What makes a piece of content great?

What makes one piece of content better than the other? We can study closely top viral videos, writings, visual arts, etc. on what makes them so appealing to a global audience. I think it comes down to how many layers there are in the content and we can look at it in 2 dimensions: from a technical dimension, or from a human dimension.

Let’s take a video for example since we’re doing videos. From a technical dimension, the layers are

• Visuals: that is what we see on screen. Visuals are technically influenced by the lighting setup, the type of camera used, the physical items on set, the colours, graphic effects etc.

• Audio: that’s what we hear. Audio is also influenced by how pure the sound is recorded at source, the volume, the musicality of sound tracks, tone of voice, voice acting, sounds effects and many other factors that makes things sound great.

• Editing: that’s how every video element is pieced together to form a story. It comes down to how clips are assembled, where the cuts are made visually, the timing and pacing of the entire video to draw interest and hold attention, how the sound syncs with the visuals, and many other editing techniques to put a video together.

So from a layering view, a good video would have these 3 layers done well. Generally, having more is better i.e. thicker layers, meaning more visuals, more rich audio, more editing to polish the story. But only up to a certain point before it becomes over-the-top, just too much of a good thing that makes it unpalatable already. Most great content I’ve come across have these 3 layers.

Now from a human dimension, these are the layers I observe from great content

• Emotions: content that stirs up the common human emotions

  • Happiness: enjoying good food, good vibes all the time, just like https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyEd6QBSgat5kkC6svyjudA going around the world to try everything nice

  • Sadness: Sentimental stories as we explore human struggles, like how https://www.youtube.com/@OGS.Official tells human stories and what we can learn from them

  • Fear: Stunt shows where we fear for people’s safety and watch on nervously https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcDr8_oleB4

  • Respect: deep admiration for people who’ve dedicated their lives to that one thing, like how https://www.youtube.com/@saintcavish set out to capture food stories around China

  • Disgust or anger: shocking food documentaries as seen on Netflix, like what happens inside the meat industry

  • Surprise: usually in a positive sense, like surprising restaurants normally empty with 100 guests https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8lsd1FuuYQ. People also like cooking competitions which are filled with surprises and drama, like MasterChef.

• Social values: showcasing cultural and traditional practices on-screen. Here’s a good example from a village girl from China seeking to promote and preserve her hometown heritage https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQG_fzADCunBTV1KwjkfAQQ

• Pain points: solving people’s problems by offering a direct solution, usually seen in how-tos and tutorials https://www.youtube.com/@epicurious/videos

• Rare events: Unusual ingredients or techniques people usually don’t talk about. https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisYoungCooks/videos is really pushing it from a creative cooking science angle.

• Curiosity: Weird claims and science experiments https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRober/videos is best known for

• Aspiration: People want to learn from the best, or from people who try to. https://www.youtube.com/@FallowChefs/videos chefs are best known on YouTube for teaching western cooking at a Michelin level but at home.

• Authenticity: Content that shows real struggles and how things actually look resonate well with people. https://www.youtube.com/c/bingingwithbabish includes his cooking mistakes and learns from them, while https://www.youtube.com/@MadeWithLau shows how their family cooks dinner on a personal level.

• Community: People want to feel noticed and not be treated as just a number among the viewers, so channels that frequently engage viewers like https://www.youtube.com/@Maangchi/videos make people come back to hangout with her for feel-good content.

This list is definitely not exhaustive and there are possibly thousands or more factors we can glean from various content around the world, because of how diverse we are as human beings. Everyone has unique interests and strengths, as compared to the technical layer which only has 3 layers, whereas the human side has so much more.

So where do we go from knowing all these layers? Great content can in fact be engineered by including one or more of layers we could think of into our content. For a start, analysing the top content in our niche gives us a list that acts as guideline for us to measure ourselves and see where we could add another layer to our content. But again, more doesn’t mean better. Usually the best content focuses on 3 to 5 layers, so that people could focus on them without getting too confused by what’s going on. But generally, for content that is not getting views, it’s usually because there aren’t enough layers to it that makes it interesting enough to be worth a watch.