How Fireship became YouTube's favorite programmer
How Fireship wins YouTube
This post is a bit different from most of my other articles I’ve written. It’s about someone technical rather than something technical. Nevertheless, I hope you find it interesting and insightful!
Engineer’s Codex is a publication about real-world software engineering.
Fireship is one of YouTube’s most popular programming channels. With over 3 million subscribers and 200 million total views, he’s garnered a fanbase with his fast-paced, humorous, meme-filled videos explaining programming and software trends.
Each Fireship video, with a combo of sarcastic humor combined with bite-sized learning, leaves you satisfyingly entertained and gladly informed.
What makes Fireship’s videos so good?
What is his secret to growing so fast on one of the hardest niches on YouTube?
And how exactly did he do it?
That’s what we’ll answer in this article.
The Types of YouTube Programmers
Programming is a popular topic on YouTube, and most programming YouTubers fall into one of four categories. (Some YouTubers will fall into more than one or be in half a category).
Tutorials: Tutorial YouTubers create tutorials for various technologies, usually by walking through the creation of a sample project. However, the main issue here is that someone watching a “Firebase and Angular” tutorial may not want to watch a “React Native” tutorial, making one’s subscriber base fragmented. (Example: thenewboston)
Humor: Humor-focused programmers are extremely popular. Creators rise quickly from making comedy skits with niche tech and software engineering jokes. (Example: Joma Tech)
Coaches: YouTubers who generally work in tech as a software engineer and teach others how to get a job. (Example: Power Couple)
Commentary: YouTubers who generally work in tech as a software engineer and commentate on happenings. (Example: ThePrimeagen and his glorious moustache, Neetcode)
Indirect Entertainment: These are more “classic” YouTubers, where programming is in the background and entertainment is the first part. (Example: Fundy).
Which category does Fireship fall into?
Fireship’s Beginning
Fireship began by creating niche tutorials, specifically Angular + Firebase tutorials.
He eventually expanded his niche as his audience grew.
He stuck with programming, but started generalizing the tutorials, going from “Angular and Firebase” to “Firebase Basics”.
Then, as he kept growing, he widened the niche of programming even more, going over more generalized concepts while adding more personality into his explanations. His videos got faster-paced and much more interesting, as he started adding his sarcastic humor, niche jokes, and funny memes into each one.
Fireship’s Secret Sauce: Humor
Let’s look a little deeper into Fireship’s sense of humor.
Niche Jokes
He commonly makes jokes that only people with some programming experience would understand, such as jokes about how every week there’s a new JavaScript framework coming out.
Funny Memes
Since he doesn’t show his face, he needs to put something on the screen that’s visually entertaining and he uses memes and hilarious scenes from various media.
Sarcasm/Self-deprecating humor
Lastly, his sense of humor is sarcastic and often self-deprecating. In his “How to get a 1M subscribers in 100 seconds video” he talks about how he has the personality of a carrot (he doesn’t) and his handsome face (he is).
All these humorous aspects combined make Fireship an approachable YouTuber. He feels like your friend or coworker. He has jokes that feel like inside jokes, he shares memes with you (like your friend that sends you Reels on Instagram), and his sarcastic, self-deprecating humor gives him a sense of humbleness that makes him feel like a peer rather than this “YouTuber”.
Fireship’s YouTube Strategy Explained
Thanks to these aspects, viewers are encouraged to comment and discuss the topic at hand in the comments, boosting engagement. Since he teaches things too, you’ll see many comments glad they learned something new in an entertaining way.
And the way Fireship structures his channel not only drives viewer engagement, but also encourages “binge sessions”.
Evergreen Videos
YouTube loves it when a viewer binges someone’s videos. It shows that the viewer is satisfied enough that they keep watching one’s content and as a result, will boost that YouTube channel in the hopes that other people will also binge that content (and spend more time on YouTube as a result).
The best way to create a binge library is through evergreen videos - videos that are part of a series, but not news or trend related.
Fireships’s “X in 100 Seconds” series fits this bill. He publishes quick, fast-paced explainers in his unique style of topics like languages, frontend frameworks, and more.
When someone watches “C in 100 seconds” and they enjoy it, they’re hooked. They’ll watch another video, maybe “Java in 100 seconds”. Each video is satisfying to watch, filled with Fireship-style humor, and short, leading to a satisfying experience and the feeling of “let me just watch one more video.. It’s only 2 minutes..”.
Other longer evergreen videos also do well, like The God Tier Developer Roadmap (11 minutes long), which is currently the second most viewed video on his channel, with almost 7 million views at the time of writing.
Trending Videos
After publishing evergreen videos for a long time, Fireship started a new series, The Code Report, on Feb 1, 2022 (How a CS student tracks Elon’s Private Jet with Python). The Code Report was introduced as “a new series where I bring you breaking news every programmer should know.”
This video did really well and it fit the same style as the rest of Fireship’s videos - fast-paced, snappy, humorous, and educational.
Along the way, Fireship still continued uploading evergreen videos too.
Growth
This strategy of combining trendy topics along with evergreen videos was genius. Paddy Galloway, renowned YouTube strategist, has noted similar YouTubers do this, like Graham Stephan in the finance niche.
It’s genius because trendy topics are pushed immediately, so they get a large amount of views in the beginning and then eventually taper off.
Evergreen videos may not get as many views in the beginning, but they grow in views steadily over time.
Combined, you get a view graph that looks like this. It’s spiky but the trend is up over time.
Fireship’s growth really exploded when ChatGPT came out. At a time where there was tons of AI hype along with new AI announcements coming out daily, Fireship was uploading at a rapid pace. This pushed him to a new high of 16.9 MILLION views in March 2023, a time where ChatGPT plugins, GPT-4, and other AI advancements were all announced. He also gained a record high of 120K subscribers at this time too.
Of course, the tech world is chock-full of drama and new happenings, so Fireship beat this record in December 2023 with over 20M views that month and over 150k new subs.
Key Takeaways
Keep videos fast-paced. It boosts retention and keeps viewers watching.
Fireship excels at edutainment. Humor is a great way to educate and Fireship’s unique combination of humor scratches an itch for people watching.
Trend-jacking: The Code Report capitalizes on trends, meaning his video about a timely topic will be searched for often and be pushed by YouTube more.
Evergreen videos: Evergreen videos are necessary too, as they mean you have content and be discovered by new viewers at all times. A video like C in 100 seconds is timeless - C as a language is not going anywhere.
There is no “limit” to growth: Looking at other programming YouTubers, you may think that growth can stall at some point. And it might! But programming is growing as a field and the younger generation is more YouTube-focused than most. The programming niche on YouTube (and other platforms!) can only grow, and by starting early, Fireship has set himself up as “Programming YouTube’s” top creator.
My favorite takeaway is definitely “there’s no limit to growth.” It’s true of a lot of things, like companies. People never thought Apple would be a $1T company, yet it’s worth almost $3T today. It’s the same in the creator space. I’m sure that Gergely Orosz never expected the Pragmatic Engineer to one day have over 700,000 subscribers, yet it does!