Great collaboration videos can be hard to pull off, but can be really fun to watch and are great ways to cross-promote to different audiences. But how do you do an amazing collaboration that stands out?

Check out these 5 examples of creators that have pushed the boundaries to come up with some really clever and creative collaboration techniques:

The Revolving Collaboration

All great videos must come to an end. Or….do they? (cue Vsauce music)….. Jake from Vsauce3 and Joe from ItsOkToBeSmart created a really cool ‘revolving collaboration’ technique, which they’ve designed to explain different elements of the same topic in each video, and send you back and forth between videos in an endless loop.

Check out the end of each video to see how this works:

The Synchronized Collab

Destin and Derek from SmarterEveryDay and Veritasium went all-out to take collaborations to the next level with this ‘synchronized’ collab. They uploaded videos to each of their channels that are designed to play at the same time, and even designed a micro-site to make it easy to watch both simultaneously. Click here to check them out.

The ‘Around the World’ Collab

Individually, 331Erock and Pellek are great musicians, and each have very popular YouTube channels. You’d think that being on opposite sides of the earth (USA and Norway) would make collaborating impossible, but they’ve been able to use their epic metal powers to transcend geographic barriers, and combined talents to create some of the most epic metal covers of 80's songs the world has ever heard:

The ‘Unaware’ Collab

Kutiman is a musician / editor / mashup artist, and every song in his latest album ‘Thru You Too’ is a expertly arranged mashup of songs and sounds that random people have uploaded to YouTube — creating an amazing collaboration without the participants even knowing:

The Crowdsourced Collab

Why collab with just one person, when you can collab with your entire audience? Ryan Higa (aka Nigahiga) created this touching video asking all of his fans to make videos of themselves saying “I Love You” to their Dads and recording their reactions, and then edited all the videos together:

Bonus! The Cameo Collab

This example isn’t necessarily a strategy, so I’m including this one just for fun: Collaborations can be complicated — but they can also be really simple. For instance, if you are paying close attention in this epic ‘Epic Rap Battle of Manliness’ from Rhett and Link, you might notice two bystanders who you could say have a long and successful history with Epic Rap Battles:

What are some of the most creative ways that you’ve seen YouTube creators collaborate with each other? Leave a comment or send me a message!