As a YouTuber, there’s one storytelling device you MUST use for your videos to perform well. It doesn’t matter how many subscribers you have; this will improve your views if you do it consistently. I’ve personally worked on many multi-million view longform YouTube videos across every niche, and I have to keep reminding YouTubers to do one thing: 🔁 ALWAYS HAVE AN OPEN LOOP Let me explain the simple version first, and the detailed version after. — 1️⃣ The simple version: An open loop is just an unanswered AND INTERESTING question that your video is helping the viewer discover. What’s ‘interesting’ is audience and niche specific. In entertainment, it’s some sort of emotional payoff, like a fight or a successful romantic courting or reveal. In education, it’s usually the FEELING for the viewer that they understand the topic of the video well enough to move on from it. An ideal open loop must: + be genuinely interesting + feels genuinely unknown + involve something the viewer actually cares about + have clarity If you can do that consistently, you’re already doing really well. — 2️⃣ The more detailed version for more advanced YouTubers. This requires higher skill but will get you much better results if you implement it correctly: 1. Have one big open question that leads to a grand payoff towards the end of the video 2. Use smaller questions for mini-payoffs on the way (hook -> event -> payoff) 3. Most importantly, LAYER your open loops in a way that BEFORE you close one small question, you OPEN another question that has to be answered. I’ve attached a clip of a Tom Scott (6.73M subscribers) where he explains this exact concept of layering. 4. For the genuinely masterful: Focus not just on EXPLICIT open loops, but on IMPLIED open loops. That is to say, it’s OK to be like “wait till this part of the video to experience this!”, but it’s much better if the setting of the video just implies something will happen. 5. When you have these open loops, the more you have the more clarity becomes an issue. - An open loop that is forgotten is in essence a dead open loop. - So you solve this by explicitly RE-ITERATING the open loop, if it just feels like it’s been too long. You never want the audience to feel lost. - Another way to solve it is to just make sure that the progression of the loop is logical. That is to say — no fillers! Make every moment count towards the progression of that loop. — 3️⃣ This last part won’t matter to most except the most advanced YouTubers, so let’s go one last level deeper: A really good open loop is actually not *just* a question. It has a specific emotional valence. It’s a specific feeling of tension in the viewer. You can call this stress. Stress is not a bad thing! It is critically important for payoffs. I suppose in an abstract sense, it’s the same concept as potential energy. The higher you hold up a ball, the more distance it has to drop, and the greater the impact when it hits the ground. But it’s not just the height of the ball, either. Since storytelling is by definition a linear experience, the journey up to this “max height” also matters a lot too. It shouldn’t just be constant escalating tension, but closer to a sine wave that directionally tracks up and to the right. That mini release keeps people comfortable enough to actually enjoy the video. So it ends up being not just about the question itself, but the process of “marinating”the question ultimately makes the difference between an enjoyable video and a legendary video. — Hope you’ve found this interesting/helpful! I’m Dabi, a doctor/YouTube strategist focused on 1. storytelling and 2. AI agentic tools. Slides are from https://t.co/tod75eqR6e . Like and bookmark if this was helpful :)
