Muware

Remotion now has Agent Skills - make videos just with Claude Code! $ npx skills add remotion-dev/skills This animation was created just by prompting 👇

To get more views on your long-form video, it's important to focus on retention. That's because YouTube considers how long people watch as a signal to decide how much viewers enjoyed the video. So, here are 10 tips you should consider to improve your YouTube videos. Note: These are best practices, but this doesn’t instantly mean breaking them is going to ruin your entire channel. Look at them as improvement guidelines. 1. When you’re writing your intro, it’s important to understand that the intro isn’t meant to deliver high-quality content. Its job is to set up the story, provide context, and make sure the viewer understands the journey they’re about to go on. That’s why intros should be tight and condensed. A good rule of thumb is to keep them between 8 and 25 seconds and focus only on four core elements. A strong intro confirms the concept behind the title. It establishes any structural context, or context needed to understand the twist. It sets clear goals, so viewers understand how each scene moves toward that goal. And lastly, through the way it’s edited, the intro sets the tone and creates a sense of excitement for the viewer. 2. Many times, when a creator is in a conversation with another character in a video, they tend to neglect the connection with the viewer. This neglect could come from something as simple as turning your body completely towards the other person, rather than having a more open position so the viewer feels like they are a participant in the conversation. So, to make viewers feel more welcomed and connected to the creator, we often focus on keeping open body language, especially in content where that viewer-creator connection is important. 3. While subtitles are actually great for clarifying language to help the viewer take in the story at their own pace (traditional use), subtitles can also be used to emphasise keywords or phrases for comedic effect (modern use). However, people often forget another benefit of adding subtitles. This is the benefit of increased perceived effort put into the content. Viewers often care about feeling that the creator cares about the content. And while they don’t always see the amount of work put into a video behind the scenes, subtitles make the effort more apparent. So, particularly in content where the natural visual appeal isn’t that great, subtitles can have a whole range of benefits. 4. One of the easiest ways to lose interest from a viewer is to have long transitions between segments. Most of the retention issues actually originate from this particular part in the video. We have just resolved one conflict, and I’m now transitioning to the introduction of another conflict, rather than instantly jumping into the next conflict. And this downtime of uncertainty leads to a loss of engagement in a lot of cases. This particular loss is often referred to as segmentation loss. So, keep transitions very short. 5. To make talking head videos more engaging, we want to avoid overusing side angles. The use of too many side angles for cinematic reasons can often have an adverse effect in YouTube content. This is because the viewer feels less connected to the host. So, mainly use side shots as a means to strategically hide cuts or break up long frontal shots, but don’t just use them for cinematic reasons because it might bite you in your back. Also, when you come back from B-roll, it’s often a good idea to start on your frontal shot to instantly reconnect to the viewer rather than your side shot. 6. When you're having time-sensitive challenges, make sure to use visual timers. This visual countdown keeps viewers constantly aware of the time limits and helps the viewer maintain that sense of urgency. A common mistake is to have a time challenge and only show the timer at the beginning and the end of the challenge. This makes it so that, throughout the challenge, the viewer has no grasp of time, which makes it harder for them to stay engaged through the tension. 7. Many people, when they make storytelling content, often overthink their storylines. They try to come up with a complex why and insert multiple layers of obstacles. However, the more complex your story becomes, the less widely appealing things are. This is also why we often begin our story extremely simply and only introduce new rules and layers of complexity segment after segment. This makes it so that viewers can ease into the complexity, and it makes it more likely that your videos appeal to a wider audience. It’s false to say that YouTube videos cannot have complex storylines. They just should not push viewers away right off the bat. 8. Repetition can come in many shapes and sizes, and many creators think that repetition is showing the exact same visual or saying the exact same thing. However, repetition can also happen through subtext, which is referred to as implied repetition. This is when you show or say two different things, but their hidden meaning is the exact same, and to the viewer this still feels like repetition. It slows down pacing, sometimes to the detriment of engagement. So always ask yourself, am I just repeating the same idea I’ve just told the viewer, or are we truly moving on? 9. You shouldn't be afraid to break the fourth wall, as it can help to build authenticity. Many viewers still come to YouTube to have a genuine connection with the creator, or what they believe is a genuine reaction (parasocial relationships). However, breaking the fourth wall in educational content has an even bigger benefit. It can increase the perceived quality of the content, especially when you are using this method to talk to your producer. There's a lot of nuance around breaking the fourth wall. So don’t see it as something you can or cannot do, see it as situation- and goal-dependent. 10. Memes are often a great way to make content feel culturally relevant. However, there's a massive danger in overusing memes. Not only is there a high likelihood that they become timely, meaning that they lose their comedic value over time, but they are also very subject to overusage. That's why it's important to recognize when you are using a meme as comedic relief and to not use them multiple times, in case they lose their cultural relevance or in case too many people use them and then it becomes redundant and straight up annoying. One example is the SpongeBob “10 hours later” meme, or the old man laughing, or even recently the 6–7 meme. These are just some tips to improve your retention, but what I would really like you to take away from this is the nuance behind each piece of advice, as nuances are often where the real gains are.