How to be successful on YouTube [what I learned after 2 million views]
I have always been a big fan of video as a communication tool and YouTube is an amazing platform if you use it right. —it's human —it's you, your voice, your gesture, your feelings, much more than text
Context & Ripple Effects
Loic Le Meur's practitioner write-up lands at the end of an arc the corpus has tracked since 2007, when the Wall Street Journal framed YouTube fame as learning to be a star in a new medium, and late 2008, when the New York Times confirmed videos were pulling in real money. By September 2010 the question has shifted from whether ordinary people can reach an audience to how they do it deliberately — Le Meur cites 2 million views and argues video wins because it carries voice, gesture and feeling that text cannot.
The platform side of that shift was accelerating through 2010: YouTube trialed its live streaming platform with partners including U2, the Indian Premier League and the White House in mid-September, launched the passive-viewing Leanback interface and an HTML5 mobile web app in July, and added a basic cloud-based editor in June — a philosophical turn toward creative tooling. The same month, commentary criticizing YouTube's fair-use posture as 'The Big Copyright Lie' showed creators also saw enforcement risk in building on the platform.
First-order effects
- Practitioners following Le Meur get a repeatable playbook rather than a virality lottery, which lowers the cost of treating YouTube as a serious communication channel rather than an experiment.
- YouTube benefits directly: every creator who internalizes this kind of advice supplies the catalog that its 2010 pushes — live events, Leanback, the HTML5 mobile app — are built to distribute.
Second-order effects
- With monetization established since the New York Times' 2008 reporting, better-executed amateur video competes for attention with professional content, pressuring media producers to match the human, direct-to-camera style Le Meur describes.
- Platform investment follows creator behavior: the cloud editor and live-streaming trial signal that YouTube is competing for creators' production workflow, not just their uploads.
Third-order effects
- If 'success' becomes teachable, the creator economy stratifies into those who study distribution mechanics and those who don't, and platforms respond by shipping the analytics and tools that codify those mechanics.
- Video-as-communication shifts from a novelty format to default infrastructure for individuals and institutions alike, which is precisely what makes copyright enforcement policy — the fair-use fight already visible in September 2010 commentary — a structural issue rather than a legal sideshow.
The trend: Online video creation is maturing from accidental virality into a learned discipline, with platforms racing to supply the tooling that makes success systematic.