I don’t know what algorithm has clicked into place at YouTube, but the views on this video have now jumped from a little over a hundred a day to thousands a day:

Check out the views chart:

That 9,902 is the last day. Here’s the more in-depth chart:

As you can see, right around the 20th, something happened.

Wait a minute… the 20th!?

I’ll bet that was it. Maybe there was a higher level of searches for “illegal” plants, leading to more views, which triggered this video to start being a “suggested video?”

I don’t know, though. It’s a rather silly episode. I deliberately made it clickbait just to see what would happen. Rachel was horrified that I made it look like she was smoking in the shot. In reality, she’s just inhaling the rich aroma of a tonka bean.

It’s paying off now. I posted that video almost a year ago. Here’s the views chart in context:

You can see a nice little bump at the beginning, followed by mostly nothing, then suddenly a massive spike into viral land. If this continues at the current rate, it might actually make creating YouTube videos worthwhile for me. I’ve now made $222 off this video:

Most of my videos only make a a little bit of ad revenue. Here’s a pretty typical example:

That video took me a few hours to put together and made only $10 in eight months! Plus I have the cost of software, camera, lenses, etc. If a video doesn’t “catch” in the algorithms, it’s not worth doing (at least for a hope of return). Most of my 578 videos were not worth making. Some of them have made pennies. Basically, if a video gets less than 5,000 views, it probably wasn’t worth doing.

If my tonka bean video continues at its current rate, however, it will make up for a lot of failed videos.

There are plenty of other videos I would have preferred to go viral, like some of my good composting demonstrations, but I’ll take my $222 wherever it comes from. It’s encouraging me to get out and make another half-dozen videos this week.

If it hits $1000, I should buy Rachel a clothes dryer.