10,000+ Hours of Storytelling Knowledge in 49 Minutes (Dr. Dabi)

**Dabi** (0:00)
That's a known hack YouTubers can use to improve storytelling would be, this is like an illustrative example. For MrBeast, you might have stuff like You Got the Hook, you want some foreshadowing, especially if it's a longer video. As you said, I got 1 million views in 7 days, and I think because we crafted it in a way, was both retention focused, but also people focused. So this is kind of like Hero's Journey, it applies to a lot of different stories and epics and stuff. But how do you apply to YouTube?

**Vexen** (0:21)
And our attention like jumped like through the roof.

**Dabi** (0:23)
Usually you'll get like a small retention dip, just like a tiny one, but those tend to add up over time. To avoid that, so a lesser known hack that YouTubers can use to improve storytelling would be, I think that always thinking about like how you have retention before payoff is really, really important. I think that YouTubers don't actually think about that very, very often. But for example, if you're trying to create a hype moment, a lot of that hype is actually created from the stress that comes before that moment, and your script, your videography, and the audio should all sort of support that so that when the payoff happens, that's like, oh, this is like amazing. That's just one small hack. But of course, it very much depends on the content.

**Vexen** (1:07)
Ooh, that's actually a really good answer. So it's funny that you totally said exactly the tension before the actual payoff. So I work with a little YouTuber named Winter Clouds. And one of the things that we do with him is once a month, we go in and we optimize retention. And it's a gradual improvement where it's like, okay, this is the biggest issue right now, or like, this is the biggest issue. And one of the things that we talked about in mid-June was like, one of the things I noticed, we're having these big drop-offs before the payoff, and it shouldn't be that way. It shouldn't be that way at all. And we built up a system where we need to create tension. It's like the actual terminology I use, we should build out tension, we should build out these moments that when we get the payoff, they need to see the payoff, right? And that was the way I explained it to him. And we started implementing that, and our attention jumped basically through the roof. Once we implemented that, it took a week or so to actually get in. But now his videos, on average, his watch time has gone up, I'm not going to say a substantial amount, but it's moved the needle pretty tangibly. A 20-minute video before might get, let's say, eight to 10 minutes watch time, AVD, and now we're at 12 to 13 And the content is functionally the same. The ideas are pretty much all similar, but we focus on crafting those pieces of tension. And that's usually done through storytelling and characters, for the most part, and setting up conflict. Yeah.

**Dabi** (2:26)
I mean, if you think about the, I guess one of the very, very foundational, basic storytelling structures of YouTube is kind of the hook event payoff, which I used to talk about a lot back two years ago, but I think it's become a bit more sophisticated now. And kind of like the hook is your introduction, the point of interest. Your event is the events that happen in the payoff is like, you know, maybe it's a win, maybe it's like some completely challenge, whatever.
I think that inheritance is something like putting tension inside. It's like you're thinking like, okay, like, how do I think about these open loops? And I know this open loop, for example, like if it's like a challenge, you know, who wins the challenge or how do they win the challenge? That open loop, it almost like very, you get this sort of good thing that comes from like really trying to think about increasing tension because the open loop itself won't resolve until the end. And then when it does resolve, then it's like, oh my god, like that's amazing. So it's kind of like, maybe you can phrase it as like hide, reveal, maybe you can phrase it as problem, solution, whatever it is, but it's those like mini moments that are really satisfying to viewers. And then thinking about that, what it means for like every niche, it's also different, right? So for example, like something that's like a cooking niche, it itself has like that sort of hide reveal thing as well, where it's like, okay, I don't know what the food is gonna look like. And then bam, like here's like the food, and it's like amazing and stuff like that. Or it's like this competition, you don't know who's gonna win. And then it's like, you don't know also, not only who's gonna win, but you don't know how they're gonna win as well. So that's also like itself like a bit of a payoff. So yeah, all those things are sort of supported by open loops and then tension release and stuff. And that's really cool. And as you said, like, it's really useful for retention in the sense that, retention is just like a, it's just a proxy for like people's attention and satisfaction, basically. So I know a lot of people sort of rag on like, oh, retention's not good. I hate tension and stuff. But I know for me, personally, I still really think it's important because it's one of the, especially like with the graph, how the graph changes relatively speaking to itself. That's like the most important thing. But yeah, we can talk about that and learn about that in a lot of depth if we want to.