The Power of Compilations

In the summer of 2021, I was a new father with a two-month-old baby. With zero time to produce videos, I lazily compiled some recent clips of me magically turning into objects and posted it online.

Individually, the clips did okay - a few million views across all of them. But something big happened when I grouped them together - 250k retweets, hundreds of millions of views, and national news appearances.

As someone who specializes in 5-second attention-grabbing clips, it's super important to me to understand why grouping a handful of these videos together makes them infinitely more shareable.

I'd wager that there's something to the clips being similar. In this example, I fall and turn into something. So after the first clip, you understand the format and get to play along with what surprises might happen in the next clips. I don't necessarily think this format would work with disjointed clips.

I proved this with me Magically Breaking in Half. Rather than post each clip, I specifically shared it as a themed, 5-video compilation - to great success.

I'm also a big believer that people respect and are more inclined to share human effort. A handful of clips just feels more like I've taken a serious amount of time, effort, and skill to produce the compilation, compared to a single clip.

👉 Interestingly enough, I'm going to be spending all of November producing a compilation of magic tricks for a global brand, where each clip highlights a different product. It'll be done exactly in the style of these examples (although maybe not as destructive or violent).

So all of that to say that me lazily repurposing videos has lead to job opportunities 3 years later! There's obviously something to this format that excites both viewers and advertisers.