PROJECT: Moky_Dokie
ROLE: Strategy, Branding, Content Creation
DURATION: Sep ‘21 — Jun '23
Overview
Kurtis “moky_dokie” Pratt is a professional eSports player, Twitch Streamer, and YouTuber with an audience of over 70,000 followers across various social media platforms. His content primarily focuses on his career as a top-level competitor in Super Smash Bros Melee (SSBM), but he also regularly uploads a variety of other content. Taking over video editing, posting, and branding in September 2021 from his previous editor, I took a metric-driven and strategy-heavy approach to the role, helping to increase his YouTube subscribers by approximately 500% in the first year, a 400% improvement over the year prior.
Challenges
Create engaging, high-quality, content.
Develop a unique branding and visual identity.
Convert impressions into sustainable
cross-platform growth.
Competitive Analysis
In order to construct a solid foundation for content development for moky, I did a considerable amount of research into other content creators to better understand the markers for successful content.
I made a deliberate effort to look at direct competitors (other competitive gamers in SSBM and other esports) and also content creators in non-gaming spaces for insight into the breadth of successful online content. My goal was to find unique opportunities for moky to establish himself as a personality and content creator within the esports space.
I saw opportunities for competitive differentiation in
highlighting the following features:
Highlight the Narrative
Most SSBM gaming content is comprised of compilations of unrelated Twitch stream highlights, without a strong through-line. The most successful creators in other online spaces center their videos around singular, engaging video topics with strong appeals to emotion. We decided to apply this sensibility to moky’s content.
Quality over Quantity
In order to emphasize storytelling and strong narrative content, we decided to take a quality-over-quantity approach, in direct contrast to other creators in the space. moky and I frequently write scripts, film voiceover narration, and develop custom visual assets to differentiate his content from his contemporaries.
Follow the Fun
Competitive gaming content can often be dry and analytical, focused on instruction to aid in improving the viewer’s skills in-game. We decided to focus on personality-driven, entertainment-first content as a way to both differentiate moky from his peers and also allow moky to slowly broaden his content beyond SSBM.
Create Engaging, High-Quality Content
Challenge One
The performance and success of online social media content, particularly content that is algorithmically distributed (such as YouTube videos) can largely be tracked through two key value markers: Impressions and Engagement.
On YouTube specifically, Impressions and Engagement are most clearly represented in the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and Audience Retention statistics. My primary goal in content development has been to attempt to optimize output for these metrics.
Click-through-Rate (CTR) is the number of clicks that content receives divided by the number of times that content is shown:
clicks ÷ impressions = CTR
Audience Retention is the average percentage of a YouTube video that people watch. Videos with high Audience Retention scores tend to have increased visibility on YouTube's platform.
Maximizing Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Maximizing CTR on YouTube is a matter creating unique, captivating video thumbnails and titles that drive viewers to want to see the advertised content. CTR is extremely important to the success of YouTube content- it doesn’t matter how good a video is if nobody is interested in watching it. This means that, in a sense, the video thumbnail and title are more important than the video itself.
My strategy for maximizing CTR was to improve upon to facets of content display: Make sure video ideas are inherently interesting, and frame those ideas in a way that elicits emotional intrigue.
Visual Branding
Sub badges & emotes based on SSBM iconography and the in-jokes within moky_dokie’s chat community.
Video Content
Below is a collection of some of the content I produced for moky. I edited all of the videos below, and also produced thumbnails, monitored analytics and SEO optimization, co-wrote and produced scripts, and produced any additional necessary video or graphical elements.
Results
Beginning with my involvement in September 2021, Moky’s channel saw a rapid acceleration in growth, in spite of content not being produced at a substantially increased rate. The development and refinement of content through the strategies outlined above has resulted in significantly better viewer engagement, retention, and subsequently channel growth.
Total Video Views (Monthly)
Takeaways
Working as moky's YouTube editor has been a challenging, but rewarding experience. Through strong, creative decision-making, a focus on data-driven success markers, and an iterative approach to content development, I was able to help him grow his channel, reach a much wider audience, and establish a unique voice in SSBM and the greater content creation space. The positive results speak for themselves, and I am proud to be a part of moky’s continued success.
Feel free to check out moky’s YouTube channel below!
