By colorado Wanted to see what really pops on Ryan Cassidy’s channel, so I rolled up my sleeves and dug into his most popular stuff. Started simple – just pulled up YouTube and went straight to his channel page. Scrolled past the live stuff because I was after both regular uploads and streams.
Hit that “Videos” tab and sorted by “Most viewed” – figured that’s the quickest way to spot the winners. But man, scrolling through hundreds of videos felt like digging through a messy garage. Had to peek at view counts and thumbnails to find the real bangers.
Grabbed a notepad and started scribbling down anything crossing 500K views. Noticed something right away – his tutorials on basic character rigging were crushing it. Like that one where he rigs a simple walk cycle in Maya? That’s been viewed over a million times! People eat up the “how-to” stuff like candy.
Top performers I jotted down:
- Maya beginner rigging tutorials (those always hit big)
- Game character design breakdowns (especially fantasy stuff)
- Q&A streams where he fixes viewer models live
- His “I spent 24 hours animating” challenge videos
- Those reaction videos critiquing student showreels
What surprised me was the streams pulling bigger numbers than regular uploads sometimes. People stick around for hours watching him troubleshoot rigging problems. Takes notes on thumbnails too – bright colors with blue character designs always did better than dark-themed ones.
Finished up comparing view counts against upload dates. Big lesson? His older tutorials from 2-3 years back still out-view new fancy stuff. Shows evergreen content’s king even for animation channels. Whole thing took about three hours with coffee breaks included. Might use these findings to rework my own content calendar later.