How Reckless Tortuga Broke into YouTube's Top 100

Tubefilter: How are you making the series work? Usually premieres get a lot of hits and subsequent episode don’t. How do you maintain the viewership?

Jason: It’s actually quite difficult to do and it doesn’t always work out. As far as the first video getting the most views, I really think that is just the nature of the online space at the moment. People’s watching habits tend to start something and rarely finish it. But these are things we try to help give our series a chance:

We try to make each episode stand on it’s own as best as we can
Always end it with a cliffhanger
We write longer story arcs so that we can shoot one 15 minute video and break it up into 4 parts it really allows us to keep costs way down while getting a continuous story.

Tubefilter: You’ve been working on Reckless Tortgua for almost 3 years now? When did you have that “A-ha!” moment where you realized this could be something big?

Lindsey: It was around Sept 08′, Kanye West was arrested in the airport for hitting a photog. That same day who ever runs his blog had posted “Racism in the Elevator” (This time from our channel) so when people went to his blog looking for his response what they saw at the top of the screen was our video. We got so many views that day, I think we did something like 150,000 views in one day, it was just crazy.

A few days later we got an email from an creative exec. at BET. He reached out and wanted to meet with us about the possibility of doing some stuff on TV. We were flipping out. At that point none of us had imagined that this YouTube channel would ever produce anything real, it was more for fun. But when we got that email we were totally shocked. Now nothing ever panned out with BET but that is moment I think we all realized that this thing could be what we were all looking for. Read More