I've helped many YouTubers - of many sizes big and small - make multi-million view videos, a bunch of times.
Unfortunately, I'm no genius. I just happen work with a lot of YouTubers, have spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about what makes videos work, and then I'm blessed with a lot of smart friends who actually know what they're talking about.
But, in a nostalgic return to a time without humility: here are once again 11 commandments for YouTube storytelling for better retention and therefore more views. Expanded for 2026.
Once again: I do hope this is helpful to both new and seasoned YouTubers alike.
A very brief note for absolute beginners
Videos are promoted in the YouTube algorithm when they have a higher retention (i.e. people watch your video for longer, because it's fun/interesting/nice to watch), and a higher satisfaction. It is not 100% clear algorithmically what makes a video be considered satisfying - or perhaps more precisely, there's a ridiculous number of parameters that all you need to consider is human psychology rather than focusing too much on YouTube-The-Machine.
1. A banger title/thumbnail can’t arise from non-banger idea. But a banger idea has a banger story built into it.
So, as you get more experience with YouTube and YouTube storytelling, you get so used to working on Youtube video concept->story arcs that you develop this quick sense of "will this video work from a storytelling perspective?"
The idea almost defines the entire video, before you even start to write your script. It decides the title and thumbnail, which is obvious, but what is less obvious is the impact it has on crucial story elements.
In particular:
Structure of the story
Macro arc (what's the journey of the protagonist going to be?)
Micro segments and how those come together
Visuals
Audience expectations of payoffs
Listicles (which I've talked extensively about in my course) are really useful for beginners. They're actually not the best kind of content overall depending on your aim, but the reason they work so well is that they force structured payoffs, and this is good.
You don't have to necessarily think as all your videos as listicles. But you do need to think: if we have this particular segment, what's the payoff for the audience's attention and patience?
And surprisingly, more of this is idea-driven than you think.
Go for ideas that:
Have inherent conflict - be imaginative
Have inherent interestingness - something that people won't have seen before
Ideally have some sort of inherent escalation. The video should get more interesting as time goes on.
2. Reaffirm the click immediately.
An introduction to yourself done poorly almost always dips viewer retention, unless you’re the precise reason why a viewer clicked the video. Carry the momentum of the click forward.
However, when I first noticed and wrote this many years ago from smart YouTubers doing it -- (it's not my tactic, I just borrowed it from other smart YouTubers) -- people ended up thinking "we need the visual of the first part of the video to exactly match the thumbnail."
That's a good start, for many. In reality though, you're actually satisfying viewer intent first and foremost. The process of reaffirming the click is intent matching, between title/thumbnail and video.
You can do that with alternative visuals, if you want. It's just that the same visual is often the easiest way to do it, but feel free to experiment.
3. Continuous progression is the ideal pace
It was once a misconception that you had to go fast in order to keep attention. Maybe to some degree, this is somewhat true at the very beginning of a video.
But what's more important than that is that the video always has to feel like it's going somewhere.
Retention drops and boredom happen when that feeling is lost. This feeling can be lost in a great variety of ways. It can be lost in rambles. It can be lost with too much character dilution. It can be lost with segments that aren't well thought out for the audience.
These days, videos have slowed down a lot. There's been a variety of more and more absurd terms that have popped up over the years, so you could call this unmrbeastification* or ryantrahanfication or whatever you please.
*for the record, I always felt MrBeastification was a pretty unfair term to the MrBeast and his team, because excessively fast pacing was something that often occurred from cheap MrBeast replicas rather than MrBeast's videos themselves.
4. Stakes is NOT just consequences.
This remains unchanged since I first wrote about it.
The emotional stakes of a good story is not what happens to people. It’s how much your characters care about what happens.
You could lose $1 million. So what? If you're a true buddhist that has no concept of attachment to worldly goods, it might cause no emotional stress whatever. That's not a stake.
But if you lost your last $10 bill, and you were going to use that $10 to feed your son his favorite macaroni for his birthday, and now you won't be able to buy the macaroni packet BUT the $10 is hanging precariously off the cliff side and all you have to do is risk your life to grab it? Will you choose your $10 macaroni and your son's happiness, at the risk of your existence? THAT'S stakes.
Importantly, the side effect of this is that you occasionally might have to communicate your intentions and emotions out loud, for people to understand and feel it. It's fantastic if your storytelling is good enough that you can imply it. But sometimes, the implying bit may be too subtle, so it needs to be just a little more direct. This is a fine balance.
5. Contextual clarity is of utmost importance.
This hasn't changed since I wrote it.
It’s easy in the edit to know what you recorded and assume that people follow along. But, in *any* set of editing cuts that you do, you MUST make the viewer feel like they’re not lost. Confusion is a killer of joy.
6. Repetition must be avoided at all costs, UNLESS it is strategic.
Repetition in its base form is just avoiding, for example, saying the same thing twice. If you say the same thing twice, it's really boring. Saying the same thing twice is just really bad. Can't you see how bad it is? It's bad, isn't it?
But, cleverly, In his course Retention Accelerator (which is now the Million View Club Course), Mario Joos -- a superb strategist and friend of mine who has worked with the biggest creators in the world -- pointed out that there's actually many different types of repetition.
Think carefully about repetition in visuals, in emotions.
Avoid sameness where possible.
Whenever I've helped YouTubers make multi-million view listicles - a format which I've spent far too much time on - what I always try to do is make sure that if there are similar looking items, that those are spread apart as far as possible. Often, I'll even tell the YouTuber to remove them completely, if their emotional function is too similar.
It's not that repetition itself is evil. Sometimes, people enjoy repetition for branding and familiarity purposes. It's just that within a single YouTube video, you've got to be really careful not to accidentally cause boredom.
7. Contrasts cause feelings
I don't really know why this is, but for some reason, contrasts seem to activate evoke specific kinds of feelings in people's brains more strongly than if they're not used.
Conceptually, the easiest thing to think about this is just in terms of colour. A red object against a blue background.
But let's expand on this.
The most interesting contrast for me is always emotional contrast.
If you want to make people feel the sadness of a tragedy, you have to start from happiness first.
Actually, the key philosophy of the visual novel studio Key Studios (who made incredible stories like CLANNAD, Angel Beats, Rewrite) would always set up a huge arc of happiness at school for its characters. They then would proceed to obliterate the viewers with tragedy afterwards.
An easier to imagine example is this:
Let's say you want to try to make your viewer feel like something absolutely mind-blowingly-incredible has happened.
In order for the viewer to feel the incredible payoff, you MUST show incredible struggle first. This is an issue with a lot of YouTubing.
One of my favorite insights I accidentally had when working with Ben Morris, a brilliant travel vlogger, and thinking about my own videos, was this. I am a doctor. My usual optimisation is I want to solve problems as effectively as possible for patients.
But YouTubers...YouTubers are masters of problems. They are masters of articulating problems, of demonstrating them, of making them fun problems.
Similarly, people who write incredible anime or manga create these kinds of scenarios first. The author of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Araraki, said that he would put his characters in incredibly difficult scenarios that even he had trouble thinking of the solution to.
It is through the character's struggle that you create something organic, real, and - most importantly - admirable. If you start with solution-first thinking, you may just get really boring outcomes.
8. Genuine conflict is genuinely interesting.
I'm not the biggest fan of the book ‘The Science of Storytelling’, but Will Storr does actually have some really great gems in there.
One such gem is that he attributes the interestingness of stories to the fact that stories are interesting because they help us learn to survive.
Whenever conflict occurs, the ideal situation is that we imagine ourselves in that same conflict, and wonder what we'll do in that situation. To that degree, horror films are often much more strong than many action films at "gripping" the viewer.
Also, conflict results in tension. And tension is fun. That's a whole other 1 hour lesson that I don't have time to go into today.
9. Foreshadowing is critical.
The YouTube reason for foreshadowing is that it 1. helps define structure, and 2. helps define rewards of a video early, before the reward is received.
It's mainly because viewers get presented an functionally infinite selection of videos. Amongst all these potential options, the first minute of the video is helping them make the choice: does this video give me what I want?
Even in a well made video, 30% of viewers will say "nope, not for me" at the 0:30 mark.
But even for the 70% who stay, they still need a reason to stay. Foreshadowing provides those reasons.
If you don't have it, it's a stylistic and risky choice, because it makes the strong assumption that viewers will care about your video up until the point that they reach that payoff.
10. Mimetics matter a LOT.
I'd like to gatekeep this, but for the sake of people who have for some reason read the whole thing so far, this next piece of information is something that you'll probably never have seen articulated before.
People use other people's reactions as shortcuts to how they themselves should feel. This is why social proof works, why Haikyuu has crowds, why reaction content exists, why reviews exist.
If you're making a video where it falls emotionally flat, it's because it's also falling flat for the characters inside the video. You need other people to genuinely react to the things inside the video, and you need to spend time showing those reactions.
There are plenty of outside-of-YouTube uses for this as well, but I won't go into it too much.
11. Optimize for your primary metric, which isn't necessarily views.
The new YouTube meta is that views-at-all-costs is not the right approach.
This is by far the most valuable point in this entire article:
You need to optimize based on the metrics that actually matter to you.
For businesses: This is often revenue. You MUST have a way to measure attribution between videos and sales. I'm implementing Dub myself for CreatorSide. You can get 100K views and it will be a flop of a video if it results in 0 sales for you. If you just use views though, you'll think "well at least it did 100K, my other video did 10K views!" But that 10K view video might have led to 20 sales, so is immensely more valuable.
For education: Views still matter, since it's generally the case that you'd rather teach more people than less. But the depth of that education is going to be very specific. For example, the videos I most enjoy go ultra-deep on specific topics like AI agents and building a creator business. They only have about 10-20K views each, or sometimes even less than 1000 views, but to me they're extremely valuable and as a target viewer of that depth, I feel like I much prefer that creator's content. Even if it's slower or not-optimised, that depth is so valuable that it becomes an important part of life and thinking. In short: do you want 1000 superfans, or 10000 casual bypassers? The 1000 superfans will do way more for you. And one way to get there is with depth.
I'm sure there's many more versions of this. But the core approach is:
If something matters more than views, you need to measure it separately.
You then need to take actions towards it, and ignore views (unless views contributes to that metric directly).
Conclusion
In some respects, I would like to say that the storytelling meta has changed. It would be seriously awesome for myself, as a YouTube storytelling guy.
But in reality, evergreen principles of storytelling don't change that often. The only difference between now and my original article is that I happened to think about it more, and therefore discover more amongst the process.
I do hope that this gigantic article serves not so much as a prescriptive guide for how to do YouTube - you're your own person, decide what you want to keep and what you want to discard - but instead, that it sparks off some sense of discovery that helps you understand YouTubing (and maybe even yourself) better.
If you do find interesting principles of storytelling that crop up, I'd love to hear about them.
Need more advice?
I wrote a huge course on storytelling called YouTube Storytelling: Far Beyond Retention, which you can check out in the link in my biography.
If not wanting something that intense, I'll also be writing more at CreatorSide the newsletter.
It literally only focuses on YouTube storytelling. In my opinion, it's the best course on YouTube-specific storytelling. There's more focused scriptwriting courses (George Blackman, Bryan Ng) and editing courses, as well as courses for beginners, but I feel that storytelling has so much depth and it's something that I feel passionate about even to this day - just because even though the storytelling meta doesn't change much, there's just so much to discover.
I don't do as much consulting these days, because I'm busy with my own channels, but I do on occasion make exceptions where the project is ultra-interesting or it's a request from close friends.
