Welcome to another episode in our exciting new series that focuses in on some of the most successful Youtube creators around today. We're taking a look at their creator journey, and the often surprising story behind their success on YouTube.
This week the spotlight falls on The Ohana Adventure, a family vlogging channel which has to date generated 2.6 million subscribers, and 680 million views. You can read the full transcript of The Ohana Adventure's story below:
The Ohana Adventure: Journey to 680 Million YouTube Views
Hello, my name is Jase. But you may know me better as the dad from my family's YouTube channel of the Ohana Adventure. Ohana means family and our family is always an adventure. Together with my wife Rachel and our six children, Klailea, Rykel, Shae, Wyatt, Evie and Cora, we get to share our lives through our daily vlog channel that now has almost half a billion views. But how did we get here? Well this is our creator's journey.
Before creating the Ohana Adventure, I owned a skate company. I was making skateboard videos to gain awareness and to use as a promotion for my entrepreneurial company. Through those videos I learned how to shoot, painstakingly edit and tell a story. These were useful skills that would help with creating our own family channel in the future.
But during the skate video days, I didn't know that there was an algorithm controlling the visibility of our videos. But I strived to test and better understand the inner workings of YouTube with every video. I wanted to create positive controversy in my videos to get conversations going. So I decided to film the thing that does not go together in my industry which was skateboarding underwater. The video went viral and got millions of views in just a short period of time. The video now has 20 million plus views but that all happened from my thoughts which was from the comments section which added up so quickly due to the conversation going on the validity of actually being able to skateboard underwater.
I then created videos of cars running over my boards, and those took off as well. After the 20 million mark and the success of the others videos in 2016, my wife and I sat down and decided to use what we learned to start a family vlog. We decided to post daily and we haven't missed a day in over two years.
Now getting the kids on board was very interesting. They loved YouTube, they watched YouTube, and they wanted to be a part of it, but then figuring out the dynamic of a family of eight being on camera was hilarious. Now creating those videos were a little bit daunting at first and it was harder than I had expected to gain traction, but we focused on making more original and shareable content and so our first Ohana Adventure video to really take off was how to family videos.
We decided lots of families wondered about having kids, there was always new moms, families wanting to wonder about having lots of kids and what to do about it, and so we started these how to videos, the first one that actually took off was how to teach your teen to shave her legs, which was hilarious
And then we ran with that style of content for another year, videos based on those moments that were happening in our family life, like Klailea’s broken wrist and videos sharing advice with other families, like how to travel with six kids and a bunch of other how to videos, how to pack bug out bags, how to pack a car for a road trip, lots of stuff like that that really started to take off for us.
Then I've had a background in music and writing music since I was a teenager, and I really wanted to try that. So we tried something new. I was watching and waiting for the new music videos coming up from the top pop artists and Taylor Swift came out with, I don't even remember the title of her's now. You'll have to cut this part out! Taylor Swift then came out with Look What You Made Me Do, and my daughter at the same time was talking about this crush that she had at school. So I decided to create a parody called My Teen Crush Is At School. But our channel was doing so well on teen crush for keywords that we just called the video Teen Crush. And it crushed it. A million views overnight, 30 million views within the month and it kept going. To date it has over 83 million views.
We then filmed about ten other parody videos using that same algorithm and that same style for our family that worked with our family, we wanted to film and they crushed it. In early 2018 we added family challenge videos because we do that anyways. I run away from the children in grocery stores all the time just for fun. Then we started mystery door challenges and blindfold hide and seek challenges that we still play to this day.
The family games and challenges were so fun and something we did naturally as a family, these were videos we could bulk film and then wrap them in a vlog. That's very helpful for marketing content every day. I mean, every day is an adventure but some days you're just exhausted or things go wrong, or they're a little less adventurous than other days. With the challenges, we can make new and ambitious content that seamlessly adds to the vlogs and propelled our channel forward.
As creators, we're much more focused and specific when filming and editing our videos than we were at the start. But we still film our family having fun and being adventurous. As a family, we're so blessed by all of our success. Our family has always loved traveling and playing together. Now we're able to do that full-time. It's so inspiring when fans send us their stories and tell us how our content helps them in their family situations. It's that kind of love that keeps us making videos.
In the future, we're planning on making lots and lots more of exactly this style content, because it's natural to us, it works with our channel, and we have so much fun doing it. When you're making your own videos it's okay to be specific and still have fun making your content. Whether you're a creator who's just getting started or a seasoned pro, remember to be consistent, keep filming, keep uploading and always have fun with it. That translates through your content.
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