I’ve periodically uploaded videos of some of my rocket launches during the past year (with more to come soon, of course). Generally, my YouTube videos don’t get a ton of views. Most of them have maybe 50 or 60 views; some of the more interesting ones have about 600-700. But one video seems to have really taken off – no pun intended.

What’s fascinating to me about this is: why? This is just a twelve second video clip of a rocket launch. It’s the Darkstar Extreme rocket that I built earlier this year, and this particular flight is on a K-535 motor, a common and standard workhorse motor. This video is not very different from several others that I’ve uploaded recently. Yet suddenly and without warning, the views started to dramatically increase: as of when I’m writing this, it’s topped 94,000 views.

As a nice side effect, it’s caused my YouTube channel to gain a bunch of new subscribers. Some sizeable fraction of people who casually see this clip want to subscribe – my total number of subscribers has risen from about 30 to over 170 in the past week or so. This is awesome, from my perspective.

I’m just not sure what accounts for this sudden interest. YouTube provides some analytics and it looks like most traffic (82 percent) is coming from YouTube Shorts, which is something new YouTube rolled out: a vertical video format that’s basically meant to compete with TikTok.

Another 13 percent of viewers are finding this through their suggested videos. Very few people are finding the video by using specific search terms (e.g. rocket launch).

But it’s still mysterious: why this particular video when I have several similar ones? Why now?

If anyone has any suggested explanations, I’d definitely be interested, since I’m still relatively new to this and figuring out how it all works!