Why Copying Viral Videos is Killing your Channel

Hey,

Earlier this month I ran the YouTube Breakthrough Intensive in London with George Blackman and Gwilym Sims-Williams. A full-day, in-person workshop covering strategy, packaging, scriptwriting, and systems.

We sold out fast and it was an incredible day! (Big thanks to Justin Moore, author of Sponsor Magnet, for sponsoring the day!)

One question came up a few times: how do you actually use outlier tools like 1of10?

Almost everyone in the room was using them the same way to find a video in your niche that massively overperformed, and make your version of it.

That approach sounds smart. It was smart... in 2024.

If you're unfamiliar with these tools, they allow you to find videos in your niche that are overperforming.

So if a channel usually gets around 20,000 views and then has a video that hits 250,000, that's obviously not normal.

We call these outliers.

These videos are worth studying because something clearly worked, whether that's the video idea, title, thumbnail, hook, or the value within the video itself, that helped it explode to 12.5x their usual views.

I used to do this manually.

I even built The Thumbnail Vault around outlier theory back in 2022, hand-selecting over 1,500 of the best thumbnails on YouTube and tagging them within a searchable database.

1of10 and other outlier tools built on this same concept by plugging directly into the YouTube API, surfacing way more videos than my little database ever could.

It was a game changer.

A strategy that YouTube strategists like myself were using behind the scenes was suddenly accessible to everyone.

These are genuinely great tools but there is a problem and the problem isn't the tools, it's how most people use them.

As they got popular, they started surfacing the same outliers to 30 different creators in your niche.

So if you're just copying the top result, you're not finding a hidden opportunity anymore, you're joining a queue.

By the time you've scripted, filmed, edited, and uploaded your version, three other channels have already published theirs.

The audience that would've clicked has already seen the idea twice and YouTube has no reason to push a fourth version of the same video with very similar packaging to the same people.

The opportunity and total addressable market shrinks the moment it becomes visible to everyone.

So here's what I told that room full of creators to do instead:

1. Look wider, not closer

Don't just study your niche and try to find outlier videos to recreate.

Instead, look at adjacent niches as you're much more likely to find interesting titles, thumbnails, and ideas that haven't been done in your own space yet, and those are the ones you can easily adapt.

For example, if you're in the cooking niche and you spot these fitness titles performing well:

5 Meals I Eat Every Week to Stay Under 10% Body Fat → 5 Meals I Cook Every Week That Never Get Boring

The Meal Prep Hack That Saved Me 10 Hours a Week → The Kitchen Hack That Saved Me 10 Hours a Week

Same structure, same emotional triggers, completely different niche, all found using the exact same outlier tools so many people are using incorrectly.

If you want to take this a step further, go from adjacent niches to completely different ones.

One of the most powerful title patterns I've used with my client GrowVeg (the fastest-growing gardening channel in the world) came from watching Alex Hormozi's channel.

The word "Masterclass" was resonating in his business content, and I started seeing it appear across a few other niches too.

I gave the idea to the team to try a "Ginger Masterclass" video and it got them over 2.3M views.

We then tested it across multiple vegetable videos and it consistently crushed, bringing in millions of views for them the last two years.

That's not something any outlier tool would've told you to do unless you know how to use it correctly.

2. Ask WHY, not WHAT

When you see a video that performed well, don't ask "what did they make?" Ask "why did this resonate emotionally?"

What power word in the title triggered a click? What fear, desire, or identity did the thumbnail tap into? What was left OUT of the packaging that created curiosity?

These are super important questions to ask when looking at overperforming videos to try and dig deeper into understanding the psychographics of your viewer.

Once you see these recurring patterns you can start using these triggers in your own unique original video ideas to increase your chances of breaking out.

Triggering them on a psychological level to click is the game on YouTube.

With another client, Mrs Eats (Japanese culture channel), we discovered that nostalgia was the emotional driver behind their biggest hits.

Their "Japanese Explains What They Really Said in Street Fighter 2" hit 9.4 million views and it was our first video working together. If you want to see me breakdown how I helped them make this viral video, you can watch my breakdown here.

Again, no outlier tool tells you that directly but using it to analyse psychographics does help a lot.

3. Steal principles, not videos

This is the key difference.

Copying a video = making the same thing someone else made, hoping there's audience left.

Stealing a principle = understanding the psychological reason something worked and applying it to a completely different topic.

"Masterclass" worked on Hormozi's channel because it implies completeness. If you watch this video you'll learn everything, A to Z, in one sitting.

That principle worked in gardening.

It'd work in photography, cooking, fitness, whatever your niche is.

I'm also noticing the word "quietly" popping up everywhere right now. "How to Quietly Build a Million-Dollar Business." is one I saw last week.

"The Brilliant Way to Quietly [something]" as an example could work as this power word is resonating across totally unrelated niches and I'd recommend you jump on that trend now before it's oversaturated.

That's the kind of cross-niche pattern you only spot when you stop staring at your competitors and begin using these tools in different ways.

Jamie

P.S. The YouTube Breakthrough Intensive in London, was awesome and we've had such glowing reviews as a result. We covered strategy, packaging, scriptwriting, and systems and sold out fast last time.

If that sounds like something you'd want to be part of later this year, you can learn more at ytintensive.com and join the waitlist for the next one here.

We’re grateful to our event sponsor:

Justin Moore: author of Sponsor Magnet.​

Every attendee received a free copy of Sponsor Magnet plus an exclusive offer from Justin on how to attract and close better brand deals.