How a NASA Scientist Became a YouTuber With 16 Million Followers and Almost 2 Billion Views

You may be talented in more than one thing and succeed on more than one platform

If you like pranks and watch YouTube regularly, you may have heard about Mark Rober. He’s the guy behind one of the best pranks, as well as the most curious engineering inventions, featured on the platform. Not many other YouTubers can flaunt the success of their science channels, but Mark is an outlier. He’s known for original and extraordinary inventions, as well as superb execution.

Only a few years ago, this man used to be a NASA employee. Well, an employee would be an understatement, as he was an engineer working on the Curiosity Rover that’s currently scouting Mars. Still, how did he reach 16 million subscribers in the short term of two years? What lead to his success?

Let’s look at how Mark Rober took YouTube by storm and became extraordinarily famous. Maybe some of us can use it to achieve a certain level of success as well, either on YouTube or outside of it.

Who is Mark Rober, and How Did He Start on YouTube?

Mark Rober is a talented and brilliant engineer who worked for NASA and spent seven years working on the Curiosity Rover. You can read more about Mark’s beginnings in the “About” section of his YouTube channel, and there is also a great video-interview he gave the Wall Street Journal. He posted his very first video, “iPad2 Halloween Costume-Gaping hole in torso,” in October 2011, and it went viral. To this day, it has nearly 10 million views. The Halloween video helped to put Mark on the map — the YouTube map that is.

Mark is known for his genius ideas and successful execution. When he started the channel, many of his videos were short, not-so-best quality, and didn’t seem like niche videos.

However, it’s evident that the Halloween videos did really well due to his costume ideas. Apart from the video mentioned above, he posted one about making a beating iPhone heart costume and a gut ripping iPhone video. Is there anything better than sharing content about Halloween in the first week of October, right before the holiday? And can you think of anything more genius than combining it with the iPhone launch, which, coincidentally, also happens every October?

I’m telling you, this man is incredibly intelligent, and he did his homework on YouTube and marketing concepts.

What Helped Mark Along the Way?

One of the reasons Rober may have gained so many views were his appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live! several times over the years:

• “Mark Rober’s April Fools’ Prank Ideas” in March 2016
• “April Fools’ Day Pranks with Mark Rober” in March 2017
• “Easter/April Fools’ Day Pranks with Mark Rober” in March 2018
• “Mark Rober on Porch Pirate vs. Glitter Bomb & New Discovery Channel Show” in December 2019

Obviously, an average YouTuber can only dream of being invited to such a popular talk show as Jimmy Kimmel’s, so Mark had a huge advantage compared to many other creators. That said, this can serve as an example of why you need to reach for the stars and keep trying no matter what — because the invitation to Jimmy Kimmel Live! probably started with a simple email to his studio.

At the time of writing this article, Rober has 1,739,113,933 views on his channel with 15.5 million subscribers. So, it’s fair to say this creator is doing quite well.

How Did He Get Almost 2 Billion Views? The Most Viewed Videos

If you go to Mark’s channel and sort his videos by the view count, you can easily see which of them have the highest number of views. It’s mostly videos of him trying funny and cool tricks, science experiments, or social experiments.

For example, the video of him skinning a watermelon got 110 million views in a span of five years. It’s an interesting trick. The same applies to Rober making the largest jello pool in the world. One of the reasons Mark got so much traction was the originality of his ideas, as well as him breaking — or attempting to — the world records. Check out the elephant toothpaste science experiment that went viral.

You can see many other videos that got dozens of thousands of views. None of them became successful thanks to luck — it’s fair to say Mark deserved all of the attention due to his refusal to produce simple and boring content. Many of his experiments are quite elaborate — such as designing a massive obstacle course for the squirrels in his backyard. For this YouTuber, it’s all about quality, not quantity.

Glitter Bomb: The Recurring Video that Went Viral — or More Like Exploded

Have you ever fallen victim to porch pirates who stole your delivery package from Amazon or another company? What did you do? Probably nothing, as there isn’t much you can do.

Mark Rober didn’t simply let it go when such a tragedy happened to him. He turned it into a vengeful project that has lasted two years and gained him 156 million views on YouTube. Don’t piss off an engineer who is also a YouTube sensation.

Mark spent a year designing a device that could spit glitter and fart spray once the thief opens the stolen package. Describing it in a written form doesn’t do it justice — I highly recommend watching the first video Mark posted in 2018. It allows you to appreciate how much a NASA engineer can do for an audience worldwide that enjoys funny tricks and social experiments. Inspired by the “Home Alone” movie, the Glitter Box proved to be both genius and hilarious.

Speaking about “Home Alone,” Macaulay Culkin, the actor who plays young Kevin, appeared in Rober’s second Glitter Box video in 2019. It probably wasn’t the main reason that video received 54 million views, but it’s amazing how Mark could reach out to the movie star and invite him to take part in the experiment.

Finally, the third video of Glitter Box 3.0 was posted recently, on December 16th, 2020, and it didn’t disappoint. In the first four days, it got 17 million views.

Conclusion

So, what can we learn from Mark’s success? Here are my takeaways.

• Quality is key, and it should always be quality over quantity.
• Repetition pays off, especially if we’re talking about an original and genius idea.
• Time is everything. Coming up with an experiment featuring the most popular Christmas movie star and posting it every year before Christmas is brilliant.
• Shoot your shot. Not everyone can get a star like Macaulay Culkin to make a cameo appearance in their YouTube video. Don’t give up before trying.
• Science is sexy, so are many other topics — and they can certainly reach success on a platform like YouTube.

This channel’s success represents many ways to make it online and particularly on YouTube. The videos’ timing, their association with popular topics — such as Halloween costumes and Apple — and the quality speak for themselves. It also shows how you can reach your goal of becoming a YouTube celebrity if you put in the time and effort.

Mark Rober will probably keep creating amazing videos for many years to come, and his view count will be in billions and a dozen of billions of views. We can take from it that it is possible to get traction on the video platform, and even if we are not as great as Mark, hard work still pays off.