Put these keywords in your YouTube video title if you want more views

A recent study from the Pew Research Center takes a deep dive into some of YouTube’s most popular channels and provides some interesting findings.

According to the study, YouTube videos that mentioned keywords such as “Fortnite” or “prank” in their titles received more than five times as many median views than videos with titles that did not.

Videos that mentioned the video game “Fortnite,” in particular, were found to have the biggest increase in views when compared to others. In fact, 15 percent of all video game uploads from the popular YouTube channels in the study had the word “Fortnite” in its title.

Other popular video titles included video game series’ such as FIFA, Roblox, and PUBG. Gaming videos with the words “moment” and “funny” in their titles also performed better than average.

The study found that in general, video game-related content, videos aimed at children, and videos featuring children under 13 garnered more views on average than other types of videos on YouTube.

Along with “prank,” video titles with keywords such as “ASMR,” “challenge,” “superhero,” and “box” also had an increase in view count. YouTube challenges, such as the once-viral cinnamon challenge, and product unboxing videos are some of the types of videos that have become synonymous with the platform so it makes sense that videos with those keywords in the title would perform well.

Beauty videos with the word “makeup” in their titles would receive more views than other videos in that category. Putting the word “DIY” or “easy” in a how-to video also increased views. Children’s content containing the words “slime” or “rainbow” had greater view counts as well.

Using attention-grabbing clickbait terms such as “ultimate,” “insane,” and “worst” resulted in more views too.

News-related YouTube content containing the words “Trump” or “president” outperformed other current events and politics videos. The study found that 36 percent of the videos posted by popular channels in this category had at least one of those two words in their video titles.

Pew looked at a total of 43,770 popular YouTube channels that accumulated at least 250,000 subscribers by the end of 2018 for its study. The YouTube channels analyzed for the study posted almost a quarter million videos in the first week of 2019 with the average video being about 12 minutes long.

In all, this totaled 48,486 hours of YouTube content that were viewed over 14.2 billion times in total during the first seven days in which they were posted.