YouTube First Principles · Synthesizer School

YouTube First Principles

This took a couple hours. I've been reflecting and analyzing a lot of videos lately, and I've tried to distill some principles, that should be the bedrock of content success.

Those principles are pretty meta, and for this reason they lack detail.

Disclaimer, I haven't had any success with YouTube, so this is theory. But it could provide some useful insights, and I'd be curious to see the opinion of some experts, I think we'd all benefit.

So, here goes:

-------- The Algorithm (what we all know) --------

The YouTube algorithm uses metrics to push videos:

Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Audience Retention

There are other metrics obviously, but those are the ones we want to maximize.

-------- Click-Through Rate --------

You can manipulate two things to increase this metric. A great CTR is 5%.

Thumbnail
Title

The thumbnail is what will catch the eye. The eye sees thumbnail → title

The Mental Process

Capture Attention - Viewer’s attention is captured by the thumbnail
Curiosity - Viewer reads thumbnail and title. I define curiosity as a desire to know
Hooked! - Viewer is curious and opens the video

Capturing Attention

The thumbnail is what captures attention. Our brain is much, much quicker at working with images.

To capture attention, the thumbnail should stand out in the sea of videos in the YouTube home page.

This can be done with a big face, with colors, with arrows, with text, or with a simple image. The important thing is that the eye is drawn there, and the thumbnail truly stands out.

There are millions of ways to do this successfully. Instead of trying to explain all of them, ask yourself: Does this stand out?

A thumbnail that stands out matters more than one that creates curiosity!! Look at the mental process!

Curiosity

Without step 1, people don’t even know about your video’s existence. But without a reason to open it, the viewer will keep scrolling.

Curiosity is achieved through a combination of thumbnail and title.

There are millions of ways to do this successfully, but there are a few main categories:

Tutorial - The video states clearly what it’s about, and the expectation is a clear and congruent explanation.

Educational channels only.
Examples are Healthy Gamer, Leo Gura, Crash Course, Huberman, Teal Swan.
Use when the goal is to create a long-term reference video about a topic.

Tutorial/Intrigue - The video is clearly educational, but it’s not clear in the title what’s going to be said. This is typical in educational channels that have to post a video every week.

Educational channels only.
Examples are Nate Black, Justin Sung.
Use when the video isn’t supposed to provide conclusive advice, or the plain subject isn’t interesting enough.
This can be done by leveraging major pain points and fears of the audience in the title.

Pure Intrigue - The combination of thumbnail and title only provide a subtle and very incomplete hint on what the video could be about. The title is especially non-descriptive.

Entertainment channels only (?)
Examples are some of Blacktail Studio’s videos, like $5500 piece of wood, or woodworking fraud.
Use when the subject wouldn’t qualify for obvious intrigue, or you just can’t find a way to use an obvious intrigue-type title.

Obvious Intrigue - The subject of the video is so interesting that you can just put it plainly in the title, and people will still click.

Entertainment channels only (?)
Examples are MrBeast and the Sidemen.
Use if the subject of the video qualifies for obvious intrigue.

More intrigue is always positive, as long as it doesn’t stop attracting the right audience because the title is too misleading.

Main mistakes people make:

Using Tutorial when the subject isn’t interesting enough and the advice isn’t conclusive. This results in people reading your title, and just deciding not to click because they don’t care enough.
Using Obvious Intrigue when the subject doesn’t qualify. This results in a title and thumbnail that people see and just don’t care enough to click.

-------- Audience Retention --------

To increase this metric, the most important thing is that your video is great. There’s no trick that can retain an audience if the video isn’t great overall. More details on this in the "Continuous Interest" paragraph below.

Then you can worry about the details:

Hook - A focus on the beginning of the video to make the person captured and relaxed into your video. This takes 10-30 seconds. The hook replaces the video intro. Never have an intro, always have a hook.
Mini-Hooks - Reminders mid-video that good parts are coming, and the video isn’t done.
Continuous Interest - The video stays interesting throughout and engaging bits are purposefully sprinkled around.
For tutorial videos - The knowledge hasn’t been delivered fully yet.
For entertainment videos - The juice hasn’t been delivered fully yet. For example a travel or a project isn’t finished. The person will want to stick around until the end to see the final product.
Outro - Outro has a call to action and ends quickly.

The concept of Unconsciousness

Unless the video is of the tutorial kind, and thus you want the viewer to learn, you want the viewer to be as unconscious as possible.

The unconscious state is somewhat pleasurable in the moment. It requires no thinking, it’s passive and relaxed. Good communicators and humor can make an educational video light to watch. When a video is light to watch, the person can afford to be more unconscious.

So, more unconsciousness/pleasure is always better. How do people get conscious/uncomfortable?

Slow parts in the video, even if interesting.
Uninteresting parts in the video, even if paced correctly.

Both can provide a window of consciousness, making the viewer ask himself: Why am I even watching this? And close off the video.

A corollary is that to make a video as pleasant to watch as possible:

Remove any slow parts, learn how to keep a good and interesting pace in the video at all times
Only stick to what’s valuable and has interest, and add nothing more than that. Learn what’s actually valuable and what’s boring in the first place, as it’s not obvious for entertainment videos.

Hook

The hook is obviously the first thing in the video. It has 2 jobs. Both need to be done successfully in every video.

To project the viewer straight into the video, making him “unconscious” immediately. Obliterate his window of consciousness.
To enlarge the thumbnail and title’s intrigue even more.

Mini-Hooks

Use here and there when you think the viewer could’ve forgotten that there’s more to that video.

This can be useful after a climax or a good knowledge bomb, that may leave the viewer satisfied enough to click off.

Continuous Interest

This concept overlaps a lot with mini-hooks and unconsciousness. It’s also the broadest concept, and it’s not something you can address algorithmically (or maybe I can deconstruct it enough below)

Always have:

Great narration, storytelling and video structure
Great pace achieved with tone, editing and general pacing
Great video quality to lead the viewer through the story

Things you sprinkle:

Mini-hooks/Obvious reason to keep watching embedded in the video
Humor
Emotional moments
Actual interesting things happening throughout

Video Juice

Remember to keep some juice until the end. Don’t stretch the video too far or the viewer will get annoyed, at the same time, don’t spill all the beans in the beginning or in the chapters!

Outro

A good outro should do one or two simple things:

Wraps up the video quickly. Don’t just cut off a video without a single word it’s over. Outro need to exist, they just need to be very short.
Optional - Contains a call to action. Either to watch another video, to like, to click on a link, or whatever.

-------- Advertisement, A necessary evil --------

Advertisement is just like CTAs, but more intense and unrelated to the video.

Talking about a product, either yours or of a sponsor, will make the viewer very conscious, as it taps one of the 2 principles of consciousness: the bit is uninteresting. To avoid the second principle, at least make the ad fast and easy to digest.

Note - I won’t be talking about how to make a good pitch of a product here. I’m just going to talk about how to make it digestible so that the video performs well. That’s the frame for this whole page.

When talking about advertisement, you need to accomplish two things. Those are similar to what you want to do with thumbnail and title in a way:

Capture attention - Make the viewer aware of the product
Action - Make an effective CTA. This is done after attention is captured.

All of this needs to be done while keeping the viewer “unconscious”. To do so, other than making the ad placement easy to watch, make it organic. This means it needs to blend in the video seamlessly, having the viewer engaged in the video and aware of the product at the same time.

Doing this effectively isn’t easy, both because some products just don’t fit the topic of the video, and because some sponsors just won’t accept organic placements.

I believe the best move is still to maybe sacrifice some money, but make sure the ad placement is always organic and flows with the video well.

--------- Things I didn't mention (I'll add them in the future) --------

HUGE - YouTube's method of suggesting videos: association. YouTube will try to suggest your videos to a similar audience. If the niche doesn't exist, growth will risk being 20x slower as YouTube won't know who to suggest you to, and it will be much less precise.
Boosting engagement - I actually did write a paragraph on this, but I'm not sure it even has an effect on the video's performance, so I'm leaving it out.
Community - Interacting with the community and building it. This goes beyond the video's performance though.

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