“What bothers me,” I confess, “is that it makes you realize how you’re just a drop in the bucket—one of a zillion people posting videos every day. No one’s sitting around waiting for us to post something, that’s for sure.”
“Do you think anyone in our class will get BIG?” he asks. “Superstar big?”
“I doubt it. The chances are minuscule for that kind of fame.” I hide the bottle of hot sauce in the bin. “You’re not thinking about SINGING online, are you? Because you have a terrible voice.”
“It’s not about the singing,” he says. “It’s about the fans.”
When Mom appears in the garage, I block the tub of gear and the hot sauce. The whole reason we did this today was because she wasn’t supposed to be home until later.
She asks what we’re up to.
“Just going through stuff.” I hold up my old baseball mitt, which is so small I couldn’t fit into it if I tried. “Remember this, Matt?”
“We played a lot of baseball with that mitt,” Matt agrees.
“I hate to interrupt the nostalgia party,” Mom says. “Just wanted you to know I canceled my appointment and I’ll be working here if you kids need anything.”
She leaves—along with my plans for filming Monkey Love Hot Sauce today.
ANALYZE THIS
“It’s important to try and understand why some videos work and others don’t,” Mr. Ennis says in class. “Let’s talk about Carly’s latest video on her playlist and try to analyze why it already has 212,530 views.”
WHAT? I had no idea Carly was bringing in those kinds of numbers. If I had numbers like that, I’d make sure the whole school knew.
He hits play as we watch Carly tell a story about talking to her mom when one of the rubber bands on her braces snapped.
“You’ll never guess where it landed,” she says. “In my mother’s mouth! I mean, she’s my mother, but still! Suppose it had been someone from school? OMG—suppose it was someone I had a crush on!”
Does Carly have a crush on someone I don’t know about?
Mr. Ennis hits pause and asks us for feedback.
Natalie raises her hand. “Carly isn’t afraid to be vulnerable. If you have braces, you can really relate to her frustration.”
“She’s cool and funny,” Tyler adds. “I bet half of her subscribers don’t even HAVE braces.”
Is Tyler the one she has a crush on?
Mr. Ennis asks Carly if she’s tried to figure out who her subscribers are.
“Sixty percent of them are girls,” Carly says. “And in my rough calculations, approximately seventy percent of both boys and girls who leave comments wear braces.”
Is she kidding? Who does this kind of research on their viewers?
“One girl—at least I think it’s a girl, but you never know—is so cute, writing her own braces anecdotes in the comment section every single day. I actually look forward to Power73’s thoughts.”
Mr. Ennis is impressed with how much work Carly’s put in to analyzing her data. “Today we’re ALL going to look at our numbers.” He pats his stomach like he just ate. “Guess what the number one demographic is for my channel, LOL Illusions?”
We all make different guesses, with most of us estimating Mr. Ennis’s audience to be made up of kids and teenagers like us.
He shakes his head. “The biggest group of viewers I have are women over eighty. I have a huge following in the assisted-living community.”
“No way!” several of us shout.
He laughs and shrugs. “You’re right—it’s kids your age. But wouldn’t it be great to reach seniors too?”
He tells us to go to our YouTube channels and head to the Creator Studio. We follow his instructions and click Analytics in the menu on the left.
“You can also check your videos individually by clicking the Analytics button under each video.”
A few kids in the class—Carly and Natalie—seem familiar with these pages but for the rest of us, this information is a revelation. How many people liked and disliked each video, how old they are, what kind of device they watched it on, how long they watched it, if they shared it, even how many times they watched it.
Mr. Ennis walks around the room as we study who our viewers are. He stops when he gets to my desk and points at the graph I’m staring at.
“For example,” he says, “this shows that Derek had two hundred and twenty-three views on his new Monkey Love Hot Sauce clip from last night.”
I puff up my chest a bit. Not too shabby!
“But what this column shows is that two hundred and twenty-one of them were from the same person.” He looks at me and laughs. “I’m guessing that’s maybe a grandparent who misses you?”
I can’t let my classmates know I spent all last night clicking on my own videos to raise the number of views for today’s class! I laugh and say my grandmother watches everything I post multiple times.
Mr. Ennis continues to study the chart then moves to another area in the menu. “Well, unless your grandmother is a twelve-year-old boy in Los Angeles with a smartphone, your enthusiastic viewer doesn’t seem to be her.”
Umberto and Matt start laughing hysterically.
“You’re tweaking the stats by watching your own videos?” Umberto says.
Everyone laughs, including Mr. Ennis. I can feel my checks flush bright red.
“Okay, that’s enough humiliation for Derek for one day,” he finally says.
It turns out Mr. Ennis is wrong because Matt, Carly, and Umberto remind me of it endlessly for the rest of the week.
Many, many times.
COMMENTS
We’re all very aware that because Mr. Ennis’s class is a weekly after-school elective, it runs for a shorter period of time than our other subjects. When I realize there are only three classes left, however, I go pedal-to-the-metal to maximize my number of subscribers. Matt, on the other hand, tries to ratchet up his views.
