Wall of text inbound:
In all honesty, I think timing and simple dumb luck factor into being successful just as much as actually trying and uploading quality content do. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying to jump on any bandwagon that passes by with no regard to quality, or producing what you want to produce (or what your subs want to see, if you're at that point already). However, if you have a small, fairly obscure channel, one or two 'fad videos' might help to give you a bit of a nudge (or, if you're lucky, a huge push) towards your goals. Case in point, I uploaded a couple of GTA V related videos right after the game came out, and at the height of their popularity, they were pulling 1,000-3,000 views about every other week, which was absolutely unheard of for my channel. Before those few, my two most viewed videos had about 3,000 views each. Since then, my most viewed video (one of the aforementioned GTA V videos) has about 14,000 and counting, and my subscriber count has almost doubled. The extra buzz generated by these type of uploads seems to taper off fairly quickly, though.
In that regard. these fad videos are a two-sided sword: they'll fluff up your views and sub counts, but if they aren't related to your usual variety of videos, your core audience size will basically stay the same, and the people drawn in by the fad stuff will often quickly leave. I said before that my subs have doubled after I uploaded the GTA stuff, but the average views (anywhere from 5-20, with 1-2 likes, within about a week of uploading) have only gone up very slightly. This is another area where quality > quantity. Having a few subscribers who regularly watch and comment on your stuff is better than a whole boatload that never seem to do either. At the moment, I'm somewhere in the middle, and I'd assume that many of you folks in the thread are too. At any rate, I'm rambling and I suppose I should stop now before I get even more carried away.
TL;DR: If you really want a larger audience, you might want to consider uploading something (tutorial, review, etc) relevant to whatever the "big thing" at the moment is, hope it gets reasonably popular, and if it does, hope even harder that your usual content is interesting enough to get the new people you've drawn in to stay around for a while.
