TLDR;
In this episode, Jay Clouse interviews Jenny Hoyos, an 18-year-old YouTuber who has achieved significant success with Shorts, amassing over 600 million views in the past year. Jenny shares her strategies for creating viral content, emphasizing the importance of storytelling, strong hooks, and understanding audience expectations. She also discusses the nuances of short-form content across different platforms and her approach to transitioning from Shorts to long-form videos.
- Jenny Hoyos shares her strategies for creating viral content on YouTube Shorts.
- She emphasizes the importance of storytelling, strong hooks, and understanding audience expectations.
- Jenny discusses the differences between short-form content on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
- She shares her approach to transitioning from Shorts to long-form videos.
The YouTuber Who Solved Shorts [0:00]
Jenny Hoyos, an 18-year-old YouTuber, has gained immense popularity through Shorts, accumulating over 600 million views in the past year. She confidently asserts her ability to make any video go viral by incorporating compelling stories and unexpected twists. Jenny emphasizes that even seemingly mundane topics can become engaging with the right narrative and viewer investment.
How to Make Anything Go Viral [1:05]
Jenny believes that adding a story and a twist can make any video go viral, especially on platforms like Shorts where viewers don't have to actively click to watch. She highlights the importance of making content personal to get viewers invested, using an example of cooking for strangers to raise money for her broken kitchen. The irony and personal goal create a compelling narrative that resonates with the audience.
What Makes a Good Short? [2:19]
Jenny defines a good Short as one with a strong, visual hook that can function as a title and thumbnail for a long-form video. The hook should be easily understandable, even without audio, and explained simply. Additionally, a good Short should have a story that keeps viewers engaged until the end and encourages them to rewatch it.
Importance of Retention and Rewatchability [5:28]
Jenny emphasizes the importance of analyzing one's own videos to understand what resonates with their specific audience. She shares an experiment where she uploaded daily to analyze retention graphs, discovering that even a one-second trim at the end of a video significantly improved retention and virality. Jenny also highlights the significance of rewatchability, noting that her average retention is higher than her average scroll-through rate because viewers often loop and rewatch her Shorts.
Crafting the Perfect 1st Frame Hook [9:41]
Jenny focuses on the visual nature of the first frame of her videos to create a strong hook. In her series where she remakes fast food items for a dollar, she showcases the fast food item in front of the location with the logo in the middle and the price clearly displayed. This consistent framing helps with playlist visibility and brand recognition.
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How to Generate Great Ideas [12:53]
Jenny has a Google Doc with over a thousand video ideas, generated from watching YouTube, using AI, and drawing inspiration from everyday life. She shares examples of how personal experiences, like making a garden for infinite Ratatouille or her grandma getting free laundry detergent by complaining to a company, can spark viral video ideas. To narrow down her ideas, Jenny first asks herself if she wants to make the video, then assesses the hook, mechanism, and virality potential.
Retention Mechanisms and Viewer Expectations [16:24]
Jenny defines a "mechanism" as something that pushes viewers to watch until the end, such as MrBeast's closing circle in his challenge videos. She uses the "three steps" or "three things" approach to create a clear expectation for viewers. Jenny also emphasizes the importance of following through on expectations but adding a twist to surprise the audience, as demonstrated in her video where she gave her mom a $5 Mother's Day gift.
Relationship Between Short Length and Retention [18:34]
Jenny's most popular videos are exactly 34 seconds long, which she tries to replicate. She references research showing that the bar for retention depends on the short length. For her channel, if a short is less than 30 seconds, it needs to have over 100% retention to take off.
Jenny’s Shorts Structure [19:50]
Jenny's Shorts structure includes a hook, foreshadowing, and a smooth transition. She uses foreshadowing to create expectations and smoothly transition into the main content. She avoids breaking the pace by using phrases that flow better than typical transitions like "let's get started." Jenny also employs "but therefore" storytelling to create change and intrigue in her narratives.
Jenny’s Video Making Process [24:07]
Jenny's video-making process involves finding an idea, writing a hook and the last line, foreshadowing, and then either creating a rough script or bullet points of things to touch on while filming. After filming, she revisits and finalizes the script before sending it to her editor. The last line is usually a simple reaction to maintain a general idea of the ending.
Finding Your Audience Avatar [26:13]
Jenny considers her audience avatar to be her younger self and her nieces, who are 7 and 10 years old and recently moved to America. She aims to create content that is understandable and engaging for non-English speakers, focusing on how to speak to them rather than their dreams or desires.
Differences Across Short Form Platforms [28:26]
Jenny notes that short-form content is not the same across platforms. She used to perform well on TikTok with shorter, information-dense videos, while YouTube prefers slower-paced, more mature content around 34 seconds long. Instagram Reels, with its mute feature, favors visual content with subtitles and high sharability.
Transitioning From Shorts to Long Form [31:13]
Jenny is transitioning to long-form content, applying the same analytical approach she used for Shorts. She wants to challenge herself and believes that the real growth and fun will come from learning long-form content creation. While she doesn't see much more growth potential in Shorts, she aims to balance both formats.
Jenny’s YouTube Hot Takes [36:03]
Jenny believes that sharability really matters, although she hasn't done enough analysis to support this. She also controversially suggests that retention doesn't matter as much as people think, citing examples of videos with lower retention rates that still went viral due to returning viewers. She hypothesizes that viewer satisfaction, rather than just retention, is a key factor in a video's success.