Why doesn’t YouTube promote community Nerf channels?

As a Nerf YouTuber and a Nerfer at large, I’ve become interested in how to promote the events I run, the events others run, my content and general participation in the hobby.

As a member of the Nerf community, you might search YouTube for mod guides or footage from the most recent event you’ve been to.

Owned by Google, YouTube is also fantastic for SEO. If your tags, titles and content are on point, then you can drastically increase the chances of whatever it is you’re promoting being discovered in online searches, especially since video content is being given more and more search authority on many search engines each year. But that’s another story!

If you type “Nerf” into YouTube’s search bar today, this is what you’ll see:

The top 5 results are dominated by Aaron Esser and PDK Films, with 2.5 and 7 million subscribers respectively, offering entertaining “Nerf war” content aimed at a general audience, rather than hobbyists. These are generally clever montages using Nerf guns as props to emulate the popular first person shooting game genre “in real life”, complete with sound effects, muzzle flashes and sometimes with green screening used to re-create the experience gamers are used to.

Where are the real Nerf videos?

Number 6 is Coop772, with a review video, which may be considered his bread and butter along with “Nerf Combos“, “Nerf Stereotypes” and the modification videos he still releases on occasion. He has just over 1 million subscribers at time of writing. He has his roots in community Nerfing and adapted his style to increase his reach several years go.

Just under him is Twin Toys. 3 million subscribers tune in to watch them settle arguments with babysitters, The Game Master, mom (North Americans spelling!) and dad through simply choreographed Nerf wars. These “Nerf Wars” are similar to Aaron Esser and PDK films, but aimed at an obviously younger audience.

And it’s place 9 and 10 before we come across Walcom S7 and J0D0CAST at just under 80k and around 7k subscribers each. These are the first two channels we’ve come across which may be considered to be run by active members of the Nerfing community.

I’m not going to post more pictures of my search, but the next channels we encounter are GunVsGun, Nerf Official, Extreme Toys TV, Adam Savage’s Tested, Dude Perfect it’s a good few scrolls before we eventually hit LegitBread!

Why doesn’t YouTube promote community Nerf channels? Modders? Actual Nerf game footage as opposed to the stuff YouTube serves you in your feed?

And looking at those search results, how much use IS YouTube for promoting Nerf as a community hobby?

Who watches all that “Nerf War in Real Life First Person Fortnight Babysitter’s Revenge Cod Fidget Lava Spinner Battle” stuff anyway?

Please note that your search results will differ. I searched using a practically unused YouTube account for the sake of a fair test, but the fact I’m in the UK, the time of day and a variety of other conditions will have an impact!

Drac, Lord Draconical, has published more videos, possibly than any other Nerf YouTuber. He is the most active community Nerfer on YouTube right now. Or was… because the “last of his kind” declared in his video on the 1st of January 2019 that he may be drawing his time on YouTube to a close. He cited that it’s tough to be successful on YouTube whilst making the sorts of content that the Nerf hobbyist community values, and expressed frustration that his attempts to experiment with content which would result in increased reach were sometimes sneered at by members of the community, met with disdain from his fans. There was a genuine sadness that these two factors seemed irresolvably to be at odds one with another and he indicated that this made it difficult to continue on the platform which has become his home over the past eleven years.

In the light of Drac’s experience, we might ask: Why is the algorithm stacked against OUR Nerf videos not theirs? Doesn’t YouTube care?

Well, these and the questions in the paragraphs above are all good questions. Whilst becoming YouTube certified last year, I found some answers.

Let’s start with YouTube’s own words:

“Viewers, advertisers, creators, and YouTube interact with each to fuel the YouTube ecosystem. Success of one player leads to success of the others in the ecosystem.”

To unpick that, this says that we will be successful as advertisers’ and viewers’ needs are met.

A channel which more successfully meets viewers’ and advertisers’ needs will be more successful than one which doesn’t.

This presents tough questions for people who run YouTube channels in general, but here’s one especially for Nerf community channels: are we meeting the needs of viewers and advertisers as successfully as the likes of PDK Films, Aaron Esser and Twin Toys?

In YouTube terms, meeting the needs of viewers is judged by fundamentally one thing: watch time. The longer someone views your content, the better YouTube thinks you’re meeting their needs. Before that happens, there are two other things which need to happen:

Your thumbnail and title are presented to viewers. Each time more than half of your thumbnail is presented on screen to someone, this is known as an impression. Your thumbnail and title are clicked on. The number of impressions can be combined with the number of times is it clicked on to produce a “click through rate“.

If your thumbnail and title isn’t competitive and clickable, you limit your chances of getting watch time from the outset because your click through rate will be low. If you get that right but viewers don’t engage with your content, YouTube will also be reluctant to keep promoting it, because they judge it to be meeting the needs of viewers less than content that is getting more watch time.

Why would they do this? Because meeting the needs of more viewers (as evidenced by watch time) means more adverts can be presented to them, which means more ad-revenue for YouTube. Typical, right? Actually yes, because YouTube is owned by Google and Google is a multinational corporation which exists to drive a profit for stakeholders. Absolutely typical!

“But Wait! Don’t we meet the needs of our audiences? The people who watch our videos love them!”

I think we do a good job of meeting the needs of the Nerf community. There’s some great content out there, some listed by Drac in his departure video and much more which he himself admitted couldn’t be mentioned for the sake of time. I’d like to recommend these guys for a start! Drac actually expressed the frustration we all feel that our content isn’t being promoted.

But if we want to grow our Channels, and I feel that extending our reach can only be good for our hobby in the long term, we need to take a good look at how we can better meet not just our own needs as individual Nerfers and a community, but the needs of a general audience who may not be aware of who we are and what we do yet. And YouTube will only promote content (read “help you grow”) if you are meeting the needs of people beyond your subscriber base.

Let’s look at an example of a Nerf YouTuber who did this.

Coop772 is sometimes derided as a “sellout” who doesn’t care about the community any more, but I feel that he adapted his style to continue doing his hobby whilst also offering non-hobbyists value which kept watch time on his channel high enough to result in YouTube promoting his content. This deliberate action grew his subscriber base larger than any other Nerf YouTuber with community roots, and I’ll bet that some of those subscribers are now modders, game organisers and active contributors to the community. You can scoff about his not being “a real Nerfer” all you like, but as a “gateway” Nerfer, I’m positive that his content has real value to the community because of it, as well as the obvious benefit of providing himself with more income though ad revenue.

Am I saying a contribution like this is more valuable than the contribution of someone like Lord Draconical, Foam Data Services or other community members with softer voices which don’t reach as far? Absolutely not.

But if we want to grow our community, we need to offer value to people outside our community as well as within in it for YouTube to promote our content if we want to grow.

If you’re on YouTube and you’re not interested in growing is that a bad thing? No! YouTube’s a great place to store information in a well organised and easily accessible way, and if you’re not interested in growth, you don’t have to be!

But if you want to benefit financially for your contributions (possibly increasing the likelihood that you can keep making contributions in the future), or amplify your message by growing your channel, your content needs to meet the needs of an audience beyond the community so that YouTube can better meet advertisers’ needs, and promote your content more.

Should we all sell out and start making “First Person Nerf War Gun Game With Double Pregnant Elsa Pranking Spiderman Illegal Chocolate Nerf Gun Mod You Will Not Believe What Happened Next” videos? I don’t know, but growth of community YouTube channels will come from without, not within.

Comment below if you agree, disagree, or think there are other platforms which better meet our needs as a community.

justajolt is a proud Britnerfer who organises regular community Nerf Wars, runs Nerf wars at parties and events and posts videos about Nerf guns on YouTube!

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