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Kind: captions
Language: en

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The camera angle is going to be a little strange
on this one, sorry.

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I’m on the sleeper train from
London to Scotland,

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and there’s not much room in here.

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Tonight, this train is going to roll through
the English Midlands

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and up through northern England, and
while we’re on our way,

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I’d like to tell you the story of one of the
biggest online hits I’ve ever been involved in.

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The north-south divide is an important thing
in English culture.

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If you’re northern, you’re supposed to
be proud of it:

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industry, school of hard knocks,
saying ‘bath’ instead of ‘baath’.

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And if you’re southern,
you’re supposed to be proud of…

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not being northern, I guess?

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You’ll see it in the northerners who move
down to London, in the south, for jobs.

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Complaining about the price of everything
down there,

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about how you can’t decent chips-and-gravy,

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and about how for some reason the locals insist
on wearing a big coat outside when it’s cold.

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I mostly grew up in the Midlands, so both
sides hate me.

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And I brought my big coat.

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My point is: the idea of being ‘northern’
or ‘not northern’

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is relatable for a lot of the people
in this country.

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In 2013, I was working for a website called
‘us vs th3m’,

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and my job was to make web toys and games
quickly.

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So when one of our team came up with
an idea for a ‘How Northern Are You’ quiz,

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the whole office jumped on it.

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Occasionally, you might get an idea that arrives
fully formed in your head,

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like a bolt from the blue,

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a complete plan unfolding in your brain.

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Generally, I get those ideas when I’m in
the shower,

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when I’m not really thinking about anything,

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when my mind’s got time to start putting
together everything I’ve been thinking about

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over the last day.

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It’s usually a really good plan to act on
those ideas

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if you’re lucky enough to get
one of them.

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But as far as I can remember, this was
not one of those ideas.

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We workshopped this one in the office.

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All the team suggested questions;
we tested them on the folks around us.

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And rather than just using a regular
question-and-answer system for the quiz,

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I coded up a full-screen game
called the “North-O-Meter”

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that would give you a big arrow that swung
north and south

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depending on the answers to your questions.

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Another one of the team suggested that,
as well as giving you a percentage,

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it should give you a result that places you
somewhere in the country,

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in a town or a city.

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It was maybe a day’s work
to put that all together.

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Most importantly: the game had a big button
that let you share your results.

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Now, I should point out that we
weren’t doing any data harvesting here.

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Unlike certain other companies,

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we weren’t asking people to log into Facebook
and share their details with us,

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we were just using the
standard, simple sharing template

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that just posted a thing to your wall.

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Our mission was just to get people to visit
our site, to visit our projects,

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to pay attention to us.

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Our job was, literally,
to try and be popular on the internet,

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and asking people to log in would have got
completely in the way of that.

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So it was simple.

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See your friends, on Facebook or
Twitter or whatever, share their result,

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find out your own, share it onwards.
That was our goal.

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We knew we’d got a hit pretty quickly, but
the numbers kept rising, and rising, and rising.

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At one point, we had 13,000 people
playing this at the same time,

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and it only took a minute to play it.

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By four days in, it had been
shared on Facebook a million times.

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Not clicked. Shared.

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A million people had decided that they were
going to click the button

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to share their results
to their friends.

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We had made something relatable.

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No matter if you were northern or southern,
proud of it or not proud of it,

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that quiz gave you something that
you were probably willing to share.

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Now it helped that we’d spent a while 
calibrating the questions and answers,

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bouncing cultural references and results back
and forth until everyone

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had something they
were at least happy with.

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But lots of people told us that their result had
identified the actual city they lived in,

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which was basically just a lucky guess,
but somehow it seemed better than that,

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for some people it seemed almost spooky.

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And anyway,
if it gave you a result you didn’t like,

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if it was too southern or
too northern or wrong,

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that would still cause a reaction,

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that was still fun enough that you might want
to share the results.

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We estimated that, even if they hadn’t
clicked through a link,

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the name of it had still been seen
by about 10% of the British population.

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It was the biggest thing we’d ever made,
and, if I remember right,

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it was the biggest thing
we would ever make.

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The secret to success there was connecting
with people:

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provide something they’re interested in
and give them a reason to show it to others.

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That is the same reason that people
put faces in YouTube thumbnails.

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Human connections,

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the desire to see and be seen,

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that’s what powers sharing online.

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Around the same time as the North-O-Meter
went out to the world,

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my YouTube channel was starting
to see some traffic.

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For years, I’d been ignoring YouTube’s advice
about building a channel,

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about regular uploads and brand identity,

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and I’d just used it as a dumping ground for any of
my projects that happened to include video.

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Usually, they were projects without my face in them.

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I was just an anonymous British voice
in the background,

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but in the year or two before that,
I’d started appearing in vision.

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And I’d been doing some videos with a
channel called Computerphile,

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who were already doing
some pretty good numbers,

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and they were happy to link their audience
to my channel.

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Collaborating with others has to be mutual,

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but that isn’t just about subscriber counts
or about money:

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it’s about what you can provide.

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For Computerphile, I provided the expertise,

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and they provided the audience.

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Soon after that, I’d start a little series
called Things You Might Not Know,

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and that’s where it really started
to take off.

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People connect with people, and now I was
on screen presenting,

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now I was putting out regular videos,

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now there were lots of similar things
to click on and a reason to come back,

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now that I was collaborating with others,

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now people realised that this
YouTube channel, this thing here,

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wasn’t just a thing, it was a person,

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people were starting to subscribe.

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The first thousand fans, subscribers, whatever,
they're the hardest ones to get.

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Back when I was getting started 15 years ago,
it was a case of emailing the right folks,

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of showing up in the right blogs and newsletters.

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And it was a case of persistence and perseverance,
of grinding your way through.

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It still is. At least, I think.
The catch is,

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I don’t know what the right techniques and
the right places are any more,

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I haven’t known for years because I’m
out of touch with that now.

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And what those places are will be different
depending on who you are, where you are,

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when you’re watching this,
and what you’re making.

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But as you make stuff, you will find out.

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You’ll bump into someone who’ll say, oh,

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'I should send that there', or,

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oh, 'I like that, I’ll pass it on'.

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It’s about human connections.

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Not spam, not cold-calling:
human connections.

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I’d like to believe that everyone out there
already has some connections,

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some people who know you.

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A message board you post on,
people you’ve talked to in a comment thread,

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a WhatsApp chat you’re in,
a Facebook group with friends.

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Those are your first steps,
those are your first contacts, and yes,

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it absolutely sucks that there are going to
be genius-level pieces of work

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that aren’t making it out of those early groups --

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and mediocre work that gets lots of praise
because it’s from someone well established.

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I’m not saying that’s right or fair,
and we should work to change that,

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but that’s the way things are now.

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There’s still a long way to go.

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Let’s not forget that a good part of the reason
that Things You Might Not Know took off

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is that people tend to trust a white guy
with a British accent.

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Anyway.

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The site I worked for back in 2013,
'us vs th3m',

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rode high for a long time on the North-o-Meter

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and a lot of similar projects
made by a lot of different people.

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Our Twitter and Facebook and email
subscriber counts continued to tick upwards,

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and the team expanded:
we gained more staff members,

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and a second full-time developer in the office.

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But while we had some
great ideas and great traffic,

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sustainable growth was tricky.

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Suddenly there were a lot of social media
quizzes out there.

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I’m not saying we were entirely responsible
for the fad of all those

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“What Magical Unicorn Are You”
quizzes that hit Facebook in 2014,

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but we were certainly in the vanguard.

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We were popular on the internet.

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And the question that everyone
has to ask for any project, though, is:

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how long can it last?

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Because 'us vs th3m' survived
for a couple of years,

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which was much longer than the initial experiment
that it was designed to be,

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but the site was sadly never able to pay its
way in the

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really harsh and expensive
world of corporate media.

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And even now, I’m aware that my
current big project, all this YouTube channel,

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could go away at any moment.

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So how do you go from just throwing ideas
out there to making it work long-term?

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Part of the solution to that is up at my destination.

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That was too loud.