A new AGT performance by Shin Lim appeared on my YouTube this week. The video title immediately caught my attention: “Shin Lim wows with a performance inspired by Canadian magician Shawn Farquhar”.
I've worked on enough big TV shows to know the hoops one must jump through to get the person who uploads the YouTube video (usually someone from a different company to the production) to title the video exactly how you want it. And there’s no way a good social media manager would want to title a video this way. The wording of the title will have seriously impacted its virality.
Some previous titles for AGT videos featuring Shin Lim are "DON’T BLINK! Shin Lim Performs Epic Magic with Melissa Fumero”, "WOW! Magic That Will SHOCK and AMAZE You!" and "Shin Lim: Magician Baffles Judges With Incredible Card Magic". Those are well-crafted titles with keywords and incentives to click. It’s probably why the videos have 14, 8, and 9 million views.
This recent new video only has half a million views. It's Shin's lowest-performing AGT video, though there may be factors beyond its title. Most prominent YouTubers stress the importance of thumbnails and titles because if people don’t instantly want to click on your video, YouTube won’t push it out to people, regardless of how good the actual video is.
Anyway! The title is objectively bad and reads very much like a settlement to a legal dispute. I read it and assumed that Shawn had kicked off at Shin for stealing a trick of his and had somehow forced Shin to add the credit to the title as a way to settle an argument of some kind.
