorts are no longer the hidden advantage it used to be; but there is one surface that to our big surprise is still widely untapped - the 24/7 Livestreaming. Most think of an actual real-time streaming, when they hear Livestreams. But we are talking about a hack, a clever tweak that leverages the pipes of Livestreaming without actually streaming in real time; which is a 24/7 Livestream constructed from your existing content that you can set-up as a loopback play.

A few searches alone on Youtube (e.g. cartoons), will show you something unusual - certain channels are always, and literally always (24/7) livestreaming. Why are they doing it?

We have done some research by meticulously and continually collecting public data over weeks and months in order to understand this dynamic. Below are brief statistics we have been able to collect so far:

• US, Vietnam, India and Japan are top countries conducting 24/7 streams on Youtube.
• Cartoons and Music are the top categories for 24/7 streaming.
• One stream is constructed from 15-20 videos as a loopback on average.
• An ever-growing list of channels are experimenting with this, albeit very slowly.

That music and cartoons made the top category is not surprising. But we stumbled upon other unexpected and creative ways the 24/7 streaming is being used. We found language courses (e.g Japanesepod101, Chinese Fluency, etc), cooking channels and even some podcasts that were set-up for 24/7 streaming. Despite the diversity, all of these channels’ motivation is clear - get more views, and 24/7 livestream can boost your views tremendously.

For example, in search driven traffic, it’s evident that livestreams have dedicated top spots. For example, searching “children/kids cartoon” shows 2 live streaming cartoons in the top-4 positions:

The same can be observed across wide range of other queries. Creators have also acknowledged (upon anecdotal surveys) 35-50% growth in their subscribers and other traffic directly attributable to livestreams. The value of 24/7 streaming can be proven from a following simple fact - 24/7 streaming your content is not technically trivial (nor cheap), because you need to be constantly piping video-streams to youtube all the time. The moment anything breaks, your stream will break. So you literally need a dedicated machine in order to be accomplishing this. This means any creator who no longer sees any value or notices a diminishing return, will immediately cut this investment, right at the moment they fail to see ROI. The fact that the majority have not, suggests that this is a vastly underutilized surface by many.