Why is Pirate Software actually visible to almost every user of YouTube? He has exploited the system perfectly.
If you let yourself be entertained by “YouTube Shorts” for a while as a gamer or tech-savvy person, it’s only a matter of time until you come across “Pirate Software.” The YouTuber has grown tremendously over the past year, and his short clips, often containing interesting points, are widely discussed.
Things looked very different a while ago. His secret? He “played through YouTube” – and recognized exactly how to grow particularly quickly.
While some become successful on YouTube, others are withdrawing from streaming:
Who is Pirate Software? Pirate Software, whose real name is Jason Thor Hall, has grown tremendously in 2023. A while ago, he was a small player on YouTube with only a few thousand subscribers – now he is on the verge of breaking the 2.5 million mark. In his mostly short clips, which distill exciting statements from his streams to the essentials, he speaks about insider knowledge from the tech scene or his time at Blizzard and Amazon. He often shares entertaining or simply interesting anecdotes.
How did he become so successful? The success didn’t come by chance, but was calculated coldly, Pirate Software explained openly a few weeks ago in a conversation with streamer itmeJP and some other colleagues. He reveals that he closely examined the market and YouTube:
YouTube has put all its efforts into Shorts. They haven’t developed the streaming product or discovery further. They have pushed Shorts. Whenever you want to be discovered on a platform, the platform won’t do that for you. […] You have to look: What are they doing that makes them the most money, and you have to follow that trend.
So we thought: Okay, they are putting everything into Shorts, and so far, no one is really taking advantage of that.
The “Short Content” has been heavily promoted by almost all platforms after TikTok became extremely successful with it. Therefore, YouTube has also tried to highlight its short videos particularly. Something that Pirate Software knew how to exploit exactly.
My plan was: Publish a Short every day. […] We wanted to create more content. One [Short] every day, without missing a day. And then it should be published exactly at noon every day. The reason I did that: This is lunchtime for all the big companies on the West Coast of the United States. These are mostly tech companies. I primarily produce tech content. So that is exactly the moment when they look at their phones. The moment when they pull their phones out of their pockets for lunch is the moment when they can see it – and then I appear – exactly when the algorithm picks it up, and then they spread it to offices nearby.
That was the plan. And I thought maybe we’d get a few thousand subscribers. It was many more, and it went so fantastically. And now, every time I open YouTube, I see myself 5 times.
The original goal, by the way, was to increase subscribers from 10,000 to 15,000, so by 5,000 subscribers. This goal was narrowly missed by a factor of 500.
How great the influence of streamers on YouTube on a video game can be was recently revealed by another developer.
