Work Text:
"’Ladies aaand gentlemens! It's time for the Iono Zone! Hey, hey, heyyy! Your eyeballs are MINE—caught in my Electroweb! Whosawhatsit? Iono! 'Ello, 'ello, hola! Ciao and bonjour!’
Iono’s stream had officially started, which naturally caused a lot of excitement in the chat. The 30,000 people watching said stream were all there for Iono, after all.
Iono’s popularity had risen extremely quickly, somehow becoming so well known that she’d even become a gym leader somehow, in only the span of about 9 months. Sure, she had quite the… exhaustive personality, to say the least, but that wasn’t the biggest reason for her rise to fame.
Rather, it was her exploitation of the algorithm that led to her insane growth.
At heart, Iono was a streamer. She loved doing whatever, having people watch, and being able to talk to and entertain those people.
However, Iono wanted to make it big. And at the same time, she knew that streaming was not the way to do it. There was no discoverability, she’d just be stuck at a constant 2-3 viewers, maybe 5 if she was lucky. People watch streams to see their favorite little guys, of which they already know from somewhere else.
So, Iono just had to play to that market.
She streamed, playing whatever game was popular at the time, and made sure to keep talking and get some good clips. Because that’s where all the money is.
Iono posted those clips to all her other social medias, especially YouTube and TikTok.
From there, people were just mindlessly scrolling, when they came across her clips. And sure, not everyone liked her, plenty of people just kept scrolling.
But there were some that didn’t.
And those are the important ones.
With every new clip posted, more and more people became aware of Iono’s online presence, with some even becoming fans of her.
Now that she had a small fan base, Iono kept doing as she was, but she also tried something new.
Iono branched out to long form videos. At this point, they were mainly stream highlights, but she later branched out to other video ideas, often extremely creative streams with high amounts of interaction with the live chat. However, the big thing is that Iono made certain that every video was high quality, from good, engaging editing, to sound mixing in order to ensure that nothing was too loud or too quiet.
As well, Iono made sure that the videos had good thumbnails to go along with it, as she knew that nobody would click on a video if the title and thumbnail weren’t interesting enough. She made sure to perfectly craft each thumbnail, making them clickbaity, yet not enough to be deemed as clickbait by the average person. Each video had a thumbnail that gave away enough information about the general idea of the video, and gave the viewer an idea of how the video would go, yet not too much information to where they had no interest in watching the video.
Iono’s work put into her videos paid off, as her first video got roughly the same amount of views as some of her more middling performing short form content, which was good due to short form videos having significantly easier discoverability compared to long form content. However, neither compared to the impossibly low discoverability that live streams had.
But Iono’s plan was working masterfully by this point.
She had built an audience, the fans from the short form content began watching the long form content, which meant that it was recommended to more people. And due to the quality of the thumbnails and the videos themselves, many new people ended up clicking on her videos and watching till the end, and eventually becoming fans of hers.
Iono had successfully built a decently sized audience, in only a couple months.
But, that wasn’t enough. Iono’s streams still weren’t doing well, compared to her videos. She was mainly known as a YouTuber, not a streamer. And besides, no matter how well known she became, there’s always room to grow.
So, Iono made one small change to her videos, which led to her finally achieving her dream of becoming a massive streamer.
See, she’d usually mention her streams as the source of her clips and videos, but it was usually just a short mention, and a link in the description.
However, by simply changing her word choice, the viewers on her streams increased drastically.
Instead of mentioning that she is live in a video at the time of posting, she instead stated that she might be live, and that the viewer should go check.
This small change made a world of a difference, as it ended up peaking many people's interests. It wasn’t quite a question, but it was open ended, which led to so many more viewers watching her streams.
And now, after only about 6 months, Iono had somehow become one of, if not, the most popular influencer in Paldea.
Despite Iono finally reaching her goal of becoming a streamer, her growth did not end there.
A couple of her streams included moments where Iono would partake in Pokémon battles, and the League took notice. Not only was Iono talented in manipulating social media algorithms and creating an online presence, but she was also a skilled trainer.
As such, once one of the gym leaders had left due to circumstances, the Pokémon League offered the position to Iono. She was already a pretty skilled trainer, plus she liked using electric types, a type not already used anywhere else in the League. And it was good for publicity.
And according to the challengers, Iono did a good job at being a gym leader. Maybe they were just fans of her content and liked getting a picture with her if they won, but Iono was reportedly one of the more popular gym leaders.
And that leads us to today. Guys, make sure you like and subscribe and hit that notification bell for more.