Jarvis Johnson’s approach to “audience hopping” on YouTube

When Jarvis Johnson made the intentional choice to switch audiences and genres on YouTube, from software engineering videos to comedic commentary, he took a calculated risk — one motivated by his creative aspirations and backed by his research into how algorithms work on the platform. “I quickly realized that while I could lean into this niche of tech lifestyle content,” Jarvis says, “it just wasn't the full picture of what I wanted to express creatively.”

With one funny video, Jarvis was on his way to redefining his niche as a creator. And, after seven months, he had gained a million subscribers!

Here, Jarvis dives into how he follows his expanding creative interests, experiments with videos topics, and “audience hopped” on YouTube, all while building and strengthening his relationship with his community.

Transcript

Jarvis Johnson:
I had in my head build for the audience you want, not the audience you have.

Jack Conte:
You basically said bye to those 50,000 people.

Jarvis Johnson:
Yeah, and then I never posted on my channel again.

Jack Conte:
Jarvis Johnson had one of the fastest growth trajectories I've ever seen for a creator.

Jarvis Johnson:
I was expecting to hit 100K over the weekend but I hit it at lunchtime.

Jack Conte:
A million subscribers in seven months. But here's the thing, it was incredibly deliberate. Like, he read YouTube's whitepaper on how their discovery algorithm worked and then he used what he learned in that paper to make his videos more viral. He also did something that I've just not seen many YouTubers do: audience hopping. He jumped from one audience, tech —

Jarvis Johnson:
How do I get into software engineering?

Jack Conte:
To a completely unrelated audience: comedy commentary.

Jarvis Johnson:
Why did you throw it down?

Jack Conte:
Which just basically doesn't happen.

[Clip from Jarvis’s video]:
I would like to make money following my lifelong dream of making videos, please. You and everybody else, buddy.

Jack Conte:
Now Jarvis has one of the biggest commentary channels on YouTube. He's insanely smart, insanely determined, and one of the most special creators on the internet.

Jarvis.

Jarvis Johnson:
What's up?

Jack Conte:
Thanks for being here.

Jarvis Johnson:
I'm happy to be back.

Jack Conte:
I want to get nerdy today.

Jarvis Johnson:
Oh, we will.

Jack Conte:
Like, really obnoxiously nerdy and detailed.

Jarvis Johnson:
I'm down, I'm down to get nerdy and then I'm also down to get soft and creative.

Jack Conte:
Okay, great. From the heart and from the head.

Jarvis Johnson:
Exactly.

Jack Conte:
Both at once.

Jarvis Johnson:
You need it.

Jack Conte:
Okay. When did you first feel like, "Huh, I'm building an audience. "I'm connecting with people. "I've got a community here." Was it a slow burn? Was there a moment? When did that happen?

Jarvis Johnson:
So the fourth video I made was called — something about an intro to software engineering. But I quickly realized that while I could lean into this niche of tech lifestyle content, it just wasn't the full picture of what I wanted to express creatively. I was like, "I wanna do a commentary video." Let me do a commentary video about tech stuff. So I do a video called "The Worst Software Engineering Advice I've Ever Seen."

[Clip from Jarvis’s video]
All right, step two, begin programming immediately. Remember step one? F*** step one. You gotta start programming now. Even if you're still in grade school? Is this for real?

Jarvis Johnson:
So it was my first commentary video. And at the end of that video, again, I was thinking of this as my whole audience watching everything in sequence, I watched a video from this channel called "Five-Minute Crafts."

[Clip from Jarvis’s video]
These are exercises we can do. God, that looks terrifying.

Jarvis Johnson:
I included that at the end of the video knowing that it wasn't really connected to software engineering advice 'cause I was like, "I really wanna do a whole video about this." But I think I need to tease it before people are comfortable. And so then the immediate video after that was, at the time, called "The Worst Life Hacks I've Ever Seen" because the video before that was called "The Worst Software Engineering Advice I've Ever Seen." And no one showed up for that video.

Jack Conte:
No one showed up for the video about the life hack video.

Jarvis Johnson:
The life hack video. Because YouTube is trying its best to impress upon or show the most likely viewer to watch your content the video. And to YouTube, the most likely viewer was a tech view.

Jack Conte:
So this is the problem.

Jarvis Johnson:
Right.

Jack Conte:
Which is that you found an audience. Your early videos connected. You got the tech people. And then you hit a point that a lot of creators hit where they're like, "Okay." If you're lucky, you hit a point that a lot of creators like.

Jarvis Johnson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jack Conte:
It's like, you wiggle your way in, kind of.

Jarvis Johnson:
Right, no, that's how it feels. Anything, you're taking anything you can get.

Jack Conte:
It's just like taking bets. You find something that hits, you're in a category, and then you're like, "Hm, that's not exactly what I want to do and what I wanna say. And what I wanna say is this and what I wanna do is this. But this audience expects this and that's what I found first.” Now, that's where it stops for a lot of creators. You did something that very few people are able to do which is you kind of hopped audiences.

Jarvis Johnson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jack Conte:
How did you make that bridge?

Jarvis Johnson:
I was watching another creator who was in the desired genre community that I wanted to be in, which is commentary, comedic commentary on YouTube named Cody Ko. Also a former software engineer. Don't know what that's about. Cody had made a video about five-minute crafts.

[Clip from Cody Ko’s video]
A drill? We need a power tool for this craft? It seems a little excessive.

Jarvis Johnson:
And so the first thing that I go is like I made a video about five-minute crafts. So, there have to be people who watched his video who wanna see more of this goofiness. And now they've been introduced to it, right? And so I changed the title and thumbnail of my video to just more closely seem related to his. So instead of "The Worst Life Hacks I've Ever Seen," I titled the video "5-Minute Crafts is the Worst Channel on YouTube." And you know, negativity sells on YouTube, extreme opinions, the more extreme, the better. In reality, when you watch the video, I'm not angry, I'm goofing around.

A few days later I see a spike in my analytics. This was picking up but it wasn't going gangbusters or anything. And I was like, "Interesting." And right around that time I put out this video where I was reviewing my transcript. And the way that I pitched it, which was my, it was like my whole computer science degree in 12 minutes that was how I pitched it. And that video was a one out of 10 in the dashboard. You know, it was my most successful video to date, basically, in terms of view growth. And so I had a decision to make.

The life hack video was picking up views and I could play into that audience because right now there's literally no other video on my channel for that person to watch. And then the other option is to continue to lean into the software engineering thing which is what has been working for me. You know, when something works if you just kind of keep hitting it then you can really leverage it for growth on YouTube. And so I felt the fork in the road. And in the comments to that five-minute crafts video, there are a lot of people like, "You think this is bad, you should watch Troom Troom." And I was like, okay, well let me do that. And then I made a video called "Troom Troom is Actually the Worst Channel on YouTube."

[Clip from Jarvis’s video]
The voiceover is very awkward as if the script was written by a non-native English speaker, which would make sense because Troom Troom has like, 10 different channels across a ton of different languages. And so this got me thinking like, what is Troom Troom? Who runs it? Other questions in a conspiratorial tone.

Jack Conte:
So you chose the comedy commentary.

Jarvis Johnson:
I chose the commentary because I was like I better give this a shot because I already know that the software engineering thing can work. So I was like, "This is just me trying another thing. I can always go back to the software engineering thing." Because an individual video isn't gonna tank a channel so I think it pays to experiment. In that video, I have the screenshot because I have to this day never seen anything like it. So not only was it a one out of 10 on the thing but they tell you your percentages of the views are up this percent, the the watch time is up this percent. It said 9-9-9-% and then greater-than. Like, it was just the video's now off the charts. We don't even display. Our front end code doesn't even display numbers this high. And I was like, "Okay, cool." We're in. And then it was, then it was a little bit of, I now swapped audiences a bit. The tech audience was still there and they were loud. And they were like, "When are you gonna make "tech videos again?"

Jack Conte:
How many subscribers did you have at that point?

Jarvis Johnson:
At that point I had, before the five-minute crafts video blew up, I had 50,000 subscribers, which is a sizable number.

Jack Conte:
So how did you — ? Okay, this is another thing that lots of, not just creators deal with, but companies deal with, and the people who make products deal with. You basically said bye to those 50,000 people.

Jarvis Johnson:
Yeah.

Jack Conte:
How did you feel about like, clearly in the comments, and —

Jarvis Johnson:
Yeah, I had in my head build for the audience you want, not the audience you have. And so I was like, let me try capitalizing on this because at that point, that five-minute craft video had 400,000 views when the Troom Troom video came out. And then the five-minute crafts video continued to grow. And then the Troom Troom video was a fast follow to it. So today, the five-minute crafts video has 10 million views and the Troom Troom video has six million views.

So yeah, it was a little bit leaving the audience behind, but because I didn't feel like that audience was a community, I didn't feel like they were there for me. Some people were, and some of those people are still around. Like, I'll get DMs and they'll be like, "I've been following since these days." And I'm like, "Really?" But the other thing I did, I wasn't ready to throw tech aside. I made a second channel. And basically, it was kind of like, this is where I'm gonna do tech stuff. And that channel, one video got 300,000 views and it got 50,000 subscribers in a few weeks.

Jack Conte:
So you basically just migrated your —

Jarvis Johnson:
Just moved them. Yeah, I felt like I migrated. And then I never posted on my channel again. Which is the saddest part is that I kind of led them to, you know, their demise I guess.

Jack Conte:
But the thing that I think is so important in all of that is that, you know, you as a creator, I feel like, yes, you can just make the thing that you got famous for and kind of hop on the treadmill and start cranking it out, despite the heart. Because clearly you're an incredibly smart person. You could have just brained your way through that whole thing and said, "I'm gonna leave the spirit behind. I'm gonna leave the heart behind "and just like, logic my way through building an audience." But you felt a pull to make something else and you had the guts to do it. And I think that is something that, man, I wish for every creative person because it's so easy to get sucked into trying to maneuver through the rules and just winning the game and learning the game of it, and forgetting that "oh, actually if I want to be happy and fulfilled as an artist, I gotta listen to what I want to make in the world."

Jarvis Johnson:
That's very true. I do wanna say that it's very easy to tell that story in a narrative and be like then the rest was history. But that process repeated, like, okay I'm experimenting, I'm going back to what works. I'm experimenting — throughout that, you are building an audience, hopefully. And in the long term, you expand that core so that you can take more risks and have it not be as big of a hit on your performances.

Jack Conte:
Last question. You got a podcast called "Sad Boyz".

Jarvis Johnson:
True.

Jack Conte:
You're nailing the YouTube life. You made the jump somehow. It's been incredible. You now got a team: editors, producers. You're making stuff all the time, multiple things a month. Are you happy? Are you fulfilled as a creator?

Jarvis Johnson:
You know, I am so much better these days than I was immediately after leaving Patreon because I was trying to figure out myself. And then right after I thought I figured out my plan and I moved to Los Angeles, suddenly, COVID happened. And I was like, okay, well now I'm just in this Los Angeles apartment, I haven't really explored the city yet. And a lot of my friends moved. You know, it was — I was rebuilding. I felt like a series of, kind of, rolling the boulder up the hill Sisyphean style and having it roll back down. But I actually do feel like I'm at a good place now to build from. And if it stops here, I'm really happy.

Jack Conte:
Amazing. Well, thank you for coming in. Thanks for taking the time.

Jarvis Johnson:
Hell, yeah.

Jack Conte:
So good to see you again.

Jarvis Johnson:
My pleasure. Yeah, so good to see you.