Beauty Creator MINSCO: No Algorithm Boost Needed—Just Eleven Years of Search Rankings and Staying Power

Not a single video went viral overnight thanks to the algorithm—that's MINSCO's own words. After eleven years running her YouTube channel "Minsco," her growth curve has been slow, so slow that she describes it as "almost no videos that really blew up." But the top search result for her name has always stayed constant. That one detail says more about how she got to where she is than any million-view video ever could.

MINSCO is one of Korea's first-generation beauty creators, known to viewers by her nickname "Sales Queen." In 2017, she competed in Korea's first beauty survival show, "Get It Beauty 2017—Perfect Brush," and won the finale by completing an Allure Korea magazine shoot. In a recent interview with Allure Korea, she mentioned that viewers still remember that competition to this day: "People still tell me, 'Unnie, I've been watching you since then—you won that, right?'" In her view, it was the first beauty show that "was genuinely about content," different in nature from later shows centered on makeup artists.

Asked what qualities a creator needs most, she puts "consistency" at the top of the list. Back in the blogging era, there was a saying: "Post once a day, keep it up for three months, and you're bound to succeed." She followed that advice, and it actually worked. She admits that working solo means there's no external force keeping you accountable—whether you can stick with it is often the deciding factor. As for how she figured out what kind of content suited her, she says the answer wasn't clear from the start: "The shape of it emerged as I kept working." She didn't start out doing unboxing and reviews—it was viewer feedback that told her that's what people actually wanted to see.

Her channel's most-viewed video to date, uploaded seven years ago, is a pore-concealing tutorial with the blunt title "NO Primer! Pore-Erasing Concealer Technique." She notes that tutorial videos share a common pattern: "The response is lukewarm right when they go up, but views keep climbing steadily over time," as new viewers who are just starting to wear makeup keep discovering them. Her personal standard is to skip pro-level techniques and stick to "simple methods anyone can do every day"—a scrappy, no-frills eyebrow-shaping tutorial using just an eyebrow razor ended up racking up over 1.7 million views.

As for the classic creator catchphrase "subscribe, like, and turn on notifications," she almost never says it, and her reasoning is blunt: "Do viewers actually do it just because I say so?" She believes that as long as she keeps making content people want to keep watching, subscribers will follow naturally. She's also candid that long-form videos take far more time than shorts—editing is much more labor-intensive than filming. "If I only made shorts, I could probably fly through production," she says. Still, she chooses to focus on long-form content, because it keeps bringing in new viewers through search, while shorts tend to fade too quickly along with trends.

Having tried countless products and brands, her current obsession is Chanel's "Le Rouge Duo" lip tint, which she praises for its incredibly strong color payoff that barely fades. "It started as a dewy lip formula, and then a matte version came out later—I'm so happy about that." As for her mountain of accumulated makeup products, she admits she "can't organize any of it at all." She rarely throws away powder products, while liquid formulas get cleared out regularly; she has no attachment to discontinued items, but limited-edition products give her pause—recommending something to viewers only for it to already be sold out "feels like I'm messing with them." The makeup she wore for the shoot that day was done entirely by herself, going for a clean, dewy look with Snidel's shimmer eyeshadow and Natasha Denona's Hy-Glam foundation for base makeup. This September, Allure Korea and YouTube will co-host an offline event called "Allure Salon," where MINSCO will appear as a speaker for newer creators just starting out. She says she hopes to draw on her eleven years of experience to share why she started creating content in the first place, along with practical, hands-on insights.