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How Funtoys Collector Became a YouTube Phenomenon

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In the world of YouTube celebrities, those who entertain the masses of teen through young adult audiences get the majority of media attention. Pew Die Pie, Smosh, Epic Meal Time, Jenna Marbles, Philip DeFranco, Epic Meal Time, and a few others are amongst the most prominent. They make high quality, highly entertaining videos that are shared and viewed over and over again.

What you may not know, especially if you’re childless, is that one anonymous pair of hands are as popular, or even more popular in some cases, than any of those YouTube channels. That channel is Funtoys Collector. On this account, once known as Disney Collector, you’ll see these anonymous hands opening a boxed toy, talking about the contents in a clear and soothing voice, and assembling it. Here’s an example:

That’s what happens in every video, and that simple premise has the channel at nearly 7,300,000,000 views. You read that right: 7. Billion. Views. How did this anonymous pair of hands become so popular? That, and what you can learn from them, will be looked at in this article.

How successful is the Funtoys Collector channel?

To put Funtoys Collector’s success in perspective we’ll look at total channel views for some of its peers in the YouTube celebrity world:

  1. Pew Die Pie: 9.4 billion views
  2. Smosh: 4.5 billion views
  3. Vegetta777: 3 billion views
  4. Jenna Marbles: 1.8 billion views
  5. Philip DeFranco: 1.3 billion views
  6. Epic Meal Time: 881 million

That’s right, only the mighty Pewds has more views. To be fair, Pewds joined YouTube a year before Funtoys Collector, and also has around 1000 more total videos uploaded. There are only two other channels which seriously challenge Pew Die Pie and Funtoys Collector for most channel views of all time: EMI Music, and Rihanna’s Vevo. One is the entire EMI music roster, the other is the very repeat viewable, and always in the news, Bad Gal RiRi.

Looking at FunToys Collector’s individual videos, we see that there are a few viral hits. There is nothing different about these videos though. It is still the same hands, the same voice, and the progression of opening a box and assembling the toy inside. Here’s the channel’s most popular video of all time, released last year, with over 360 million views:

 

That’s it. There’s no secret to the content in the videos themselves; open a box, assemble, talk about the product. So how does the Funtoys Collector YouTube channel manage to be so popular? Let’s look at that next.

Looking at the popularity of the Funtoys Collector channel

Most YouTubers are always working to get more and more subscribers. This makes sense as it permanently attaches the content creator’s YouTube account to that of its fans. Meaning once someone subscribes to a channel they’ll come back and watch videos repeatedly since they’re notified of new video uploads. You could make the assumption now that the secret to Funtoys Collector’s success is subscribers. Let’s look at the subscriber numbers for the peers we already looked at above before we assume this:

  1. Pew Die Pie: 38 million
  2. Smosh: 21 million
  3. Vegetta777: 10 million
  4. Jenna Marbles: 15 million
  5. Philip DeFranco: 3.5 million
  6. Epic Meal Time: 7 million

Those are some pretty big numbers from Pewds and Smosh, with Jenna Marbles way up there too. Funtoys Collector must be amongst these top three YouTube celebrities with millions of subscribers too, right? Wrong. Funtoys Collector has slightly under 5 million subscribers. That is fewer than Epic Meal Time who haven’t reached a billion total views yet, let alone Funtoys Collector’s 7 billion+!

So what’s the secret behind Funtoys Collector getting so many views, besides a million moms playing the videos on this channel to sooth their children when they want 5 minutes of quiet? You’ll see it now with this screenshot of a typical description from a Funtoys Collector video:

She does it with KILLER, out of the box, SEO tactics! The same killer SEO tactics you can learn from using RankWatch’s tool for keyword tracking.

Some would say that Funtoys Collector is bordering on being spammy. Some would also say that this is one of the most popular, and profitable, YouTube channels in the world. Use the same SEO tactics as this channel and let other people complain on your way to the bank.

The channel’s SEO tactics have 4 main sections in every video:

1.    A description that contains the names of everything in the video.
2.    A section where the word ‘toys’ is translated into other languages.
3.    A section where the main feature of the toy is translated into other languages.
4.    A section which describes the show or marketing behind the toy, along with translations of the character names in other languages.
5.    BONUS: As a bonus to the channel’s SEO, you will occasionally see other languages in the video titles. For example, the Hello Kitty videos always feature Japanese in the title.

Funtoys Collector is, to phrase it cheekily, getting billions of views because someone working on the channel knows how to use Google Translate. Funtoys Collector has also realized something that so few people do on YouTube: you can market to a truly global audience!

As an example, let’s say that people are searching for videos like yours in German, but your videos are in English. So what? If they find you they can still get something from you visually. With so many people speaking English as a second language, which is the most popular of all second languages, they’re STILL likely to understand you anyway!

What you can learn from Funtoys Collector’s SEO tactics

What you can learn from Funtoys Collector isn’t that you should try to appeal to every single language group in the world. It isn’t very likely that you’ll have as large an appeal as this channel. What you should learn is that you can work on discovering which other language groups may be interested in your video content, and incorporating that into your SEO. What are the other languages spoken in your country? Should more USA based businesses incorporate Spanish? Do Canadians need to focus heavily on French? Analyse your demographics to see where the opportunities are.

What’s more, have you thought about adding additional languages as subtitles, or doing complete overdubs, to your video channel? A number of other channels are already doing this, like Lego who translate a number of their videos into Spanish and Japanese.

No matter what your goals are for your channel, I’m betting that having more views is going to be a major component of your success. Take a look at your SEO tactics, and include the fact that people are searching in languages besides English. You can really grow your channel with this globally aligned tactic.

 

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