School Girls, Nerds & YouTube Traffic

So I’ve been spending a lot of time recently studying psychology and how it relates to advertising. In my research I’ve found myself browsing through what will soon add up to be hundreds of videos on youtube. In the process I’ve learned a lot about our desire to express our individuality, crowd mentality and the darker side of public relations. I also stumbled upon this little gem, and it really personifies these psychological queues.

As I was browsing this video channel, all of the related videos had anywhere from 4,000 – 12,000 views. Meanwhile, this imparticular video had almost 3 million views! The headline just read ‘School Girls & Nerds’ and the screen capture for the video preview just happened to show a fairly sultry picture. However when you click through to the video, it’s just a simple segment on the origins of the words & stereotypes themselves. The video itself is in fact quite boring, and I’m assuming there are around 2 million people out there who were pretty disappointed once the video started.

Still though, that amount of traffic is staggering and as far using psychological desires to drive traffic this is about as obvious as it gets. This tactic of using subtle innuendo in headlines and adcopy has proven time and time again to improve CTR.

I’d love to hear how any readers might have applied this strategy or more examples of it’s use. Pitch in and let me know what you think in the comments!

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