Storytelling is definitely making a comeback as a priority. Everyone is collectively realising how important it is. Companies are now increasingly hiring dedicated "storyteller" roles after finding out that in fact, just paying excessively for traditional advertising isn't going to cut it anymore.
As someone who’s thought about this topic almost everyday for the last 5 years (in the context of storytelling optimisation for YouTubers), here are some thoughts specifically for people who care about storytelling themselves. I've tried to only include things that may be non-obvious unless you're pretty deep in the field already.
1. Views-maxxing is not the primary function of storytelling.
Getting a tonne of views in-and-of-itself is a pretty worthless endeavour, in precisely the same way that money is worthless.
With money, the only reason for caring about it is that you can trade things for it that are actually useful.
Views are exactly the same. If you had one trillion views, the view count itself doesn’t make an iota of difference to your life by itself.
What does matter are all the ways it impacts people at scale. You should consider measuring breadth AND depth of impact on a viewer.
Breadth x depth = influence
2. The effect of storytelling is heterogenous because humans are heterogenous.
The same story that might move one person to tears, is enough to make another person cringe, and yet again enough to bore another person.
In practical terms, it’s silly to focus too much on breadth by generic content. If you make the same thing as everyone else, you’ll always lag behind someone else. That might be okay for a lot of people, but it’s not okay if you want to be the best in your class.
3. Storytelling at its peak is a specialisation combining many fields.
It combines writing, visual design, sound design, a deep sense of psychology beyond textbooks and LLMs, audience understanding, market dynamics, interpretation of analytics, a sense of musicianship (this is different to sound), and world understanding.
The ceiling of storytelling is essentially limitless.
4. Storytelling feedback loops are 80% internal, 20% external.
Retention on YouTube is a really good example of this. It’s beautiful data showcasing, objectively, when someone chose to leave your video.
But with that small dip at the end of the segment: can you actually see into exactly what happened?
You have to watch the video to figure it out. Not just at the dip itself. The dip is just the “final” culminating event of some preceding sense of discomfort. The emotional cost of staying now outweighs the emotional benefit of continuing to watch.
In real life, people have to leave all the time: maybe it’s time to go to work, maybe one’s child is crying, whatever. A completely flat retention means you have literally, in that singular moment, overridden every other possible priority that that person may seek to accomplish in their life. All to watch your video?
And since retention is just a proxy metric for attention, which itself is a proxy for reward seeking behaviour, then good retention means that evidently your video seems very emotionally (or promise-wise) rewarding.
Bad retention is not an anomaly; it is the default action for all viewers. People have plenty of things to do (including watching other videos that aren’t yours).
In making videos that perform well, you’re overriding default human behaviour.
And best-in-class deeply understand how they themselves react to things. What makes you tick? What makes you laugh? What do you love? What do you hate?
Comments are a reasonable data point, but they are always the minority of your viewers. A single comment may represent the feelings of a few thousand people.
Views are the best data point. Like money, they are symbolic emotional value.
5. Being able to see what’s wrong with a story, correlates poorly with being able to make a good one. And vice versa.
Diagnosis and generation are two very separate skills. Someone can make good stories without knowing why they’re good. Another can analyses stories super well, but maybe there’s a gap in their ability as a creator.
Mastering both is really important, though. They have different, rich layers of understanding that aid each other.
All super prominent YouTubers that I've met are very good at both.
Conclusion
Anyone can get good at "functional storytelling", which is storytelling to serve a business aim. No originality is required here: if you can invent and adhere to templates, you'll be fine and achieve business outcomes that suit your needs.
Somewhat sadly for creators, effort alone isn't a moat, in the same way that driving a car 42km or running 42km will both end up being 42km worth of travel.
Yet, people run marathons all the time. They train for months or years, drink copious amounts of electrolytes and carbs on the day, and endure great pain to do so.
But, getting ultra good at storytelling is a little different than running. The ability to understand people and how they'll react to things, or why they love the things they love, is an extremely strong skill to have.
If you can master it, I would say it's one of the most useful skills in the world.
Where to from here?
I'm Dabi, a doctor from Australia who's helped a tonne of YouTubers across different niches with multi-million view videos. YouTube Storytelling: Far Beyond Retention is the single greatest course I've made to teach YouTubers how to improve their videos to this level.
Consider ➡️ https://creatorside.link/5-insights
