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Short version: An outlier video is one that did far better than its own channel usually does, and it's a decent clue for what to make next. The catch is that the multiplier balloons on tiny channels. The top score in our OutlierKit test was 178x, and it came from a channel with 144 subscribers and a video with 25.6K views. Before you copy an outlier, look at the channel size, the actual view count, and whether the topic is anywhere near yours.
On October 25, Joel and I were testing OutlierKit for our OutlierKit review. I typed "productivity apps" into the outlier search, spent 2 credits, and watched the cards load. Most of the scores were unremarkable. 1.3x. 1.3x. 1.4x. Then one card said 178.0x.
I'll admit my first reaction was "found it." Then I read the rest of the card. The video was "My simple iPhone Home Screen setup!" from a channel called Sam Vision. 25.6K views. 144 subscribers.
What the 178x was really telling me
The multiplier compares a video to that channel's own normal numbers. If a channel usually gets a few hundred views, a video that reaches 25.6K looks enormous. Good for that creator. But it says very little about what our readers or viewers want. Mostly it says one video broke out of a very small channel.
Now look at the dull 1.3x card near it: "Top 15 Best Android Apps - Oct 2026" from HowToMen, with 227.1K views on a channel of 906K subscribers. Small multiplier, but nearly nine times the views of the 178x video. If the question is "do people actually want this topic?", that card answers it better. And it's the one I nearly scrolled past.
There was an in-between one too. "More Frame Questions Answered!" from Rico Raccoon scored 25.6x, with 53.3K views on 2.1K subscribers. A small channel with a big result is interesting, sure. It's also an FAQ about a gadget, which has nothing to do with what we make.
That's the second half of the problem. Plenty of the results were only loosely about productivity apps: iPhone home screen setups, a Microsoft Copilot announcement, that FAQ. I also couldn't find any way to sort by score, so I ended up reading every card anyway. The tool still did its job. The number on the card just isn't the full story.
vidIQ does the same thing
I wanted to know if this was an OutlierKit quirk, so on October 30 I ran "productivity apps" through vidIQ's free plan. Same pattern. vidIQ shows a multiplier and views per hour on each card, and the first one I noticed was marked over 100x: "How I Use My iPad for Productivity" by Rob Dryburgh. His channel had 4.3K subscribers, and the video had 37K views after 20 days.
That one is on topic for us, so I'd still watch it. But again, the biggest multiplier belonged to a small channel. The free plan gave me roughly a dozen cards before a "Get Unlimited Outlier Videos" lock, and the subscriber, views and outlier filters all had padlocks on them. So there was no way to hide the tiny channels automatically. (More on the free limits in our vidIQ free plan review.)
What a solid outlier looks like
For contrast, we ran OutlierKit's channel analysis on Ali Abdaal's channel, which cost 10 credits. It showed 6.7M subscribers and a recent median of 258.0K views per video, and it flags a video as a breakout once it hits 1.5x that median. One of the outliers it listed was "Success Is Hard Until You Build Systems Like This," at 1.7M views and 6.6x.
6.6x doesn't grab you the way 178x does. Except it's 6.6 times a channel whose ordinary video already gets about a quarter of a million views. That's an audience leaning hard into a topic. We checked his numbers on YouTube the same day, too. The subscriber count matched, and so did the three view counts we compared.
How I check an outlier now
I don't take a multiplier at face value anymore. I go through the same questions on every card.
How big is the channel? If it has a few hundred subscribers, I enjoy the huge number and move on. How many views did the video get? A 3x on a few hundred thousand views tells me more about demand than 178x on 25K. Is it my topic, really? I'd take a 1.4x video my audience would click over a 25x video I'd never make. Then I look for the same idea popping up on a few different channels. One video can be luck. Three channels doing well with it usually isn't.
If you want to try this without paying, vidIQ's free plan let us browse outlier videos for "productivity apps" without spending any credits. You'll be checking channel size by eye since that filter is locked, which is honestly good practice. For deeper channel breakdowns, our OutlierKit review walks through what our trial credits got us, or you can look at OutlierKit's site yourself.
Next time a card shouts 178x at you, check the subscriber count first. It takes two seconds and might keep you from building a video around somebody's lucky week.
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