How ZHC Became The Biggest Art Youtube Channel (Full Story + Analytics)

This is ZHC aka Zach Hsieh, the king of Youtube Art. ZHC was able to grow by 10M subscribers in just 1 year by finding the spot where art can be trendy. That makes him one of the fastest growing Youtuber of all time.

In this video, I go over ZHC’s history and what did Zach do exactly to go from 20,000 subscribers just 2 years ago to a staggering 12.5M subscribers count.

Well...Over the past 3 years, ZHC has gone through 5 distinct phases.Let’s start with the first phase: His Instagram Days where he went from 20k followers to 300,000 followers in just 3 months. So quick backstory, in early 2016 ZHC was in high school and easily bored in classes. So what he would do is draw all day to get out of boredom. He then started an instagram as a hobby showcasing his drawings.
He slowly got some traction on Instagram but nothing crazy until big art instagram pages started sharing his work. The more he posted on Instagram, the more he realized that he could get big pages to share his work.
So as a young instagrammer, he would dedicate 1-2 hours every day to reach 500 to 1000 people in addition to drawing every day. That hustle led to a jaw-dropping growth.We see him go from 20,000 followers on Instagram in January 2017 to 300,000 3 months later. However his growth decreased significantly when Instagram changed their algorithm. (circle out the line in the previous graph between july 17 and jan 18)Around that time, his followers were encouraging him to start a youtube channel and that was a logical next step for him.
We are now in Phase 2: His tutorial days.
Big art youtube channels were mainly doing tutorials so he followed the trend and focused on doing How-To Videos.
It’s during this time he would hone his skills as an artist by drawing every single day. We can see here the difference in quality for his drawings as the years pass by.
Even with a massive 400,000 followers count on instagram, he was growing very slowly on Youtube with only 10,000 subscribers.

The problem with tutorials that they are not original and this type of content is oversaturated. So he tried new things to stand out.
And that’s what Phase 3 is all about here. Trying to bring art into trendy topics.

He did skits, tried reviewing art memes, did asmr videos and a whole bunch of random videos related to art.

It’s during this phase that we see more of his personality shine. We see more of his face in videos and thumbnails. We start seeing a glimpse at his personal life with his friend Steve and his girlfriend making videos more entertaining and not purely informative.ZHC refers to Pewdiepie saying: “ if you want to succeed long term, people really have to care about you as a person and not just what you are showing.”

Prior to this phase, he was just showing art and people did not know who he is.
By trying all types of content, he got his first winner with the world’s weirdest pencil video on May 18, 2018 which blew up. After that video, he gained 20,000 subscribers in one month. For context, it took him 1 year and half to reach his first 20,000 subscribers. He carried on trying to make art as trendy as possible doing other successful videos like Can you draw with a pencil made of ice or Draw KSI.We then see a shift in his videos where they resemble more and more like MrBeast’s content.

This is when he did the One line art challenge in September 2018 which marks the moment he went from having hundreds of thousands of views per week to millions of views per week.
This leads us to the 4th phase, the MrBeast-inspired videos where he would do over the top challenges in the art sphere. Videos Like drawing 10 hours straight or I made giant art using only Gold did really well.

He then had a turning point moment with the pewdiepie drawing on february 17 2019. So to give some context, Pewdiepie vs T-series battle for the first to reach 100M subscribers was ongoing and PewdiePie was trending. Many smaller youtubers were trying to help in their own way like MrBeast going all out with the SuperBowl ad.

ZHC did his own spin on the movement and drew Pewdiepie for 24 hours.
That video went viral and his picture even got up to 76,000 upvotes on reddit.

The growth from there on out went craaaaazy. We clearly see his growth going from a slightly inclined flatline to a rocketship-type growth. So he carried on doing similar challenges to Mrbeast which turned out to do really well. He did videos like drawing pewdiepie in one breath, paid an artist 20,000 to finish drawing or last to stop drawing wins $10,000.

Видео How ZHC Became The Biggest Art Youtube Channel (Full Story + Analytics) канала Richard the Youtube strategist