Tesla! TESLA! $TSLA. tsla tsla tsla. TESLA. Give us Tesla!
Every week we went live for one hour to chart popular stocks, and every week one person would spam the chat with their tickers of choice. Other voices weren’t heard, and our retention was lacking. We needed to fix this.
The Background
When I first joined TrendSpider, a SaaS company for day traders, our weekly stock market analysis was combined with an interview with Finance accounts on X (then Twitter). But our KPIs were showing that people only wanted stock market analysis and combining them was hurting our viewership. The first thing I did upon taking control of our long form media was to separate the two shows, and to make the stock market analysis live so that people could get the most up-to-date information and have their own questions answered.
The Problem
While viewership went up, and people loved our streams, we did have one problem. Every week we would ask people what they wanted to see charted, and every week one or two people would spam the chat with what they wanted to see. It obscured other comments and made it hard for the host of the live stream to pick anything that wasn’t this person’s choice. Viewership would start falling off as people realized they wouldn’t get the tickers they wanted charted, and we were left wondering how do we fix this?
The Solution
I decided to gamify our show and created a system for people to submit tickers to be charted and vote on which ones they wanted to see first. This allowed us to ensure that every ticker we reviewed had been voted to the top of the rankings. Every time we started charting a new stock people would be given three new votes to use, and after they finished they could leave comments trying to convince other people to vote for the ones they wanted to see.
The Results
This new format was a massive success. Not only did we hear back from many viewers with positive feedback, but over the months following implementation we saw a 27% increase in views. We also saw view duration increase for these live streams, proving that this level of engagement allowed people to become more invested in the stream while watching their own tickers climb the rankings.
Additionally, we found an added bonus to this method. One of the measures we took to prevent spamming was to require people to give an email address before they started voting. Because of this we were able to add over 1,000 emails to our marketing outreach lists.
Key Takeaway
Thinking outside of what could be done within the YouTube platform allowed the creation of a truly engaging video live stream that increased overall views, view duration, and brought in 1,000 new emails.
Sadie Lowell 
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