The Art of Storytelling and View Retention

i've been watching you guys videos on creators and interviews on the youtube landscape for a while you've been also andrew you've been watching a couple of them i've been telling everybody to watch them just because they're really good but also like let's find as many different ways to tie these experiences we've had together as we can um but one of the common things i've noticed so we've talked about like everything from like the mr beast of the world to all the other tech youtube creators and one thing that i keep noticing that i always want

to like explore is the advice that you can get from a creator about youtube about the platform about how to make better videos doesn't necessarily always apply and so watching so i'll just go ahead and plug right off the bat it'll be in the show notes the the video you did with jimmy where you hung out with him you're in his studio get all kinds of this awesome information out of him and about youtube and about the way he approaches making videos and i i want to listen to that whole thing and just just take

every little bit of advice i possibly can to make our videos better but not all of it actually works and applies to tech so i'll just give a quick example you might say something like you really want to be um introducing people to a story line within the first 10 seconds of a video but that bit of advice might not work if you're trying to review a product for example and you have to talk to the person considering buying the thing immediately they would leave if you start telling a story and it has nothing to

do with the product so i'm curious when you guys talk to a bunch of different creators in different genres who have different pieces of advice that they give do you find that there's more overlap or almost no overlap between let's say a beauty creator or a tech creator or a vlogger and all the different types of youtubers you've talked to so i i personally actually disagree about what you just said about tech videos interesting i actually think you can introduce multiple narratives introduce new stories when it comes to the product it's just not the same

way it's not you telling a story but if you said like there's two things i really like about this and one thing i really don't all of a sudden you've just introduced something that i'm waiting for i see that's a story what's the thing marquez doesn't like about this and i'm waiting for that and so i think actually a lot of the advice that he's giving is the way i take it is more of this just general storytelling advice and if someone's you know you're introducing a product and there's no tension there's no nothing new

that's gonna happen um then i might not stick around and i think you know i think colin should explain also this advice from the creators of south park when it comes to storytelling and i actually think storytelling advice applies to everyone who's telling a story yeah there's this clip where the creators of south park are speaking to a class and they said that a really bad story will go like this it'll go this happened then this happened then this happened then this happened and you think like that's an extremely boring way to intake information yeah

and what you want is a story that goes this happened but then that happened therefore this happened so you want some causation between the beats in your story and i think that's something that could exist completely in a tech video where you're saying here's this new phone that was just launched history has shown us that it's been really incredible it's been an incredible line of products but this one is different therefore you should think differently right and if you can keep that going throughout you'll hook people and keep them longer i think one of the

interesting things about reviewing tech products is a large part of what we do is actually deciding which products to review especially if i'm just like narrowing it down to reviewers and so it usually turns out that the stuff we review is at the most extremes it's either the best stuff and we want to highlight it and show you or it's like the worst stuff and it's like i gotta warn you not to buy this and then there's a whole bunch of stuff in the middle that's like most tech which is like fine and sometimes it

can be really hard to pull a story out of the stuff that's fine like you'll you'll get to this whole line of products has been fine this one's also fine stay tuned so i find like a lot of channels are like trying to pull a story not even a story but just trying to like exaggerate things to create a better video which may actually shift the conclusion about the product yeah so i think there's two things one it's like the way you the way you reveal information to the audience is you know part of that

kind of retention strategy that you can pull is like okay i'm going to save this piece of information for there but i'm going to tell them i'm going to say there's a little bit of like i can hook them but i also think there's completely different tension and release points in different formats so all good storytelling is gonna build a ton of tension in the viewer and then release it right that's what it is it's like i'm i wanna i'm curious about something and then you let me know and so i think a tech review

is inherently a bunch of tension because it's like i wanna know marquez's take on this and so that that's the tension the release is watching it so i agree with you that it's not apples to apples but i also would say that i think that some of the storytelling advice that you can take from you know someone who's able to capture you know 100 million people's attention then i think you can't apply small bits of that and i think the the thing is like jimmy on our interview but then also jimmy uh spending four days

with him in north carolina like the in-between moments you get a lot of jimmy where he's just speaking more directly to us at least like about our content and being more you know kind of understanding of what our goals are and so i think the more time we spent together the more he started giving us advice that was catered to our channel and i think that's a pretty unique experience yeah um but i think there's like general storytelling advice and and at the same time i would say that you know he reaches an incredibly broad

audience the most broad the most broad and i think there's different tactics to building a niche community and i think the way i view the internet and how i like to interact with it is through niche communities i mean our first business was a network a sports network dedicated to lacrosse yeah that's a niche community that i'm a part of and the creator community is another niche community i feel a part of right and so now i think we're creating content for that community so i want to be a little bit more narrow and i

don't actually want the most broad audience yeah and we won't take his advice to the fullest extreme because if we did our videos would be edited down to six minutes for retention they would take us forever and we would leave out valuable things sometimes letting someone speak for us for four to five minutes is valuable yeah right and so we need to make that decision of yeah no our audience because we know them because it is niche wants to hear about that right got it do you think you would you think you would last in

a mr beast challenge which challenge i'm trying to think i feel like i'd be pretty decent keeping your hand on something i mean keeping your hand on a phone that's his app i could definitely get my hands on that now i'm pretty i'm pretty i'm decently like mobile and athletic and i don't i don't know like if i if you put me up against other creators and editors i'd feel pretty confident because most creating and editing is like sitting down like endurance yeah i feel like i have a little bit of a physical advantage but

again it depends on what the channel so you could sit in a seat with poor posture for probably the longest i guess um all right so a lot of what we've talked about also in the youtube world is youtube as a platform has relationship with its creators in a way that not every platform does like not every platform sends plaques to its creators when they reach milestones and has like creator you know teams that work with us and things like that um i'm curious from you what are like the biggest complaints that you've seen from

creators to youtube because i feel like here were i don't want to say isolated but it seems like every gate or every like big problem that youtube has seemingly seemingly doesn't really affect our channel very much whether that's because we're a tech channel or we're a pg channel or a friendly channel to youtube whatever it is it seems like we've been pretty safe from all of it and i guess that's why but i'm curious what sort of things you guys see that ring true the most often among other creators i think the number one complaint

from creators that i hear is the inability to a b test thumbnails because i think yeah thumbnails are this like incredibly stressful um part of our job do you remember when it was just like the middle frame of the video yeah you could game that system pretty easily and totally became like you need to be a partner to upload a thumbnail yep and now everyone who is like anyone can upload thumbnails now right i think yeah i think so yeah but like thumbnail designer is becoming it's great that it's becoming like a job in our

world right that's like that's a difference between a million views and 100 000 views a lot of times is your thumbnail but i think that's the the most stressful part of creating is that you make this amazing video not only do you have to be like to be a youtuber not only do you have to be um good on camera you also have to be a good producer yes so just be a good director a good animator good editor like you have to be all these different things and then on top of that you have

to be really good at packaging and that's actually what you find out over time is that actually the most important part of the job then yeah and i think the importance of that is really positive because it increases like the the barrier to entry and makes the quality really good but i think thumbnails today are causing a lot of creators a lot of stress and are the biggest complaint is like can we just a b test yeah it seems like it's such a simple fix um but i would say that's the biggest complaint it would

be nice we were just talking about this the other day but um would you be uh open to being able to change so when it kind of auto plays on your say your smart tv or like when you're hovering over something on the web and you don't get to choose what that auto plays like being able to now change that similar to a thumbnail and you think that could increase click through yeah definitely you can choose that on uh on instagram reels and yeah yeah just like being able to do that yeah because we've had

ones where we just released a studio video where we had the rivie and it has this like gear tunnel in the bottom and the clip it shows was tim crawling through that geared tunnel so like super fun right we've had other reviews where it chooses like half of that one second is marquez and a role and the other half is switching to b-roll and looks terrible when it like goes on yeah well [Music] with the video yeah and i've chosen stuff on my like smart tv because i accidentally scrolled over it and that one clip

was like that was kind of interesting i think i'm gonna watch the video now yeah i believe that's uh ai selected at this point whether it's be from retention or just from a random i think they try and choose a face usually yeah yeah i mean all of my videos have a face in them sometimes it doesn't pick a face and i find that odd but yeah i i think so i see a lot of i agree with a b testing thumbnails i think that would be great i would use that for sure um so

i agree definitely that a b testing thumbnails would be fun i would love to i would do that all the time but i also am probably among the youtubers that i know and associate with in the tech world i'm probably the one that changes my thumbnails the least i think i see a lot of people upload a video with a title and a thumbnail and then an hour later change the title and then an hour later change the thumbnail and then change the title and the thumbnail and i'll come across it a third time in

my home on my home feed or something i'm like i think i've watched this already but it has a different title and thumbnail so maybe i haven't um would you do you guys play with title and thumbnail at all do you find that that's like a major major part of how you package a video and and manipulating it and changing the way it performs or no we do play with them but from my perspective if we're frantically changing titles and thumbnails we made a mistake much earlier in the process if if we have good ideas

make titles and thumbnails easy yeah so we try and make sure we have that figured out before we even make the decision to start filming or scripting the video yeah it's kind of changed our process to to just say hey let's start that way in the beginning and say okay we have this idea but wait before we take any other steps how do you package this idea yeah i think one of the conversations i have with jimmy was like when do you pick the title and thumbnail and for him it's before the video even gets

shot at all and for us we were like well that sounds like great advice let's see how early we can apply it but if we're reviewing a piece of tech and we don't know how good it is and we don't know if we're going to recommend it or not i can't choose a title and thumbnail before testing the thing so i gotta test the thing and then maybe at that point when i'm starting to write the actual video i can pick a title and thumbnail but that's much later in the process and at that point

i don't know anymore if it's a good title and thumbnail but that might be with new formats because you have a lot of formats too where you know first impressions you're going to put that in the title that is true yeah and so that's what we're in the process of finding or what are our formats where we it'll make it easy for us and for our audience that does they'll get kind of annoying sometimes when we we know we have to put galaxy s 21 ultra first impressions now the actual title we give it basically

has to be three to four words like where we have to limit ourselves from that so this checklist of like the process of making a video and it's usually as i'm uploading the video then i am finishing what i think the title should be i have my last two or three options for a title and we're shooting the thumbnail at that moment and i don't know if that's i mean there are lots of tech topics and other ways to come up with a title and thumbnail first and craft a video around it but specifically for

reviews that's been a challenge of mine is like packaging the video in an earlier than as i upload way that's like us for interviews you know we just filmed an interview with you we don't know exactly what the title thumbnail is going to be yeah we have like a loose idea going into the interview coolest guy ever yes that was it yeah yeah yeah okay yeah that might work there's i think the other complaint about the other common complaint is like i don't make enough money you know adsense you know this that or the other

and my perspective on that is for so many years because we were in such a niche topic adsense was not a part of our business model at all and i don't believe that youtube owes us anything for uploading videos to youtube i just don't believe it and and i think my perspective is just that it's our job to make a business out of it if we can find audience that's that's on us youtube gives us the platform and it's a search engine and they give us the tech adsense i always look as like it's a

cherry on top of our business luckily i think over the past year our growth has been such that it's a it's a nice cherry on top but i just don't view it i think any creator who's starting out and being like frustrated that youtube's not paying enough yeah it's like you you have to be doing this for a long time for that to be a significant source of revenue thanks for watching that clip of the podcast with colin sameer it's always fun having creator guests on and that's why i want to ask you now that

you've seen the clip who else do you want to have in the comments section uh on the waveform podcast i think other creators would be great suggestions i love other creators they don't have to be tech creators but just like if you're on youtube in general there's some sort of conversation we can have yeah so let us know on this clip we'd like to see and we reach out comments aren't open unless you hit the subscribe button so press it very important just test her out call to action having confidence mirror on make sense so

i hit the red button good point do it for colin and samir see you guys next time [Music] you