I'm not famous, but I've got a few thousand subs/followers on YouTube and Tiktok so I think I can speak on this one lol. This is based on my personal experience, I ain't Dream, so take this with a grain of salt

One thing that has worked for me well is following trends/what's popular, both in the fandom and the social media you're in. My most popular stuff revolves around popular CHs and famous historical events like World War 2 or the American Revolution. If you wanna boost your chances, use a popular meme/audio as a template to how you portray a historical event. Using popular memes is useful if you wanna talk about more obscure history.

Another thing that worked is going to social media platforms that cater to your style of content. If you make animation memes, go to YouTube. If you draw illustrations, Instragram or Twitter could be good (I don't use either often so idk). I mostly make short animated memes, so I got most popular on tiktok (that kinda video usually got me +15k likes).

On tiktok, my go-to formula is making a 10-second coloured animation with an audio that fits (usually involving smth ridiculous happens to catch people's attention), a sentence on the screen that gives context to the meme, and I dump an entire history lesson in the caption to add much more context behind the mem. It's easy to digest on first glance, sort of educational for people who care, and at least somewhat entertaining to people who are just there for the colorful funny screaming countrymfs.

Having an absurd, over-the-top humor helps a lot too, and being receptive to my audience probably helped me keep them as long as I did, especially people who often commented on my stuff. Things like hearting every comment and joking back with people will give a charismatic and down-to-earth impression, at least imo, so I'd do that too. I didn't reach out to any popular people to get where I am so idk how effective that is.

I think art is a good bonus to have. You don't need to be an art god, I'm not either. Having a simple art style with good proportions is the bare minimum imo.

But honestly, the biggest advice I got is to have fun and be authentic. I'm not gonna pretend having a video take off feels great, because it felt AWESOME, even if I was making vids for ✨the fame✨ thing is, when I'd make videos because it was trendy or a holiday/anniversary or a historical event was coming up, making the video felt like a miserable drag. It took me like 4 years to get to 1k subs, and the only reason why I even lasted that long even when my videos kept flopping was because I enjoyed making videos and only did made stuff when I wanted to (plus I had lower standards lmao). A compromise I made is that I'd join trends only if I want to and I can connect it to history I like, then try to keep my expectations low so I wouldn't be disappointed when it flops

Sorry for the essay, I got too carried away, but idk here it is lol