How To Go Viral On YouTube
Zach Blank
45M+ subscribers
I’m Zach Blank, Head of Content for Nick DiGiovanni. I’ve helped produce videos that have collected 30B+ views, 12 Guinness World Records, and collaborations with MrBeast, Gordon Ramsay, Mark Rober and Tom Brady. Virality isn’t luck, but it also isn’t a formula — it’s a set of repeatable decisions you make before, during and right after publishing.
1. The idea has to be explainable in six words
Every video of ours that broke out could be summarized in a single sentence a stranger understood instantly: “World’s largest chicken nugget.” “I cooked against robots.” “Gordon Ramsay reacted to my food.” If an idea needs a paragraph of setup, it will not travel. Write the title first; if the title is boring, the video will be too.
2. Thumbnails win before the video plays
We build thumbnails around one subject, one emotion, and one point of contrast — usually scale (giant vs. tiny) or conflict (me vs. them). Test the thumbnail at phone size: if you can’t read the story in half a second at 200 pixels wide, it isn’t finished.
3. The first 15 seconds decide the next 15 million views
Deliver on the title immediately. Show the world record attempt, the celebrity, the absurd ingredient — then explain. Retention curves nearly always break in the opening beat, and no amount of great editing later recovers a viewer who already left.
4. Shorts are the fastest virality lab there is
Our World Cup Shorts run from 18M to 93M views, and each one cost a fraction of a longform shoot. Publish variations of the same hook, watch which framing spikes, and promote the winning idea into a full-length video. Shorts let you test in days what longform takes a quarter to learn.
5. Borrow an audience on purpose
The single biggest lever we have is collaboration. A video with a creator whose audience barely overlaps with yours puts your face in front of millions of people the algorithm would never have shown you. Pitch the thing neither of you could make alone.
6. The pre-publish checklist we actually use
- Can a stranger repeat the premise after reading the title once?
- Does the thumbnail read at phone size, with one subject and one emotion?
- Does the payoff appear in the first 15 seconds?
- Is there a Short that tests the same hook this week?
- Whose audience does this borrow, and why would they care?
- What will we change in the next video if this underperforms?
Go deeper on the planning side
Virality is the spike; strategy is what keeps a channel growing between spikes.