Internet Orbiter video with sudden huge increase in view count

asbjos

tuanibrO
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I was browsing YouTube, and found back this classic video by the creator "Rseferino Orbiter Filmmaker", whom I assume many of you know about.
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IKhuTp5XUs"]Apollo direct landing - Orbiter Space Flight Simulator 2010 - YouTube[/ame]

One thing surprised me though: it had a staggering 19 million views, making it the most viewed Orbiter video to my knowledge! (I first couldn't believe my eyes, thinking it was a YouTube-bug)
Compare that to the user's second most viewed video, counting 750 thousand views.

Playing internet detective, using this YouTube tracking website, it becomes apparent that the video got close to 10 million view count boost within the two weeks from March 9th to 23rd, 2020.
2020-05-28%2022.24.33%20socialblade.com%20rseferino%20orbiter%20filmmaker%27s%20youtube%20stats%20%28summary%20profile%29%20-%20.png


Another surprising thing: it had "only" 281 comments. But as the most recent comment is from 5 months ago, coinciding with the last upload, the video creator probably is moderating every comment before displaying it, I'm assuming due to moon-landing deniers.

So, I guess the point of my post is (other than to share the happy news), does anybody know where this increase in view count could come from?
Either the mysterious entity "The YouTube Algorithm" is the culprit (although the view boost is mostly lower in my experience), or maybe it was embeded/shared on a webpage with an enormous reach?
(by comparison, this Quora anecdotal evidence says a popular New York Times article gets something like 10 million total views)

Anyway, it really shows the potential reach in YouTube videos. Rseferino's subscriber count as a consequence jumped by 30 000 users. Just imagine what 30 000 new people could do to a community ...
 

n72.75

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That's cool, it's nice to see Orbiter getting so much attention. There really could be a lot more Orbiter videos on youtube. We're a bit stuck in 2004 in that regard.
 

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Indeed those numbers are unusually high.
Perhaps YouTube picked up the video and added it to suggestions. Or it was circulated in some Facebook forum or something.
Keywords do feature "alien", "ufo" and "kebal". I guess I should add those to my videos ;)

There are more Orbiter videos around but with much less views.
I have a simulated Apollo 18 landing on my channel and some Mercury flights. Others have used it extensively.
The problem is that YouTube doesn't suggest them. You have to narrow down your search in order to find them...
 
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Marijn

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Same with this video:

It jumped to 12M views in a week time. A gliding video without anything special going on. That had never happened before. It gave him many, many new subs, so all his subsequent video's have a high view amount as well. Now he's a profesional Youtuber. It makes careers.

The Algorithm is a fitting term as long as nobod is able to tell what's going on.
 
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Tex

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It's wild how the YouTube algo works at times. My Titan documentary barely got any views for a long while, then all of a sudden it's over 10K, then 50K, and now 688K views, all within a matter of months. What ever caused it, I'm happy to see it doing so well as I spent a lot of time creating that one.
 
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