1,000,000 views for the conference talk nobody wanted

In 2016 I started proposing a new talk to conferences titled "CSS Grid Changes Everything." The talk was about a mostly unknown new CSS layout module called "grid" which was about to hit major browsers and would change how we think about and work with layouts in significant ways.

I sent the proposal to 15 conferences, and all 15 declined. "Not relevant for our audience" said one. "Didn't pass our blind speaker review" said another. "We already have content on CSS grid systems" said a third.

At the time, I was heavily invested in the WordPress community, so I also sent the proposal to WordCamp Europe, an event I already have tickets to. They also turned the talk down.

Oh well, I though. Win some, lose some. Or in this case, lose all, but maybe next year?

Then, in 2017, just one month before WordCamp Europe, I got an email from the organizers. A speaker had dropped out last minute, and they needed someone who could step in on short notice. Was I that person? Absolutely I said.

And so, on Saturday June 17th, 2017, at 9am Paris time, I stepped on stage, apologized in advance to the simultaneous translator for what was about to be 45 minutes of extremely fast speaking with a lot of jargon, and dove into a practical explanation of something the majority of the audience had never heard of.

The talk got a standing ovation, and it eventually made its way online, first to the WordPress TV platform, then to the WordPress YouTube channel.

Then something unusual happened: 15 days after its initial debut online, a separate YouTube channel picked up the talk and pushed it to its very large audience.

By December 2017, the talk had over 300,000 views, and yesterday, December 15, 2020, the video hit 1,000,000 views:

There was even a supercut made of my talk:

Keep pushing

I've learned some lessons from this:

1. Conference organizers don't always know what talks will succeed.
2. I am not very good at writing talk proposals.
3. "Blind" speaker panels are a bad idea because unlike a musical performance, you can't judge the quality, content, and relevance of a conference talk by a title and 3 paragraph description.
4. Reach on YouTube largely relies on the right channel promoting your content.
5. Open source events like WordCamp would greatly benefit from investing in video SEO and marginal marketing (to date, the WordPress YouTube channel version of the exact same talk has 41,000 views.)
6. A lot of excellent content shared by open source conferences is ignored by the community because they think the conference is only about a specific open source subject and therefore ignore it.
7. Never stop pitching your talks, even when everyone turns you down.
8. The YouTube view count is not super accurate.
9. CSS grid is even awesomer than I thought it was back in 2017.
10. I'm pitching a "CSS Grid Changes Everything: Revisited" talk to conferences in 2021.

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Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) focusing on front-end web development and the next generation of the web platform. He has worked with and contributed to open source projects large and small for the past 16 years and is a firm believer in ethical open source as the path forward for us all.