That’s exactly what Ryan Trahan did on his YouTube channel: he took advantage of this idea and started his own challenges, which, little did he know that would be a great success for his content creation career.
Compared with other YouTubers who had some background in content creation, for example, from Vine, Ryan Trahan was at first a track athlete who competed in different regional and collegiate competitions when he was in high school. Shortly after, he discovered a passion for content creation and decided to leave the university aside in order to focus more on his Ryhan Trahan YouTube channel and on gaining more subscribers.
Maybe the series that really made him internationally popular was the “Penny Series,” where he started with a goal of travelling across the U.S. states with just a single penny. Back then, his final goal was to deliver one big penny to Mr. Beast, who lived in North Carolina. So, Ryan Trahan started from California and travelled all the way to North Carolina in just 30 days, with a single penny.
How did he manage to do this YouTube challenge? Well, this curiosity also determined thousands of YouTube users to subscribe to Ryan Trahan’s YouTube channel.
With a great desire, in just 30 days, he arrived at Mr.Beast’s door delivering his promised penny. Along the way, he tried to exchange that penny in return for different things. The first object exchanged in his journey was a pen, which was later sold for $1. Then he bought a bottle of water to sell it for $2. Little by little, and with the help of a lot of people, he survived 30 days, starting with just one penny.
Even though it seemed that he had no chance of doing this in just a short time, he succeeded.
It’s important to mention that his greater goal was to raise $1.4 million to end hunger in the U.S. So, when he started this YouTube challenge, he also started the fundraising, called Feeding America.
Ryan Trahan's YouTube Channel, similar to others, has always been focused on the U.S. problems and tried, based on Ryan Trahan’s popularity, to raise money for different causes.
During his 30-day YouTube challenge, he raised $1,418,596.00, which is an insane amount of money. He didn’t have a goal, but his fundraising surprised him, because with this money, the goal was to try and feed 38 million Americans who struggled with hunger.
Besides the fact that he is trying to find impossible challenges, he also has great skills in social media. That means that he knows the fact that if he starts a YouTube challenge, he needs to post daily to attract his subscribers back every day to see his new episode.
At the end of every video, he includes a cliffhanger, which is meant to keep viewers engaged in the content and click on the next episode.
On the other hand, the entire design of the thumbnail is especially important, because this way his subscribers will be surely interested from the start. With bold and simple thumbnails and intriguing headlines, Ryan Trahan became very popular in the world of content creators.
His perspective has always been focused on subscribers, because they are the most important thing for a YouTube vlogger. So he delivers engaging content, without long and boring introductions that can easily draw away viewers.
He is also trying to collaborate with other creators to have content diversity. Let’s take the example of the Penny YouTube challenge, which features Mr.Beast’s house as the final destination of the journey. This mix is perfect to maintain a loyal audience, who are always eager to find out what new experiences Ryan Trahan had.
After all sorts of challenges, Ryan Trahan is now 21.3M subscribers, with millions of views at every video that he posts.
Now, Ryan Trahan’s YouTube journey is the living proof that with the right ideas and determination, you can achieve great things at the same time help others. He doesn’t have a “secret” that stands behind all his videos; he only tries to combine his creativity with authenticity to stay relatable to YouTube subscribers.
