Transcription
Why did you cut that so fast? Like, actually, give me a bit of time to process what you actually said. Sometimes people just use such fast editing that you can't process the important moments. I would say nearly every client I've worked with over the last 3 years, I have said the word "slow down" to you. You've never seen his face, but you've seen his content. Patty Galloway is an editing consultant who captured over 2 billion views, and he learned editing with data. I just studied probably 5,000 retention curves across different channels.
This video needs open-heart surgery. Let's take a much better section that appeared later in the video and let's like sew this in here and see if there's a way we can connect it to the intro so it still makes sense. We ended up getting 88% retention at 30 seconds. Creators have the privilege of data learning with every single video they post, whether the editing worked or didn't. When someone says, "I don't want to optimize for retention," I say, "Well, you don't want to make a good video then."
But what if that data and obsession with it being fact has taught us the wrong lessons? Creators try to tell a story, and they tell it badly. Retention goes down. What does that teach them? To don't do it again. Yes, so data tells us to cut it out, but as an editor, is that the right response? I genuinely think a lot of YouTubers aren't actually good storytellers.
Welcome to the Editing Podcast. Thank you for having me. Really looking forward to this. So for those of you who don't know, just give us a really quick overview of where you come from, why you're in the YouTube space, and just a little bit about your career. Basically, ever since I was 10, I've just loved creating videos, and YouTube was the first place I could actually express that. So I remember the early days of YouTube when it was this terrible site without an algorithm that was all based on five-star ratings and all these different things. I was just at home in Ireland where I lived, and it was really isolated from where all my friends lived. So I went to school, but after school, during the summer holidays, I was not within walking distance of any of my friends. So I'd spend the whole summer just shooting videos with my brother. Whatever we could think of, we'd just shoot a video, edit it in Windows Movie Maker, upload it to YouTube, get like two comments, one dislike, and be like, "This is amazing."
That's crazy. For those who are not quite unaware of you, what is the best way to recognize the work that you have done? I would say my own channel. Um, is like, like you call your channel a love, a love letter to editing? Yeah, I think my channel is like a love letter to YouTube strategy. You know, just how to, how to grow on YouTube and how to build a platform on YouTube. So I just like showcase a good bit of my knowledge there. And then at the same time, uh, behind the scenes, which up until recently, a lot of people didn't know about me, I work with some of the, the biggest creators on the platform. I've had the pleasure of working with people like Mr. Beast for a period of time last year, and some massive creators, people like Jesser, he's a basketball creator, and plenty of big creators. So I get a real nice look into the behind the scenes. We're just really excited to dive into the editing and the storytelling aspect of your job and what you do and how you help creators tell better stories on YouTube. Has there been a case where you've been able to work on a video that was potentially an absolute disaster? You took one look at it and you went, "Okay, I know what we can do to fix this."
Funny enough, there was a video I made with Jesser, who's the basketball creator I talked about. We've got about six, six and a half million subscribers, and we did this video which was busting 100 sports myths in 24 hours. And essentially, the process we have with that team is we have two or three guys that do like the V1, V2 notes, and they just kind of focus on like a lot of the fundamental stuff. But their goal is essentially getting it to me and like, it's almost like a KPI of getting it to me with as, as little feedback I need is possible, even though I'm, you know, I, I just love giving the feedback. So the video came to me, I think it was a V3. I watched it once and I was like, "What the hell is this? This, you know, this doesn't work." Like the, the flow is wrong. The, the first, essentially it was a video about busting 100 sports myths, but you know, I watched the first sport, and it was just boring. It was golf. Golf just never seems to perform well on YouTube with a younger audience. It's, it's slow-paced. It's slow-paced. It was boring. We were like, testing how far the guys could hit the golf ball, but you couldn't even see the golf ball. We didn't use any tracking. It was just, it was horrific, honestly. And I was like, "This video in its current form, if we release it, we're going to lose 40, 50% of viewers in the first 30 seconds."
This video needs open-heart surgery. Let's take a much better section that appeared later in the video and let's like sew this in here and see if there's a way we can connect it to the intro so it still makes sense. We did that with the video. We ended up getting 88% retention at 30 seconds, which for anyone in the know is a lot, a lot, because the average is about 30 to 40% fall off at that 30-second mark. Wow. And that completely changed the fate of the video. And I firmly believe if we had led with the golf, that video would have 600,000, and that's like a make-or-break in terms of return on investment for how much we spent on the video, but in terms of subscribers and just overall momentum. So that's how I see editing. To me, it's like picking those pieces and making sure we make the best video possible.
So how do you get from point A to point B with that philosophy? So you look, you watch this intro, you say, "Okay, this is trash. I'm not interested. Like, I am going to click off for sure." How do you go from there into figuring out what's going to solve the problem? My issue, and this is something I've tried to train people because I've hired people who I want to like build into my client's workflow as well. My issue is so much of my, in my opinion, skill has come from just experience and context. You know, to as to what's interesting and what works. And I'm someone that loves data and I like to look at everything I say and say, "Can I back this up with data?" And some things are quite difficult to back up with data because you're just like, "I know this is a better story if we do it this way. I know this flows into the content in a more effective way." Like even in that example, like we had done similar challenges to the golf challenge in previous videos, and we had seen it didn't hold retention very well. So to me, it's a pretty obvious one to say, "This didn't hold retention well. The most critical part of the video to hold retention is the first 30-60 seconds. Why would we put it there?" You know, and ultimately, I think it's still a mistake from us and from the team because we filmed it first, we put it there. We should have actually known beforehand that that wouldn't work.
You have the benefit of experience to help you develop the gut to know exactly what to do next. Yes, I, I assume you have the same thing, and it's, it's really difficult sometimes to convey that. And like, sometimes I wish like I could give more rationale to some of the things I believe. And I think it's a combination because essentially for like 10, 15 years of my life, I've been making videos, and I've made maybe 2,000 videos on my own channels across the years. So that gives me a lot of context. And then between the years of 2019 to 2021, I just studied probably three, four, five thousand retention curves across different channels and just looking at every retention curve in different niches and trying to find trends that you see frequently. Like when you end a storyline, this happens, or when you're transitioning between storylines, when you use this kind of language, it leads to viewers converting to the next scene much better. That kind of stuff. So I, I combine the experience with some level of data. But then in there is that just kind of almost like unquantifiable, like, "This just doesn't work for me." I've always gone into, I will watch the video myself and I try to understand how I feel about this. This is why I felt like I wanted to click off. Let's figure out how, without having that data to tell me why. I used to actually just watch a video all the way through and say, "Where am I bored?" I'd get my younger brother to watch the video all the way through and just, if he noted somewhere where he felt anyway, this was just boring or it didn't make sense, he'd just like write a quick timestamp down on on a notepad. And I think it's crucial to watch the video as a viewer.
Yes, and that's where editors get it wrong. That's where YouTubers get it wrong. They watch the video and they just hyperfocus in on minute-by-minute sections and they don't see the entire picture. Have you ever done the distraction test? This is something that I do where it's, I get every single potential distraction possible. And so when I'm going for a video, I'll get my phone in front of me, I'll get my tablet in front of me, I'll get a book that I am avoiding reading in front of me, I get my cat in front of me. And then the second I want to pet my cat, I want to look at my phone, I get a notification, I'm interested, or finally, I'm going to pick up that book that I've been avoiding all these months. Something's wrong here.
Honestly, I've got like an Irish version of the same thing. So where my, where my house is, where I do most of my work, I have this office upstairs, and we have this big like, I can't remember, VCR window that you like pull down. And essentially, I have a fan beside that. I turn on the fan. I don't do this as much anymore, but I used to do it a lot. I used to turn on the fan, have it oscillating, have it like at the number two setting, so it's relatively loud, but not so loud that I, I can't hear the video. And I'd open my, my, my window. And outside, just classic Ireland, there's just a cow farm, right? So all you can hear is just this all day, and it's just going. And then there's like a, I don't know, like a pheasant and a peacock or something else just making noise. And I'm just there watching some 16-year-old kid from California make a YouTube video. And I'm just looking at, I'm like, "Uh, what's that noise?" Oh, you know, the same thing of like, "Am I getting bored? Or am I getting distracted?" Or can it's even like a good sort of test for like, "Are things clear enough? Like, like actually audibly clear enough?" I always say this, the average viewer on YouTube is not listening to the video with sound or 30, 40s or whatever the hell. You know, they're, they're just watching it on their AirPods on the train. They woke up in the morning, their mother's shouting at them to get up, and they're just watching it, or they're just watching without headphones. You know, and I think it's really important to to consider that you have every opportunity to stop watching.
The industry became hyper-aware of that, very aware of, "Okay, we are at a huge risk here." Developed this really fascinating insecurity with not trusting the viewer. And from my observation, what we started doing is throwing everything at them very aggressively. Throwing them with as much graphics as possible. We started having the cuts being so aggressively fast that even with it, trace, there's not even a moment for you to really comprehend what you just saw because we're already throwing you the next shot. And then to an extent also trying to give you as much big, beautiful imagery as quickly as possible, also knowing that the video needs to be as quick as possible because the shorter the video, or the best, more optimal a video can be, the quicker they I get at the end of the video, the algorithm goes, "Great, they enjoyed this. Let me push it to it more." Created this interesting experience with a lot of viewers where they simply clicked on a video, watched it the whole way through, and I bet, and then everyone went, "Wait, what just happened?"
How can creators ensure that viewers are watching throughout the whole video without, I would say, patronizing them? I think the first point you make is is spot on, and I say that all the time. It's like, if you ever want to see distractions central, just get up YouTube. Just even on a desktop, you just see, you know, you can press the homepage, and within a millisecond, you're back, and you've got 20 personalized recommendations based on everything I like to watch. The search bar is there. So in just, even if I get like a second in the video where I'm like, "I wonder what happened in the football game last night," or "I really want to hear this Nicki Minaj song," or something, I could just search, bang, I'm in there. Notifications coming in, flying in, flying in, suggested personalized videos that are picked based on my interest and watch history. So if I'm watching a video about something interesting at 10 p.m., YouTube knows, "Oh, he really likes watching two-hour long podcasts at this time," and they're all just there. You know? Wow. And it's just so much to contend with. And I say the same example with more traditional media, like if you're in a cinema, the barrier to leave is quite high. Like you, you're sitting down, you've got popcorn, the movie is terrible. And I remember there was a movie I watched two, three years ago in a tiny cinema in the west of Ireland on a rainy day, and it was, uh, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino. And I didn't like the start of the movie. Like I, I just thought it was slow. I just, I was like, "God, it's taking ages to get into the story here." And because, you know, it's raining outside, and it would cost money and take time to go switch to another movie, I just stuck through it. And I love the movie. I really like the ending. I thought it was great. I thought it was really well done. You might be no longer paying attention to the scene, but you're having to make the decision, "Do I want to leave?" And then you're having that internal debate with yourself. Whereas on YouTube, uh, we do not have that luxury. It's frictionless.
Yeah, the word I use, it's, it's absolutely friction. And I think to kind of address the second point there of like the trend that you've seen, I would say I've seen the same thing. But the thing I would always point out is like, when people hear that I like, like first of all, the word "optimize," I find quite problematic because like, it's like, you know, "optimize for what?" You know, like that's always the, the term. And I'm, I'm someone who's probably, you know, if you go through my tweets, I probably use that word before because it's just almost like industry, it's a buzzword. It's like, "Yeah, optimize it." It's like, "That's like the golden word." Yeah. First, I think it's really important to address who the viewer actually is. And I think there is a problem with people like us maybe looking at content that is not intended for us and then trying to put our own sort of subjective, like, "This is too fast," or "This is too shouty," or "This is too screamy," when maybe the audience that person is pursuing is 12, is 13. And again, I don't want to patronize a 12 or 13-year-old, but they do have different viewing habits to an older person. Like I've done some work with some golf channels, like they can get away with a lot more. They can be really slow at times. They can even put put some stuff in that just, it's kind of boring. That's where golf content can work. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just not if you have a young audience.
I've tried to hire an editor for my channel. I know some extremely talented editors. I give them my video, and then they just, it's almost like they're trying to impress me, you know? There's just too much going on. I'm like, "Okay, let's just really boil this down. When someone watches my video, what are they trying to get out of it? They're trying to get education. They're trying to learn something. And they're, they're trying to get takeaways." I want to give everyone time to process what's going on. Like, if, if I have have a point, and it's like, "Point three: You should do this with your thumbnails." If that just comes up with a simple bit of text and an example and a few arrows and like that, it's very easy to follow. If it comes up with like, "Bang! Three! This! That! Cinematic bollocks! Bang, bang, bang!" It's just, it's really hard to follow. So I would say my advice generally for for a young editor coming up is to really understand who you're editing for. That's, I think that's the first and foremost thing. And then this might be controversial, but I think you should study a lot of traditional. Like, I told you, my favorite film is The Godfather. Which is... Have you watched it since? No, comment. I'm afraid not. This is me, a filmmaker nerd, who's yet to see The Godfather. I do apologize. I'm so sorry. I've betrayed everyone. If you, I would be really curious to think to hear if you liked it because I love The Godfather, but it is genuinely the slowest thing ever. You know, and I work on YouTube. You know, I work, I work with a Minecraft YouTuber that goes, "Today, I'm going to do this." You know, and The Godfather is like the slowest thing ever, but there's something you could take from it. You know, there's something in there that might be like, "Wow, I really like how they introduced that scene," or, "You know, I really like how they teed up that tense moment," or the music they used here. Like, there's, there's a great scene in The Godfather where, I won't spoil it, but one of the main characters is kind of like transitioning towards becoming like The Godfather. And there's a moment where there's this like tense moment where him and this baker are guarding a hospital where someone is lying that people are going to come try to kill. And these guys come along with guns in their cars, and they're pointing at at the at them. They're kind of looking them and saying like, "Oh, like, will we break in?" And him and the baker like pull to their pockets, even though they have nothing in their pockets, to try and make it feel like, "Yo, we've got guns." And then after that goes on, Michael, who's the guy that's building up to be The Godfather, he just lights a cigarette, and he just looks at his hands, and they're completely still. And then he looks at the baker and he's just like, you know, he's just like, "I can't, I can't. My..." I was like, "That's such a smart way to like illustrate how someone is like realizing that they're becoming something different." Like, that didn't scare him. He's completely still. That is some visual storytelling right there. Yeah. Whereas is that was a YouTube video, and that's when I realized, "I'm about to become The Godfather." Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So I think studying, studying traditional media is still really important. You have to like balance it because I, I can tell really quickly when someone has never watched, not The Godfather, never watched like a film and really analyzed it. And I know like someone like Mr. Beast, like it's, he interests me because he says, "I don't watch films. I just watch YouTube." And maybe that's just an anomaly. But I think for an editor, I think it's important to study traditional and just understand that you don't bring that over. You bring certain parts of it over, and you learn from certain different parts of that process.
I think it's just so useful to actually write down what's happening in the video. I do that all the time. Like, I, I just call it the skeleton, nothing too creative, of the video. I just write the entire script. And then I just go at the top and like, "Okay, what, what is the eight things? Like, what are the eight different progressions? The eight scenes or whatever in this video?" And being able to look at them, and it's, it's only so simple when you look at it all just laid out like that. You can say, "Why am I putting that there? That should be later," or "Or could I bring this moment forward?" So I think, I think it's less about thinking about scenes and it's more about thinking of videos and the entire picture.
I would say nearly every client I currently work with or I've worked with over the last three years, I have said the word "slow down" to. This Minecraft channel I work with, Dom Minecraft. I, I think I showed you one of the intros before. Yeah, he would, he would tell you firsthand. You think that's fast? You should have seen what he was doing before he started working with me. Like I've been like, "Hey, Tom, you're an incredible editor. You're incredible." He is a really good YouTuber and he's really driven to to succeed with his channel. But near every time he shows me the intro, I'm like, "Why did you cut that so fast? That just like, you, you should have let me like dwell on the point you just made." Or like, one of my biggest pet peeves is when someone like sets up a really big storyline that's going to happen in the video. So for example, he tries to achieve something, he can't achieve it. So then he says, "I'm going to come back and attempt this later." It's just classic retention. It's just like, "Yeah, we're going to come back and achieve this later." It's a, a classic storyline. What people who do it too fast will say is like, "Oh, I couldn't get this sword going. I'm going to come back and do this." There, bang, next thing you know. Whereas like, I want to hear like, "Oh, this is a struggle. I, I really want to achieve this, so I'm going to come back and do this later and see if I can get it." And like, actually give me a bit of time to process what you've actually said. Sometimes people just use such fast language and such fast editing that you can't process the important moments.
But if you look at Mr. Beast and compare him to a lot of the the clones or even just the people that aren't clones but have been heavily inspired, he actually does usually have slower moments. It's not just, it isn't just always pace. When you're not as an experienced as a creator, you look towards the best. And so you look towards who is the most popular creator, such as as Mr. Beast. And so you look at him and try to reverse engineer and try to study what's going on. But because you don't have particularly as much of a huge experience or really do know those nuances, you only do see the surface-level detail of effort. And therefore, you see fast editing and you go, "Oh, so is that the lesson?" And off they go. I think a lot of creators have unfortunately learned a lot of the wrong lessons because they simply don't know what they're actually looking for.
Yes, bringing that back to the the point we're making here, I think it just comes to that context. You know, people sometimes ask me, "What's the biggest thing you think sets Mr. Beast apart?" I say, "Context." And people like, "What do you mean by context?" Like, like giving context in the video. And I'm like, "No, he made YouTube videos when he was 12. He saw the entire progression of YouTube. He's been making YouTube videos for 10 years." That gives you so much context over like what's funny and what's not funny, what is a good idea versus what's not a good idea. You can read all the theory and the threads and the videos, but then someone will read that and just say, "Oh, bang, I can like package a course together and sell it." Or but sometimes I can see someone that writes a Twitter thread, I just know, I'm like, "They're going to sell a course." Like, they're just waiting to get like 3,000 followers and then it's like, "My course." You know? And I'm like, you know, if you, if you haven't just, like you said, if you haven't actually made videos, if you don't have that context, again, not trying to be a gatekeeper, but when they come to me for advice, I say, "Either start your own channel and do that as hard as you can, like try as hard as you can of doing that for as long as you can, or go find a bigger YouTuber and work for them."
Since you guys are both consulting, you're consulting on a more data side, you're consulting on more of an editor side, you guys probably are repeating yourselves pretty often with what you the advice that you give. Specifically with editing, like what's an editing note that you give all the time that people could learn from? People I just notice always make mistakes in transitions. Like how they transition between things. A storyline might end, and they're just dwelling on something boring. And I'm like, "At this point, we want to give the viewer the next storyline that's transitioned to that next moment." So you can always transition to a next storyline and then add some humor, some context, some like, even just off-topic riffing. But because you've hit them with the next storyline, they now have something that they want to wait around for, forward to. And that thing, again, optimizing for retention.
And I remember Hayden, I remember we said this in a conversation a while ago, like I'm like, "If you're optimizing for retention, like really, like retention, like a high retention video should be a good video." When someone says, "I don't want to optimize for retention," I say, "Well, you don't want to make a good video then." And good, like that's a very kind of subjective thing because it's like, "Good for what?" And like, you know, I feel like I'm getting some daggers back of me right now. No, I love that. But honestly, that's the way I think about like, YouTube gives you real feedback on how well this video performed for 100,000, a million people. Yeah. And sometimes it does make you kill your darlings, put your ego aside, and say, "I thought that comedy skit was funny, but 10% of people left." But then there's a counterpoint, and this is what no one thinks about with retention. And I think you're going to like this point, Hayden, is like, no one considers maybe a section leads to a 2% dip in retention. But what if that section was something that gave the video more story? Maybe it's something that made them laugh and made them love your video more. And what if, even just from a purely, like, let's just play the game of purely data and purely analytics, what if that section led to a better hold and retention later in the video? So you might have lost 2% by adding that in, but if it led to a hold at 50% in the video for a longer period of time, yeah, it was worth keeping in.
Do you think there's something to the nature of the platform of YouTube and how you receive feedback from analytics? How accurate do you think the algorithm is in studying human behavior? I think like that phrase, like, "All watch time was not created equal." You know, you can watch a 10-minute video and say, "That was good," or you could watch a 10-minute video and say, "That is the best video I've seen in weeks." And YouTube do have systems to try and measure that behavior. So like surveys, uh, even like engagement signals like likes, but also potentially, and this is just more theorizing, but I would imagine if someone watches an entire video and then they go watch another five, six videos, it's a pretty positive signal that you were really impactful with that first video. Like, I've watched lots of 10-minute videos for the first time from a creator and then just never watched another video because it was like, "Yeah, it was decent. I got something from it, but it didn't make me go, I need to watch every single video." And I get that a lot with my channel.
Disagree. Oh, really? Following the philosophy of TikTok, you watch this one, it wasn't good enough. You watch this one, it wasn't good enough. You watch this one, that was good enough. You end the session. I think we have the same issue on YouTube. If a video was genuinely absolutely brilliant, you're satisfied with your session and you end the session. Oh, and then the algorithm goes, "Oh, wait a minute. You've stopped watching. You're no longer on YouTube. Kill it."
You think that is a theory? That is, we're getting on now. But I mean, at the end of the day, YouTube are optimizing for time on platform. So it's not, it's a theory, but it's not necessarily just complete pie in the sky. Because if that does lead to the action of quitting YouTube, YouTube will see that as a negative signal. And that's, that's the balancing act. Because YouTube always like to say, and I, I love YouTube, and I know a few YouTube employees, and I think they, they honestly, out of all the platforms, they do really care about the content and the audience, and everything is put through that lens of of the audience. If someone leaves the platform, that's not good for YouTube. Just as you said, like, they're not going to say like, "Oh, that's a negative signal." But if that viewer just truly enjoyed and loved that piece of content, they're satisfied, they can go back for their day. It's a good point. That is a data entry that YouTube cannot capture. That data, it can't really properly dictate why they ended that session. But the obvious interpretation would be, was because it was a bad video. The suggestion is, don't make a great video because you, your session will then end because of it. To, because we have to keep designing our videos for it to be wanting just a little bit more.
I think it's, it's like a spectrum. So I think that there are videos so good that you got such a dopamine hit that you're like, "Okay, I'm done. That was incredible. I'm leaving the platform." But then there's also an addicting nature to some videos as well. Those creators that are posting once a month, just absolute bangers. That could be those incredibly high-performing videos where they might want to click off. But I mean, the data doesn't really suggest that that might be true if they're performing at that level. That's the balancing act. And it's like this kind of like, like, where's the equilibrium? Where do things meet in the middle? Because like, even in that example, like, yes, maybe, maybe if there was this perfect video, and I think there is some like contentiousness to like, if you do watch a perfect video, do you leave? Because like, it's one of those things that maybe, maybe you think that's the case, and I can see why that could be the case in a lot of situations. You're like, "Oh, that's like fulfilled my day." But you know, maybe there's a, there's a more return on your time. You're like, "Oh, that was really good. Let me watch another one." Like you said, the kind of addicting nature of it. If they watch the entire video, that's still positive. That's a positive signal because most videos on YouTube are not watched for more than 50%. So if someone is watching the entire video and they're fully satisfied, they'll probably subscribe to the channel. They watch the entire video, they like it. And I believe, and it'd be great to get a, a YouTube algorithm engineer on the couch as well to talk about this, but I would, I would believe that YouTube would outweigh that over the fact that they ended up leaving the platform. Because they would make the bet, and I'm not trying to fight YouTube's corner here, but I would imagine they'd make the bet that if they had such a positive experience with the platform, when they open up their phone next day, are they going to pick TikTok or YouTube?
Well, what you're suggesting is, let's just say I watch a really, I discovered a great creator. I watched one of their videos. Great. I'm satisfied. And then you're right, and then they, that creator does stay with me. And then maybe I think about it as I sleep, maybe even dream about the video. I wake up next morning and went, "Maybe I want to watch another video of his or hers." And so maybe, maybe even the, the returning, like, "Hey, I've returned." And I immediately want to go to that creator. What else has that creator posted? And so maybe the session may have ended, but I've now restarted the session. And so even for me, I simply don't know. Is that data picked up? That is the, the crazy thing about even this whole industry of like YouTube advice and like conferences like this, where we all talk about data. There is data we get. You know, we get CTR, we get AV, we know that we have to be relative with that. You know, click-to-rate for the first 100 views is going to be high for the first thousand views, then it's going to lower as the impressions grow. Like there's all this nuance, but there's some things we just don't know. Like we don't know how, like I would love to know if you were watching this video, what was their session time after watching my video? Like I would love to know that data. But I feel like it's probably too complex or like too hard to track for YouTube, or maybe there's a reason they don't, they don't actually want to share that data.
Before we were talking a lot about just YouTube as a platform and as a storytelling medium. How do you see YouTube storytelling being different than some of those more traditional media platforms? Like, do you think that YouTube as a platform affects that? And do you think that's good or bad? I think it's just different. Like, it is different. Like, it would be hilarious to put a retention chart in front of Quentin Tarantino and say, "This section during Pulp Fiction when they were eating bacon, people were just gone. People didn't, you know." Like, imagine his reaction to that. You know, it just goes down to how different the industries are because genuinely, like, name a YouTube channel that actually starts with the team. There are some examples that are coming up more recently, like Er, kind of started with a few guys around him. Beam started with a few guys. But it is more, it's rare. And maybe it would become more common. But generally, YouTube starts from one person. Yeah. Whereas a film, feature film, or even even like a, you know, my brother is really into film, just the organization that has to go into him making this short film he's trying to make is bizarre. The funding, you know, he's like, "Hey, you know, do you have any money? We need to, you know, your car and I brought." You know, I think it's just because YouTube starts as a solo platform, that just changes how you approach things. And the fact that, um, I just think it's less, I'm not going to say it's less artistic because you might hate that. But I'm about to come for your neck. I, I genuinely think it's just like, because it's a solo, it starts off as a solo thing quite often, you have to wear a lot of hats. And you get like real-time feedback. You know, like, if Quentin Tarantino releases a movie, he probably just cares about the check, about the box office, about the critical response, and probably says he doesn't, but I would imagine he does. And it's just like, you know, he gets that a few weeks after, you know, thinks about it for two years, then comes back and makes another movie. You know? Yeah. Whereas YouTube, you get the feedback instantly. And it's like, "Well, what's the next video?" That's kind of deviating from the question about pure storytelling, but I think that does affect the decisions people make and how much time people give for something. And then also, like, the thing I always think about is like, there could be moments where someone could leave in more story. And it comes from a place of fear and insecurity that they say, "People will leave." If you think people will leave, it's probably because that story isn't actually that good anyway. You know? And that's like the, the difficulty because there's such low barriers to entry. I genuinely think a lot of YouTubers aren't actually good storytellers.
Creators try to tell a story, and they tell it badly. Retention goes down. What does that teach them? To don't do it again. Yes, so the rule should be, keep trying to tell those stories until the graph goes up. It's not about cutting out those stories, it's about telling it better. That's a one-liner there, or two-liner.
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