Why is Pirate Software visible to almost every YouTube user? He exploited the system perfectly.
If you, as a gamer or tech-savvy person, let the “YouTube shorts” wash over you for a while, then it is only a matter of time before you come across “pirate software”. The YouTuber has grown extremely over the last year and his short clips, often with interesting points, are widely discussed.
Things looked completely different a while ago. His secret? He “played through YouTube” – and realized exactly how you can use it to grow up particularly quickly.
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Who is Pirate Software? Pirate Software, whose real name is Jason Thor Hall, has grown extremely in 2023. A while ago he was still a small figure on YouTube with a few thousand subscribers – now he is close to breaking the 2.5 million subscription mark. In his mostly short clips, which break down exciting statements from his streams to the most important things, he talks about insider knowledge from the tech scene or his time at Blizzard and Amazon. He often has entertaining or simply interesting anecdotes.
How did he become so successful? The success did not come by chance, but was coldly calculated, as Pirate Software openly explained a few weeks ago in an interview with the streamer itmeJP and some other colleagues. He reveals that he took a close look at the market and YouTube:
YouTube has put all its efforts into the shorts. They haven’t developed the streaming product at all, they haven’t developed Discovery. They pushed shorts. Whenever you want to be discovered on a platform, the platform won’t do it for you.[…] You have to look: What do they do that brings them the most money and then you have to follow that trend.
So we thought: Okay, they’re putting everything into the shorts and so far nobody’s really taking advantage of it.
“Short content” was heavily promoted by almost all platforms after TikTok became extremely successful with it. That’s why YouTube has also tried to make its short videos particularly stand out. Something that Pirate Software knew exactly how to exploit.
My plan was: publish a short every day. […] We wanted to make more content. One every day [Short]without missing a day. And then it should be published every day exactly at noon. The reason I did this: This is the lunch break time for all major West Coast companies in the United States. These are mainly tech companies. I mainly produce tech content. So this is exactly the time when they look at their cell phone. The moment they pull their phone out of their pocket at lunch is the moment they can see it – and then I show up there – right when the algorithm picks it up and then they spread it to nearby offices.
That was the plan. And I thought, maybe we’ll get a few thousand subscribers. There were many more and things were so much more fantastic. And now every time I open YouTube I see myself 5 times.
The original goal was to increase subscribers from 10,000 to 15,000, i.e. by 5,000 subscribers. This goal was missed by a factor of 500.
Another developer recently revealed how big the influence of streamers on YouTube can be on a video game.