---
title: 'How to Create Viral Videos: Lessons from MrBeast''s Strategist'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=miXS8zbH6W8'
video_id: 'miXS8zbH6W8'
date: 2026-08-10
duration_sec: 397
---

# How to Create Viral Videos: Lessons from MrBeast's Strategist

> Source: [How to Create Viral Videos: Lessons from MrBeast's Strategist](https://youtube.com/watch?v=miXS8zbH6W8)

## Summary

This video summarizes a presentation by Chuckie, a top strategist at MrBeast's company, on how to create viral YouTube videos. He shares a data-driven approach to identifying and replicating the success of outlier videos, emphasizing the importance of the idea and audience breadth.

### Key Points

- **Outlier Definition** [00:13] — An outlier is a video that gets significantly more views than the channel average. Example: 100 views average, 10,000 views = 100x outlier.
- **Outliers are Replicable** [00:26] — Outliers are not random; they result from specific creator actions. Identify and replicate them.
- **Finding Outliers** [00:38] — Search for outliers on your channel, competitors, and other channels. Use tools like '1 of 10' to see outlier scores on YouTube homepage.
- **First Principles Analysis** [00:52] — Break down the video into first principles: idea, title, thumbnail, edit, script, hook, story, content, format, stakes, characters. Analyze which contributed to success.
- **Case Study: Alicia** [01:21] — Client Alicia's landing page videos were outliers (15k views vs 1-2k average). Made another landing page video, got 70k views. Copied idea, title, thumbnail.
- **Case Study: Own Channel** [01:48] — The video 'How to Edit Viral Videos' was an outlier. Copied edit, hook, thumbnail to three other videos, which also became outliers.
- **Idea is Key** [02:04] — The idea is the biggest factor in virality, not editing or thumbnail. Most ideas don't appeal to a wide enough audience.
- **Broadening Audience** [02:17] — Broaden ideas to appeal to more people. Example: 'speeding up editing workflow' → 'how to blow up on YouTube' → 'MrBeast drama'.
- **Testing Idea Appeal** [03:26] — Use YouTube search to gauge audience size. Search 'how to throw in the run as a QB' (1k-5k views) vs 'how to throw a spiral' (50k-1M views).
- **Trending Content** [03:53] — Trending content capitalizes on current trends (e.g., MrBeast drama, Olympics). Use Google Trends or news. Example: Belinda's video got 40k views (8x average) after a game release.
- **Evergreen Content** [04:38] — Evergreen content gets views over time (e.g., tutorials). Both types can go viral; use both.
- **Data Limitations** [05:17] — Don't always rely on data; sometimes ignore it. Don't combine keywords just to please the algorithm. Make videos for viewers.
- **Thumbnail Changes** [05:55] — If a video has high watch time but low views, change the thumbnail to something completely different. Example: NateDev video went from 200k to 2.2M views after a thumbnail change.

## Transcript

I've been programming to travel all the way to Dallas to listen to Mr. D's top strategist, Chuckie, share how he creates viral videos that get hundreds of millions of views. And the best part is, you can actually replicate this for your channel to get way more views on your next video.
First, he went over how to use Outlier to go viral. An Outlier is just a video that gets way more views than the average video on a channel. For example, if your channel averages 100 views per video, and you post a video that gets 10,000 views, it's a 100x Outlier.
If a video is a large Outlier on a channel, it's not by chance. It means that there's something the creator did to get way more views than they usually do, and if you can identify what that thing is, you can replicate it for your videos and get way more views than you usually do.
So, you'll want to search for outliers everywhere, on your channel, your competitor's channels, or even other channels on YouTube. And to identify outliers, you can either just look for videos with way more views than the channel averages, or use a tool like 1 of 10, and outlier scores will appear on your YouTube homepage.
Link in the description if you want it. How to figure out what made a video an outlier. Chucky says you should write the video down to its first principles and then analyze, not just copy it outright. The first principles of a video are its idea, title, thumbnail, edit, script, hook, story,
content, format, stakes, and characters. And once you identify an outlier, you'll want to figure out which of these things made the video so successful so then you can bring it over to your video and get way more views as well. For example, when I started working with one of my clients, Alicia, we found that most
of the outliers in her channel were actually videos about landing pages. and she's in a small niche, so they only had 15,000 views, but this was also on a channel averaging only about one to two thousand views per video. So we made another landing page video
and executed on the concept super well and it got over 70 views which was way more views than they had ever gotten before In this case we were copying things over from Outliers on her channel as opposed to other people channels but the things that we copied over in some capacity were the idea the title and the thumbnail
For another example, on the channel you're watching right now, I made this video called How to Edit Viral Videos, and it did super well and became a big outlier. So, way back when I created it, I decided to break it down to its first principles and copy over the edit hook and thumbnail to three other videos that also became huge outliers.
Next, Chuckie shared how he comes up with viral video ideas. And according to him, the biggest reason some videos go viral and some don't isn't because of the editing or the thumbnail. It's mostly down to the idea. And it's not that most YouTubers have bad ideas.
It's actually that their ideas don't encompass a wide enough audience. And to illustrate this, let's look at an example video about speeding up your editing workflow as a YouTuber. By default, this interests YouTubers who are editing their own videos
and want to edit them faster. But if you want to get more people interested, we have to go a bit broader and turn this idea into a tutorial on just how to blow up on YouTube. So now, we appeal to complete YouTubers. And from there, we can go even broader if we want and make a video about the recent MrBeast drama,
which appeals to just anybody interested at all in YouTube. As we go off this chart, we're just appealing to a wider and wider audience. The point is not that you should always make the broadest content possible so you can try to get the most amount of views,
but we just have to consider that not all videos have the potential to get a million or even 100,000 or even 10,000 views at the end of the day. However, it is possible to take a video idea that doesn't interest a huge audience by default and adjust it to be a bit broader to have a higher potential for views.
It the same reason this video I made with my client Jeremy got over 100 views and this video only got 4 Both topics are about YouTube and they both produced super well but one used to queue up to so many more people because it a bit of a broader topic And if you have a topic that you not sure actually interests a lot of people
and you want it to interest a lot of people, you can figure it out pretty easily with a quick YouTube search. Notice how, for example, when I search how to throw in the run as a QB in YouTube, most of the top videos have like 1,000 to 5,000 views.
Versus if I search how to throw a spiral of videos, I have 50,000 views, 100,000 views, and even over 1 million views. This just means that the latter probably appeals to way more people and is a bit of a broader topic. After this, Shucky revealed the two video types that go viral on YouTube, evergreen and trending.
Trending content just capitalizes on, well, the trendiness of a person or thing to get a bunch of views. For example, people making videos about all the recent Mr. Beast drama, or people making videos about the Olympics, or even Nicotaro Avocado's recent transformation,
which was kind of interesting. You can identify trends with websites like Google Trends, or simply just keep up with the news on social media or elsewhere. A great example of this point in the practice is when my client Belinda and I made this video about how well she had less than a thousand subscribers and was averaging probably 5-6 thousand views a video.
The game had just come out and everybody was talking about it, so when we posted the video, it got over 40,000 views, which is 8 times more than average on the channel. Trending content is great to get a lot of views up front, but it's also harder for videos to see success over a long period of time since trends eventually civilize.
Evergreen content, on the other hand, is content that can get views over a longer stretch of time. For example, these two missed these videos because they're topics that people don't lose interest in over time. Tutorial videos are often a great example of this because they continue to get views when people search for them over long periods of time Just like these four videos I already talked about that I published on this channel as they continue to get search views even to this day because they topics that are still relevant even though I posted them over a year ago At the end of the day both evergreen and trending
topics have the potential to go viral, so use both whenever you can. Speaking of virality, Shucky's whole presentation was about using data to go viral, but one of the most interesting points he actually brought up was that you don't always need to look at your data. In fact,
sometimes you should even ignore your data. For example, just because you see certain keywords to big outliers in your niche doesn't mean you should go combine all of them in your title and hope to get views. As a creator, you're not making videos for the algorithm and it's not some sort of magic
hat that just pushes out videos that do the right thing. You're making videos for viewers and viewers like your videos if your videos get pushed out to even more viewers. So focus less on trying to please the algorithm and doing crazy stuff with your data and focus
more on using your data when you can to get some insight and pleasing your audience. Finally, check the advice changing your titles and thumbnails over time, especially if your videos have high watch time but very low views. But this doesn't mean if you just change a shirt
in your thumbnail from blue to orange like all the Twitter gurus will have you believe, you're going to get a bunch of views. If you're going to change your thumbnail, you actually want to change it to something totally different than what it was before because then when it gets shown to viewers that didn't click on it the first time, there's a chance that it appeals to them better
the second time and they click. I actually did this a lot way back on my first YouTube channel, NateDev, and I did it with this video in particular when it was sitting at a couple hundred thousand views and it led to this bike which eventually led it to get over 2.2 million views.
And yeah, that's everything I learned from Mr. D's Mousetrages. And if you want to learn more about how to create viral videos just like I've done with my channels as well as my clients, then this video here will probably help you out with that. See you in the next one.