Dormant to Global: Shorts turn a 6-year hiatus into 188M views
Client:
Tropfest
Industry:
Film Festival
Year:
2025
Services:
Content Strategy
YouTube views generated
Viewing from outside Australia
The Challenge
Bring the Tropfest YouTube channel back to life after it sat dormant through a six-year festival hiatus, and build a global audience before Tropfest’s return in February 2026.
The Approach
Built a content strategy around using Tropfest’s library as the hero
Tropfest’s archive was full of short films made for modern audiences: dark comedy, sharp twists and big laughs in under seven minutes. We dug through it to find the films with the widest appeal and programmed them back onto the channel.
Using Shorts as the front door to bring in a new, global audience
We cut the best moments from each film into YouTube Shorts, built to stop a scroll anywhere in the world and send viewers back to the full film. Shorts brought in over 116K new subscribers on their own.
One pipeline, every platform.
Every Short we tested on YouTube also went out on Tropfest’s Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. The work behind one channel grew the brand everywhere.
Results
In its first year back, the channel reached 188 million views and 3.2 million hours of watch time. Subscribers more than doubled, from 114K to 255K. More than 95% of that viewing came from outside Australia, turning a Sydney festival into a global brand. Instagram followed the same path, growing from 6.5K to over 95K followers almost entirely organically.
