With over 5 million YouTube subscribers The Slow Mo Guys – Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy – know a thing or two about building an audience.

Speaking to The Drum at this year’s Cannes Lions, Free and Gruchy explained that their channel wasn’t an instant hit.

“It was quite a slow process” said Free, “then we had a viral hit, our giant water balloon video, and that got 2 million views in a day. Immediately all our other videos went up and we got loads of new subscribers.”

“Since then it’s [The Slow Mo Guys channel] become much more well-known and easier to get lots of views,” added Gruchy.

Like most YouTube creators Free and Gruchy rely on the platform’s analytics to make the videos they know the audience wants to see.

“We can see where they’re from and what age they are so we kind of cater towards that,” said Free. “We have a very young, male audience primarily so stuff blown up is always good.”

Despite living in two separate countries and holding down full time jobs The Slow Mo Guys feed their audience’s appetite for new videos by shooting “ten or so at a time” two or three times a year taking on board feedback from YouTube comments as well as suggestions The Slow Mo Guys Twitter feed which they use to boost views.

“It really helps to see people say ‘I really like this video and I’d like to see them do something like this…’. We’ll usually then sit together or chat on Xbox Live and work out what to do next,” said Gruchy.

“Twitter is better for interacting with the audience than YouTube,” added Free. “We take a lot of audience suggestions…basically if something looks good in real time it looks even better in slow mo.”

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