Predicting which videos will be popular on YouTube

I've been publishing videos on YouTube for a few years now, in fact my first video was a washing machine review published back in 2012. Some of my older videos have done really well. My most popular video - a look around the Playmobil Lion Knight's Empire Castle that we bought my son for Christmas one year - has received over 115,000 views which is quite amazing. I have quite a few other Playmobil videos which have done surprisingly well, and all I do is show the features of the sets and talk about them. I should probably think about making a few more, especially as many of the sets are now no longer available!

Something that put me off adding videos to YouTube for a long time was that it has a reputation for negative comments and trolls. I'm a sensitive person, and if someone said something rude about me or my children I would take it very personally and it would probably stop me uploading videos. Fortunately the worst that I've had was someone commenting on the fact that I was letting my son play with dolls!

I've uploaded videos across a variety of genres, but mainly toy reviews, craft tutorials and days out or holiday videos. I've never really done much in the way of promoting my videos, and I've found that in general they either take off immediately and the views keep growing, or they tank completely. I think that one way to do well is to get lots of views as soon as you can after publishing. I had a lot of success with my video about the pirate play area at Center Parcs de Vossemeren which I shared to their Facebook page and they re-shared immediately. The views came in straightaway, thick and fast! But having said that, my second video about the park which I published a few days later and didn't share has now overtaken it in terms of views.

In general my travel videos do perform well, especially those of holiday destinations abroad, and hotel or room tours. A really quick video that I made of the beach where we stayed in Fuerteventura also took off really quickly without any promotion at all, I've no idea why!

One type of video that I've had poor success with has been craft tutorial videos. This surprised me as I thought they would do well - I obviously need to do some work on improving them! My most popular craft video was this short demonstration of the Chameleon Multiple Tone Pens, one of the first craft videos that I made. It took a long time to get to that level of views though, it was published over two years ago.

Another craft video that I made has done terribly despite me actually promoting it - it's only 30 seconds long and I really thought it would do better - please have a watch and make it more popular!

So sometimes there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why some videos do better on YouTube than others and I find it impossible to predict! I'd love to know if you have any tips or tricks for YouTube success!