- Video intros, they absolutely kill audience retention,
especially in the first minute.
So I'm not gonna use them anymore. Let me prove it to you
and tell you what you should do instead.
I've gotta be honest, I haven't been a huge fan
of YouTube intros for quite a while now.
Far too many creators use them and they're far too similar.
Just imagine for one second
if YouTube introduced this TV streaming feature.
After you'd seen one video from that creator,
you would click that button every single time
unless the intro is intentionally different
every single time, and how often does that happen?
And then there's this.
(fingers snapping)
Have a guess what type of channel
this video intro comes from?
We'll come back to that later.
I, myself, I'm not immune to the video intro curse.
We used one for years here in the vidIQ channel
before I binned it off, because I thought it was too long,
even at four seconds in length.
But recently, and I don't know if you've noticed this,
but vidIQ has recently gone through a rebranding exercise.
And as part of it, we got this cool,
what you call in the business, little stinger ident,
and I thought at two seconds long,
it would be perfect to reintroduce to the channel,
but apparently not.
Let me show you what I mean.
This is the audience retention on one of our recent videos,
and watch at the moment the branded intro
kicks in on the video.
That is a noticeable steeper drop in audience retention,
losing about 4% of the audience in about four seconds.
All right, fair enough.
ViSN is verifying through a second video
and here we go again.
The branded intro kicks in
and this time we lose 5% of the audience in two seconds.
Now this is a concerning coincidence.
And then we have this bad boy.
Now then what's this?
(suspenseful music)
Ooh, ooh, hello.
Come to papa.
(suspenseful music)
Whoa.
That is pretty incredible, isn't it?
An audience retention drop of 12% in two seconds
or 24% in six seconds.
I'm not naive enough to say that the brunt of the intro
was solely responsible for that drop,
but it probably played a pretty significant role.
But before we look into that,
Tulia asked, "Do copyright claims on YouTube shorts
"affect your channel?"
And the answer is they don't affect your channel,
but it may impact the possible distribution of a video
and copyright claims.
Content will not count towards any shorts bonus payments.
Now back to those videos intros.
Are we saying that even an intro of just two seconds
is too long?
Well, it's probably not so much,
the length of a video intro,
although anything more than five seconds is too long.
It's a very fast, if an intro exists at all.
It's what's called a pattern interrupt,
which is usually a good thing
because it resets the viewer's attention.
On the other hand,
a video intro resets the viewers' decision-making
leaving them to ask the question
while that intro is running,
"Do I really wanna watch this?"
Nah.
On the other hand, without a video intro,
there is no hard stop.
And that allows the viewer over a longer period of time
to come to a natural conclusion
about whether or not they're in the right video.
And that allows your video hook to do more work.
A video hook is designed to start delivering
on the promises made in the title
and the thumbnail immediately
and show the viewer the direction of a video going forward.
We go into a lot more detail about this hook
through the video linked onscreen now.
But in summary, watch the first 15 seconds
of this video again, that's your video hook.
And if you're still watching this video three minutes in,
that hook worked.
On the other hand, a video intro serves nothing more
than a little bit of brand identity,
which we kind of got all over the place anyway.
All of which brings us back to this intro.
Any idea what type of channel this is?
I guarantee you whatever answer you gave me, it's wrong.
It's for a sewing machine repair channel.
Let me just repeat that,
this video intro is for a sewing repair machine channel.
How on earth is a viewer supposed to know
if they're in the right place at the very beginning
of a video?
I've said this before, but I haven't said it for a while,
time is the most valuable currency on YouTube.
You, as a creator, really value your time, don't you?
Because you wanna get as much done as possible.
So don't waste that time with video intros
that just waste viewers' time.
And if you disagree with me on the idea of video intros,
that's absolutely fine.
I'd love you to share your success stories
of implementing video intros into your content.
On the other hand,
video outros are an incredibly valuable use
of everybody's time, but in order to prove that to you,
you're gonna have to click over here.
See what I did there.