What is a YouTube outlier?
An outlier video is a video that received significantly more views than the rest of the channel usually does. If a channel averages 10,000 views per video and then suddenly has one with 1,000,000 views, that is an outlier.
The same can be said when a new channel has only a few thousand subs but is getting 50k, 100k, 300k+ on their first videos. YouTube pushed these videos because demand was there, but the platform's supply was missing.
How an outlier is scored
We track these with Outlier Scores. Ours is the ZYRA Score, and it is the one to read first. It runs 0 to 100, and this is how rare each band is inside the Vault:
| Band | ZYRA | Share of the Vault |
|---|---|---|
| Hyper | 100+ | 1% |
| Ultra | 90 to 100 | 4.7% |
| Mega | 80 to 90 | 12.7% |
| Super | 60 to 80 | 25.1% |
| Normal | 35 to 60 | 30.5% |
| Chalk | under 35 | 26.1% |
Next to it sit the other two scores: how far the video beat the channel's average, and how far it beat what its subscriber count says it should get. Those two are plain multiples, and they read on this ladder:
| Reading | Multiple |
|---|---|
| Normal outliers | 2 to 4x |
| Super outliers | 5 to 10x |
| Mega outliers | 10 to 30x |
| Ultra outliers | 30x+ |
Why outlier scores disagree between tools
These outlier scores are easily trackable with extensions, or simply using the Metarch to log any interesting outliers you find while using the Outlier Vault. Every outlier tool out there bases their outlier scores on different metrics: some take the last 6 videos before an outlier video into account, some 30, and some even 100.
A lot of views does not mean it is an outlier. A 2M-view video on a channel that averages 3M is a normal day. A 200K-view video on a channel that averages 8K is a very good day.
The part most people get wrong
Ultimately, the most important thing to understand about outliers: the most valuable ones are not one-off lucky hits. The strongest niches are the ones where outliers keep appearing across multiple channels, on formats you can realistically produce. That means: If it costs $10-20k per video to make? It's probably not worth the risk.