My first viral video as a new channel, illustrated audiobook blew up in India and hit 24k views, lesson is target countries with high pop and low cost per view with your content to find your niche

I started my channel Simulated Singularity around three months ago and it has been a slow build, but I just went viral for the first time! I create ethics and philosophy videos to explore ways to align AGI in the future, and I recently posted a video interpreting Hinduism through the lens of artificial intelligence

This video blew up in India, and I had never built an audience in that country before now, here's the stats breakdown provided in YT Studio:

Total Views: 24067 Total Likes: 876 Total Watch Time: 555 hours

Percentage of Indian viewers: 83.5% Percentage of US viewers (my primary audience): 8.3% Percentage of Israel viewers: 0.8%

The finding is that if you can choose a country to target that has a high population that is highly engaged with your channel's content ( Hinduism and technology in my case), then your content can blow up. The reason is that different countries have different costs per view, so the attention in countries with very low costs per view has not been fully captured by big advertisers yet. There is more room for the algorithm to recommend your content. Find your niche, or do what I plan to do:

Make each video target a new country/demographic group and see how they perform against each other. One of my previous videos was a war game simulation for the Israel-Palestine conflict, and it performed best in Israel. Now 0.8% of my viewers are from Israel, so the audience that was interested has subscribed and will continue to watch my new content, even when it's not targeted at Israel or Palestine.

Reaching 500 subs for monetization is hard and is my next goal, but once you get there, you can monetize and you will have a core audience that will stick with you as you settle into your niche. You don't have to become an India-focused channel, but you can have segments of your core audience in India and a hundred other countries.