How To Write A Killer YouTube Title (17 Viral Title Examples)
Titles are crucial for YouTube success. A compelling title grabs attention & entices clicks, convincing viewers to commit their time. Let's explore how you can craft viral titles.
Crafting the perfect title for your YouTube video can be the difference between going viral and getting lost in the noise. A compelling title not only grabs attention but also entices viewers to click and watch.
While thumbnails are crucial for capturing initial interest, a well-crafted title is what convinces viewers to commit their time to your content. Titles are often underestimated, yet they play a critical role in the viewer's decision-making process.
Viewer Process: From Browsing → Clicking
Before diving into the best title formats, it’s important to understand how viewers interact with your content, in order to optimise your video packaging and beat the human psychology.
The process typically starts with viewers scrolling their homepage or flicking through the youtube suggested sidebar. This is where your thumbnail needs to grab their attention and spark an initial curiosity. (You can find examples of viral thumbnail formats here)
Providing your thumbnail does it’s job, viewers are then likely to read the title of the video. After some back and forth, this is when they make their decision whether to watch the video, or keep scrolling.
Now obviously every viewer is different and this all happens within the space of a couple of seconds, but the principal stays the same. The title has a huge impact on whether viewers click on your video or not.
Now that we’ve covered why titles are so important, let’s jump into how you can craft a killer title for your next video.
How to Craft Your Own Viral Titles
To craft your own viral titles, the best place to start is by looking for trending title formats within your niche or adjacent niches (niches with a large overlap in audience/viewer characteristics). To find trending formats, look for recent videos that performed better than the channel average.
We did this by using the 1of10 app to find outlier videos across a variety of niches, making the process easier and enabling us to find newer and fresher concepts. However, if you have some channels in mind, you could also use our free extension tool to see this data.
Once you've found some outliers, it's not about copying—it's about understanding successful trends within your niche or adjacent niches and why those titles performed well.
Ideally, you're looking for concepts with 2-5 recent outlier videos. Any less, and it may be risky to validate; many more, and you start reaching a point of audience saturation, where many of your target audience will have seen similar titles and the effectiveness starts to wear off.
From here, you need to figure out the viral vectors in these titles—what factors led to these titles going viral and what made people click.
Once you have figured this out, you can then plug and play with different concepts and viral vectors to craft a unique title for your video in a format that is proven to work.
Now that we've covered how to craft your own viral titles, here are the viral title formats we found that you can use for your own channel straight away:
17 YouTube Title Formats That Are Crushing It Right Now
1) [Extreme Challenge], This is what happened
2) I [Action] [Subject] From Every [Scope]
3) Worlds Most [Adjective] [Object]
4) [Authority Figure] on How to [Powerful Outcome]
5) I [action] The Most [Subject] In [Time Period]
6) I Survived [Time Period] In [Location/Scenario]
7) [Extreme] vs [Opposite Extreme]
8) I Investigated [Extreme Situtation]
9) Why [Subject] is worth $[value]
10) The [something] Rule That [Solves Problem]
11) What Happened To [Subject]
12) [Activity] But, [Interesting Spin]
13) Is [Something] ACTUALLY Worth It?
14) I [Something Challenging] To Prove It’s Not Luck
15) [Something] Everything You Need To Know
16) $[Cheap] vs $[Expensive]
17) How I went from [Undesirable] to [Desirable]
Creating an engaging YouTube title is both an art and a science. By leveraging these proven formats, you can significantly increase the odds of your next video appealing to your intended audience and performing better.
Experiment with these formats, find what resonates with your audience, and keep repeating this cycle. Before you know it, you’ll build up a great intuition for what works and what doesn’t for your audience, making the process easier.