At the start of the year, CrystalFissure’s YouTube channel had just under 14,000 subscribers. As of the time of this writing (October 9th), CrystalFissure is only a couple hundred subscribers away from 20,000, a massive milestone for his channel.
What was behind this astronomical growth (in relative terms)? The highly anticipated PS4 video game, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy. CrystalFissure utilised this game’s hype to grow his channel by uploading many videos about the game and the new footage released intermittently throughout the year.
Before covering this game, CrystalFissure did video walkthroughs (with commentary) over almost every Crash Bandicoot game released. A lot of people accredit his Crash Bandicoot videos as a reason why they subscribed to CrystalFissure’s channel. So what CrystalFissure did was recognise that the market was inherently interested in the upcoming game that was essentially a HD remake of the first three games released on the original PlayStation.
Viewership for N. Sane Trilogy content started off decently, above the average 500-1000 views CrystalFissure got for his regular videos. There were other exceptions to these numbers, such as his Spyro videos which also grew at the time (due to the fact that Crash and Spyro are inherently related sister-series’). As more people saw his coverage though, the more people would check out subsequent videos.
For example, videos uploaded in April amassed 16,000 views and higher. As it continued, he even had videos that got over 90,000 views. His largest month in this history of the channel saw him gain 746,000 total views for the month of June. He also gained 1500 subs and 1300 subs for the months of May and June respectively.
The game released at the end of June and once the game was out, his views remained higher than months in the previous year, but they dropped back once more popular channels began to cover the game. It’s interesting to see how one game can completely bring up a channel to levels previously unreachable.