How does YouTube sensation Doctor Mike keep his 4 million subscribers happy?
Mike Varshavski has not missed a single posting day since he launched the channel in 2017, and says the key is consistency and figuring out what content appeals to a wider audience, writes Amanda Perelli
Mike Varshavski is a board-certified primary care doctor who went viral in 2015 after he was featured in a BuzzFeed article about how attractive he was, and then again in People magazine’s 2015 Sexiest Man Alive issue.
Accepting his sudden fame, he launched a YouTube channel in 2017 while in his residency, and hired a videographer to film and edit the videos for him. He’s known as “Doctor Mike” online, and now has millions of YouTube subscribers with videos that often appear on the trending page of YouTube.
Yet his YouTube channel was not an immediate success.
“I launched the channel and it picked up like 15,000 subscribers,” he said. “It didn't go anywhere, even though I told 2 million people on Instagram to come watch it.”
Varshavski said he realised the key to growing an audience was consistency (he’s never missed a single posting day) and figuring out what content would appeal to a wider audience.
From hospital to filming studio, how Varshavski does it
In his second year of YouTube, while keeping up with his career as a doctor, Varshavski started posting videos twice a week instead of once.
“The first half of the week I am making YouTube videos,” he said. “The second half of the week I’m in the hospital actually doing the things I’m talking about.”
His videos gain an average 500,000 views to around 4 million views, depending on if a video is picked up by YouTube’s algorithm and recommended to viewers.
