YouTube Rip-Off Inc.

[Dan Robinson]

A big percentage of views come from recommendations, so I'd guess that particular video is probably in the "big machines starting up" genre rather than the railfan niche, and is probably getting recommended to users who have watched other videos of large ship/train/aircraft engines/motors starting up/accelerating. Those are really popular now.

 

[John Farley]

I had the exact same thing happen many years ago with a video I uploaded of a rotating wall cloud near Terre Haute, IN. Quickly soared to around 100K, when nothing else I have posted has exceed about 5K and most much less than that. It is impressive rotation, but I would not consider it one of my top all-time videos except in views. Never understood why that one got so many views, thought maybe a TV station might have linked it or something, but to this day I do not really know. Maybe something like what Dan says above. The vast majority of the views came quickly, with only slow increases in views thereafter.

 

[Warren Faidley]

It always amazes me that after you hit an unknown number of magical followers on X, for example, you can post something like "My dog just farted," and there will be a 5k likes and 2k re-posts. I can post a relatively good lightning image and it gets 20 likes and 1 re-post. And ironically, every time I get over 10k followers on X, they suddenly start removing them so I stay under 9.5k -- which happened last week -- for the third time this year. Go figure. I seriously think they alter the outputs to target people who have searched for "dog" and "fart" and distribute such posts to people who are likely to fall for related monetization. AI is going to make this even worse as targeting is refined even further.

With this reasoning, all of my lightning captions now say, "Lightning over Tucson as a dog farts."