13 videos. 198 total views. 2 real breakouts. Every number here comes from Behaverly, the channel this whole site is documenting — not a survey, not an aggregate, one channel's actual record.
Current through video 13, September 2026 · This is a running log, not a finished study
2 of 13 videos account for 129 of 198 total views — 65%.
Both came from the same place: 100% YouTube recommendations. Neither was searched for.
No cherry-picking — this is the complete record, in posting order, as of this writing.
| Video | Views |
|---|---|
| Why You Always Think You're a Better Driver Than Everyone Else | 8 |
| Why Losing $20 Feels Worse Than Finding $20 Feels Good | 4 |
| Why Online Arguments Escalate Faster Than In-Person Ones | 4 |
| Why More Choices Make You Less Happy | 2 |
| Why Crowded Places Make You Want to Leave | 103 |
| Why You Can't Admit You're Wrong | 5 |
| That Wasn't Skill | 46 |
| Why losing money hurts more than finding it! | 5 |
| Losing hurts 2.5x more than winning feels good! | 0 |
| Why facts don't change your driving opinion | 1 |
| Unlock better choices with this simple question! | 2 |
| Hack Your Brain: Drive Safer With These Habits | 2 |
| Your Brain's Secret Work in Crowds: Threat Detection | 16 |
2 breakouts out of 13 total videos — roughly 1 in 6.5. The two breakouts combined (149 views) outweigh the other 11 videos combined (49 views) by 3 to 1.
The first breakout landed on video 7 overall (the fifth Short posted). The second landed on video 11 overall (the fifth long-form video posted). Both arrived after a real stretch of flat, single-digit performance — not immediately, and not on the first attempt.
| That Wasn't Skill | Crowded Places | |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic source | Algorithmic placement | 100% YouTube recommendations (94.2% Home feed) |
| Topic type | A near-miss "that wasn't skill" moment | Everyday exhaustion in a crowd |
| Relatability | Universal — anyone who's driven | Universal — anyone who's been in a store |
| Claim structure | A shared feeling, not a specific stat | A shared feeling, not a specific stat |
| Format | Short | Long-form |
Neither breakout led with a surprising number or a specific psychological claim. The videos that did lead that way — "9 out of 10 drivers," "losing $20 feels 2.5x worse" — are the ones sitting at 2 to 8 views.
Both breakouts instead named a feeling almost everyone has already had, before explaining the mechanism behind it. "You know that feeling when a crowd exhausts you" and "you know that feeling when a near-miss feels like skill" ask for recognition first, explanation second — the opposite order of the flat-performing videos.
If format explained this, both breakouts would be the same type. They're not. Whatever's driving this, it's surviving a change in length and structure — which points toward topic and framing, not runtime.
If the channel were simply "warming up" over time, views should trend upward across the whole catalog. They don't — videos posted after both breakouts (Why You Can't Admit You're Wrong, 5 views; the Shorts posted after Crowded Places) are back to flat, single-digit performance. The algorithm isn't favoring the channel generally. It picked two specific pieces of content.
Both breakouts do use the more dramatic thumbnail treatment tested partway through the channel's run — but so do several of the flat-performing videos posted around the same time. Dramatic thumbnails may help at the margin, but they don't explain a 10-50x gap by themselves.
Crowded Places skewed unusually toward desktop (53.5%) against a mobile-heavy pattern everywhere else on this project. That's a real anomaly, not a repeatable signal — worth noting, not worth building a strategy around yet.
Everything in Part 2 is a real, observed correlation across exactly two events. It is not a controlled test, there's no comparison group, and the sample is far too small to rule out coincidence. A third breakout that shares the "universal feeling" framing would meaningfully strengthen this. A third breakout that shares nothing with the first two would break it entirely.
We're publishing this at 13 videos specifically because the honest answer at this stage is "here's what we've seen so far," not "here's what works." Treat it that way.
100% recommendation-driven traffic on both breakouts is the one finding here that doesn't need a larger sample to trust. Neither video was searched for, shared externally, or promoted — YouTube's system found them and pushed them on its own. That's a real, verifiable fact about this channel's two best results, independent of the theory about why.
The next several videos are a direct test of the working theory: lead with a universally shared feeling before the mechanism, rather than a statistic or a named bias, and watch whether that correlates with performance again. If it does, on a third and fourth video, this stops being two anecdotes and starts being a real pattern.
Every new video and its outcome gets logged in the weekly checkpoints for this channel, updated in the same honest, unfiltered way as every other number on this site — including if the next attempt flops.
Every video, every number, updated weekly — including the weeks that don't go well.
See every checkpoint →This is a sample of one channel and two breakout events — not a study, not a benchmark, and not generalizable to other niches or channels without independent testing. View counts will continue to change after publication; this page reflects a snapshot at video 13. The "universal feeling vs. specific claim" theory in Part 2 is our own pattern-matching across two data points, not a peer-reviewed finding — we're stating it as a working theory precisely because it hasn't been tested enough to call it more than that.