In Don’t Build an Audience, I outline the incentives and basic mechanics of YouTube:
Algorithms like the YouTube algorithm seek to maximize platform engagement. Platform engagement is highly correlated with the amount of interesting material a user receives. Early versions of algorithms were heavily weighted to serve new content from large existing content creators. On average, a post from a creator with a large following is much more likely to be engaging versus the marginal creator with no track record. This is a tractable signal of a creator’s quality that is easy to implement as a model feature.
Since writing that piece, I have learned much more about YouTube microstructure thanks to many discussions with Justin Kuiper. Justin has spent over a decade as a YouTube writer and creative director, working for MatPat’s Theorist channels (Game Theorists, Film Theorists, Style Theorists, and Food Theorists). His videos have amassed over half a billion views.
The following is an interview with Justin.
Background
How did you get into scriptwriting?
I got started with YouTube scriptwriting in 2017 when a big YouTuber named MatPat found a high-effort Reddit post I made about Pokemon lore and sent me a DM asking if I wanted to write for his channel.
But my scriptwriting career began before YouTube, I actually got my start in commercial scriptwriting around 2014, when I started writing visual novels. When I looked at the market for English visual novels I saw a lot of demand that seemed underserved, and there were a lot of developers who would pay a few hundred dollars for a week of work, so it was a great way for me to get my foot in the door.
You’ve been thinking about this idea of a “promise delta”, can you briefly explain what that is?
It’s how I think about the difference between expectations in reality. Think about situations where you were promised the world, but the content failed to meet expectations. That’s negative promise delta. You got clickbaited. That sucks.
So it’s tempting to run in the opposite direction: And people then run in the opposite direction: if negative promise delta sucks, then positive delta must be good! “Under-promise, over-deliver.” It seems like a good thing to get something better than what you were promised. But actually, I’d argue that it’s not good: you shouldn’t undersell what you have, or else people will miss out on the good content because you failed to properly hype it.
So the goal should be to get the promise delta as close to zero as possible. You don’t want to over-promise, but you don’t want to under-promise, either. If you have something that’s amazing, don’t be shy about telling people that it’s amazing.
On Platform Mechanics
Does the video medium have a chance at supplanting text?
No, text is too useful for looking stuff up. In fact, I find myself frequently making use of YouTube’s transcript feature so that I can control+F to a specific part of a 2-hour interview.
It’s also much lower bandwidth for conveying raw information. Average talking speed is around 150 WPM, average reading speed is around 200-300 WPM.
But there is a sense in which video can be higher bandwidth. I mean, it’s higher bandwidth in the literal sense, in that in order to transmit it to you, I need more bits; I’m literally delivering more data into your eyeballs and ears. And sometimes that part is actually signal. Because you don’t just care about my words as a robot would transcribe them, but you care about the intonation, the emotional valence, and so on. And then there’s every other part of the presentation. The music, for example, can set a tone. And as they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” It’s true: oftentimes just looking at a graph or diagram gives you a better sense of a thing in 2 seconds than a paragraph that takes a minute to read.
This is one of the things I’ve had to learn as a scriptwriter. When you’re writing an essay, there’s all these extra words that you add to give your audience a sense of the emotional valence of what you’re writing. But when you’re writing a script, and actually delivering it well, you don’t need all those extra words, because the emotional valence will hopefully be communicated by your face when you’re talking, or the BGM, or other parts of the audiovisual presentation.
Is the video content market efficient? In a previous post, I argued that the written content market is efficient. Does this extend to the video content market?
I’d argue that the video content market is a lot more efficient than what exists for written content, because YouTube does such a great job of surfacing related content. “People like you watch videos like these.” If you watch enough Wendover videos, it will start recommending Polymatter and RealLifeLore.
You will open up your YouTube app to watch the latest Wendover video, and the homepage will recommend similar videos. And then off to the side, you will see “suggested videos.” That’s way beyond anything that exists for written content.
I think that Substack is trying to do this – trying to be the YouTube of written content – where they’re not just the place where everything is hosted, but they’re also the recommendation algorithm. It’s pretty good, but I don’t think they’re there yet in terms of personalization.
What are some video content economics that most people are generally not aware of?
A lot of things are downstream of the fact that AdSense does not really pay that much. Like, a creator who is getting 10,000 views per video, that’s pretty decent, in a sense. But that’s only like $20-30 in ad revenue. That’s not a sustainable income.
But what you see among a lot of those smaller creators is that a lot of them are actually content marketers. Like they’ll say “I’ve spent 10 years working as a book editor, here are my tips for aspiring authors…and by the way, if you’re an aspiring author in need of an editor, here’s where you can hire me.” Or “hey, you watched my video on how to deadlift, here’s where you can book me to coach you.” Or “hey, I’m an indie author, you come here to watch me review fantasy novels, now read my fantasy novel.”
And it’s not all “little guys” who are doing the content marketing game saying “buy my Kindle novel for $5” or “pay me $100/hr for a coaching session.” Some of them are B2B SaaS platforms saying “buy our service.” And they’re happy to spend five figures on a video that might get less than 100k views. Because for a regular YouTuber, 100k views might be just a few hundred dollars in AdSense rev, but their customer LTV is so high, a single conversion might be worth thousands of dollars for them. These were some of my favorite clients to work with.
But you also have a lot of people who are just in it for the love of the game, they love making YouTube videos, and they keep uploading videos and investing hours of effort for something that only pays $20 in expectation. And what often happens to that smaller YouTuber is that a big YouTuber will spot them, and say “Hey, if you work for me, I’ll pay you more than $100 per video, a lot more than you’re making working on your own channel.”
And the end result is that you have a lot of specialization, because a lot of times when someone was getting a modest viewership on YouTube, it’s because they were good at only part of the job. Maybe they are a great writer, or a great editor, and getting hired lets them focus on the one thing they were good at.
How long does it take you to notice a change in the algorithm? Who, if any, sees these changes before you?
I notice changes in the algorithm way more based on my own viewing habits. I use it every day, and see like a hundred suggested videos every day, so that’s the place where I notice trends like “Oh, YouTube is recommending more 20+ minute videos this week”, or “1-minute videos are back.” That being said, I don’t always know whether that’s representative of broader platform-wide trends, so it’s useful to have multiple YouTube accounts that each sort of represent different categories of viewer. Like if I’m starting an educational YouTube channel, and I am, then I should have a google account that I just use for watching the types of videos that I think my viewers will be watching.
I don’t spend a ton of time looking at the dashboard except sometimes in the days after a new video goes live, when of course I get invested in how the most recent video has done, but I don’t think I’m learning anything generalizable about how the “algorithm” might have changed based on that.
I know some creators who are a lot more obsessive about the numbers, there are group chats where they talk about these sorts of things. And those group chats are how you get a bunch of people who realize, “Hey, all 5 of us suddenly saw our view counts dip by 15%, all starting during the exact same week, except for Bob whose uploads are in a totally unique vertical, so clearly YouTube is doing something different.”
Are thumbnails still undervalued by YouTube creators? What’s the limiting factor as to why there aren’t more creative thumbnails?
I think thumbnails are correctly valued by most successful YouTube creators, I don’t think they’re undervalued or overvalued.
One of the limiting factors is that YouTube thumbnails have to look good on a 5-inch phone screen, a 55-inch TV, and everything in between. And you’re juxtaposed there with a bunch of other thumbnails, the goal is to stand out at a glance. And you have to create a curiosity gap. In a sense, the thumbnail has to be “unsatisfying” but with the promise that you will get satisfied if you click.
I think there are some people who get really creative with their thumbnails. Nerrel, this guy who makes video game mods, is the one that comes to mind. He doesn’t have a clear “formula.” A lot of his thumbnails break every rule of “good thumbnail design.” A lot of them are intentionally kind of ugly and off-putting. I think that fits because that’s kind of his personality, he’s got an abrasive personality and that’s part of the appeal, he’s very punk rock, so when he does it, it feels very authentic, it’s congruent with his entire approach.
Synthet is also very skilled at thumbnails. It’s a music channel, how do you use a visual thumbnail to convey auditory concepts? And the answer is “pretty creatively.”
Is there an ideal time to publish new videos? Is it specific to a channel’s target region?
Timing of the upload doesn’t really have much of an effect, but you can train a tiny fraction of your audience to expect uploads at a certain time. “New videos every Saturday morning”, or whatever. Those people are probably going to account for a tiny fraction of the audience. From the analytics I’ve seen, it seems like around 5% of subscribers enable push notifications, and of those, maybe 1% actually click on the push notification, and subscribers are already a fraction of total viewers. So we’re talking about a tiny, tiny fraction of the audience that actually cares when the video is uploaded. There’s an argument that having early engagement from “superfans” in the first hour or two helps to improve your early metrics, and the theory is that this would get YouTube to push your content out to more people, because in the first hour you had people who were leaving a comment and “liking” the video. I can’t confidently say it has zero effect, but it’s minuscule in comparison to overall clickthrough rate (CTR) and retention.
Overall my more general heuristic is that you don’t need to treat the launch of a new video as a “make or break” event where if you fumble things on day 1 things will be ruined forever. This has become even more true with thumbnail A/B testing, where now the first 24 hours or 72 hours are less about maximizing views, and more about gathering data so that YouTube can select the best packaging for the video to do better in the long run. Unless you’re doing very timely videos where you’re talking about the daily news, you should expect your video to have a longer tail.
On Content Dynamics
Are most successful channels these days “marketing-first” instead of “video-first”? Is it always obvious when videos are “marketing-first”?
So to explain this for the sake of your audience, I think there’s two separate approaches to video-creation. One is more the “artist’s” approach, where you make the video that you want to make, and then you try to come up with a hook for it and a title or thumbnail for it. The question of, “How do I get people to watch the thing I made” is almost an afterthought. You’re David Lynch, you’re Werner Herzog. That’s what an artist does.
The opposite of the artist’s approach is the “content creator’s approach.” You start by thinking, “What does my audience want to see?” And then you make that video. In some cases you start with the title and thumbnail before you’ve even made the video. And, not surprisingly, these videos tend to do better.
And by the way, this is how a lot of media is made including IP-driven blockbusters. You have studios that start by deciding, “Okay, we have the rights to make a Spider-Man movie, we’re going to make a Spider-Man movie”, and then they find a screenwriter and a director and actors. Maybe they have posters and marketing before the movie is even done filming.
I think describing these sorts of videos as “marketing first” is accurate. The creator is concerned with clickability, or in the case of the blockbuster, they’re thinking about whether they have an IP that will get people to buy movie tickets. I think it can have a bad connotation, because people think of marketing as gross, and it feels crass and commercial.
But if you view it in a different light, in a sense, the content creator has to have more empathy for their audience than the artist does. In a way, it’s more humble. Like, I’m not so smart that I should assume that everyone else is interested in the same things I’m interested in. I should listen to my audience and let them tell me what they want to see. And okay, it looks like my audience likes this type of video, okay, I’ll make that.
It’s possible for this to go too far. Again, you see this in Hollywood. It’s cool that they gave Sam Raimi $140 million to make a movie because they were confident that Spider-Man would sell movie tickets. But if you care too much about the marketability, the execs will decide “Venom has to be in the movie, audiences want to see Venom”, and then Spider-Man 3 kind of becomes a jumbled mess with three villains. It’s the Hollywood version of audience capture.
Have there been any videos where you just can’t understand how they are popular or why the algorithm is boosting it?
There are lots of videos that have made me think, “okay, why has the algorithm decided to show this to me? What made YouTube decide that I’m the type of person who wants to see this video?”
But I don’t think there’s ever been a video where I truly thought, “Okay, 2 million people watched this video, and the reasons for that are inconceivable to me.” I might disagree with those people, I probably don’t share their taste, but I can still look at a thing and understand, “Oh, yeah, this is what some people are looking for, and YouTube has successfully found the audience of people who want to click on that video.”
On Talent
YouTube is unique in that it pulls from a global talent pool. Where in the cycle of professionalization is YouTube currently? How does it compare to where it was 5 or 10 years ago?
The talent pool for thumbnail designers and editors is pretty liquid and lots of people are making a living as “full time freelancers.” I don’t think we’re really headed toward a world where the majority of YouTube people become W-2 employees who work for a few big channels, but I think one of the benefits of YouTube for workers is that they can have more leverage. They can skill up quickly, find bigger clients, learn a lot in a few months, and get themselves a raise.
I will say that it’s really hard to hire good writers. I realize that’s kind of self-serving, because I’m a writer, but everyone I talk to feels this way, and it was true for me when I was trying to hire more writers as a creative director. Sam Denby from Wendover Productions has talked about how it’s just really hard to hire good YouTube writers, and from what I understand he goes for journalism school grads and trains them to write YouTube scripts. The market for writers is higher-friction than for editors or thumbnail designers, there is much more of a process of learning the “voice” of the channel.
I think a big part of the challenge of trying to hire a “YouTube scriptwriter” is that writing across verticals isn’t super fungible. You have some YouTube scriptwriters who are basically copywriters for verticals where you’re aiming for something close to “LinkedIn-speak”, and then you have educational verticals where you have writers who are spending a week reading academic research papers and books and summarizing what they’ve learned, and then people who are doing deep-dives on hobby stuff, or celebrity drama. All of those are kind of different skillsets.
How often does YouTube talent get poached? Are there generalist superstar people who work behind the scenes of various channels that are highly sought after?
“Poaching” in the traditional sense doesn’t happen so much, because you don’t have a lot of W-2 employees to begin with. It’s not like when Adobe would go to engineers and say “Hey, we’ll give you money to quit your job at Apple and work for us.” There are some channels that hire some full time employees, at the very top levels, but a lot of the ecosystem is freelancing.
That’s where you have a sort of “soft poaching” that happens. Like, “I’m going to find the editor who works for that guy, and hire him to be my editor.” And if enough people are bidding for that editor’s time, eventually he drops the clients that are paying him the least, or that he enjoys working for the least, and reserves his time for the clients who pay him the best or are the most fun to work with.
And by the way, there’s this open question on YouTube of how to credit people in video descriptions. Because if someone credits their editor in the video description, then you can get in touch with that person and hire them. If they don’t want you poaching their editor, maybe they don’t credit them. And if you’re that editor who is not getting a video credit for that reason, my advice to you would be to charge your client a premium for that. You don’t even have to give up the right to feature that work in your portfolio.
Back when I was doing work for B2B SaaS clients my rate was something like:
You can pay $X and credit me and put my social media link in the description
You can pay me 1.5 * $X and not credit me in the description but I’ll feature you in my portfolio
You can pay me 2 * $X and this will be 100% ghostwritten.
And basically all of them opted for the more expensive rates.
30% of kids want to be a YouTuber. Do you think this is a good equilibrium of talent allocation in the long-run if this continues to be true?
No, I think a big part of this is “kids name a profession that is legible to them.” Like if you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, a lot of them will say “teacher” because that’s the adult profession that they interact with the most often.
Kids say they want to be an athlete, doctor, vet, firefighter, or a YouTuber because those are legible professions. Their teacher says, “you have a talent for soccer” and they think, “Oh, I’m good at soccer, maybe I’ll become a pro athlete like my hero, Messi.” Nobody kid is saying “I want to be an actuary” or “I want to be an auditor.” And, you know, the number of kids who can actually grow up to have a job related to YouTube is actually way higher than the number who can grow up to be a veterinarian. Not everyone can be a “famous YouTuber”, but you can make a good living as a video editor.
On Market Structure
Will click and watch platforms (YouTube) ultimately lose to the get served content platforms (TikTok, Instagram Reels)?
I don’t think so. YouTube gets a ton of high-intent traffic, because when you see a YouTube video, you chose to click on it; it didn’t just start auto-playing because you swiped up.
That high-intent traffic is way better for community-building, and having a fanbase, where you show up to see your favorite creator, as opposed to just watching whatever video starts auto-playing when you open the app. That’s what you get with a “click-and-watch” platform like YouTube.
And of course that high-intent traffic is valuable to advertisers. I talk with advertisers about this, and TikTok is cheaper for sheer reach, but YouTube is higher conversion for anything beyond an impulse-click like “install this free app” because it is higher quality and higher intent.
Since good writing is one of if not the limiting input factor, should we see more scriptwriters start their own YouTube channels? Why haven’t we seen more of this yet?
I think part of it is that if you’re really good at scriptwriting, and bigger YouTubers recognize that, then working on your own channel probably isn’t the highest-leverage thing you can do. Like, Paddy Galloway has his own channel, where he could work on a video that will be seen by a million people, or he can work for MrBeast, whose videos reach 100 million people. And if you’re a Paddy Galloway, your comparative advantage isn’t being the on-screen talent or providing capital. If he’s one of the best on YouTube and his goal is just to “make cool videos”, it makes way more sense for him to work with Red Bull and work on videos with drones and F1 cars rather than try to bootstrap his own channel.
You make the distinction between “creators” and “artists”. Because you describe YouTubers as “creators”, does this cap their potential influence? Are we at a global maximum for their cultural reach/impact?
I think I sort of got at this a bit earlier, where the distinction between “creators” and “artists” actually has a parallel in the world of Hollywood, where if you think about it, the people making big IP blockbusters are more like “content creators” who are paying attention to what the audience wants, rather than “artists” like Robert Eggers or Yorgos Lanthimos who are just going to make their thing and say, “This is the thing I wanted to make, take it or leave it.”
And if you look at that dichotomy, it’s obviously the big IPs that have the biggest influence, and the same is true on YouTube with mega-channels like MrBeast. The thing that both Marvel and MrBeast have going for them, too, is that they’re global brands. You can watch MrBeast dubbed into German, French, Brazilian Portuguese, or whatever language you want. So if anything, I would think that “content creators” would have more potential reach than “artists”.
I guess the limitation comes in where content creators aren’t really coming up with new IP. Like MrBeast can make a Squid Game video that gets nearly a billion views, but to actually get a Squid Game in the first place you need to find someone like Hwang Dong-hyuk. Again, parallel to blockbusters. It’s super rare for a new IP to show up on the big screen. I’m not sure how you solve that.
Miscellaneous
Why is there only 1 long-form video platform like YouTube?
I’ve written about this before, the thing I’ll say in summary is that there are other long-form video platforms out there like Nebula, the Dude Perfect app, and Dropout. Those were all started by YouTubers, by the way, and they don’t exactly compete with YouTube, because they are selective. You have to get invited to Nebula. Dropout is its own separate thing. And they rely on YouTube for a lot of their discovery.
But nobody wants to be YouTube, the site that anyone can upload to. And that’s because it’s expensive to let anyone upload! And then you have to make sure they’re not uploading anything illegal. And then you have to host gigabytes of video forever, that’s getting seen by no one. Even Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, doesn’t want to do this, they prune Twitch VODs.
I think there’s room for a lot more Nebula-tier services, where it’s more selective than YouTube, but less selective than Netflix. But YouTube is always going to be the place where beginning creators start out.
If you were a VC and were looking to deploy into the YouTube ecosystem, where would you invest?
Oh man, I don’t think this is a question I’m qualified to answer. You know, I think my problem is that I’d go after the things that look like “safe bets” and not the higher-EV moonshots. All of the ideas that come to mind are things that I myself would do if I just had a tiny bit more risk tolerance. The thing that I think has maybe a 30% chance of succeeding and becoming a lifestyle business for the next 10 years is probably content marketing, like trying to do what Jed Herne is doing. And that’s not what the VC wants, right? They want a 1% chance of funding the next Mark Rober, not a 30% chance of being the next PolyMatter or Jed Herne.
So if I were going to play VC and take the moonshot bet, and I’m thinking about a vertical where I know enough to do due diligence, I’d take a bet on VTuber agency. It’s a vertical I’m reasonably familiar with and understand the culture and the scene. I personally know several people who are VTubers. I co-designed and scriptwrote a game that was pretty popular among VTubers. Starting an agency that’s trying to mimic the model of the biggest Japanese VTuber corporations would be pretty capital intensive, which is probably why more people haven’t tried to do it, but that’s what the VC bucks are for.
When VShojo imploded, and then left all their talent out to dry, that would have been the moment for someone to swoop in and say, “Hey, come join us, we’re going to be the big US VTuber Corp that doesn’t suck.” So it feels like there’s unmet demand for this.
At the far right tail, is one’s sense of virality learned or innate?
Definitely learned. If you look at MrBeast’s early videos, it’s very obvious that he did not have all of the skills and knowledge that he has now. You can see he has a few correct intuitions, but doesn’t exactly know how to apply those intuitions. Like he knew from the start that “bigger is better”, but that’s not a unique insight. The reason his videos go viral in 2025 and didn’t go viral in 2015 is that it’s really easy to say, “I need an eye-catching thumbnail that teases a thing that people really care about” and it’s really hard to actually execute on that without a lot of specific and deep knowledge.
If you could wave a magic wand and make changes on YouTube, what would the top 3 things you would do?
YouTube has this “channel membership” thing where you can pay a monthly subscription to channels in exchange for access to videos that they’ve gated behind a paywall. I like the concept, but the execution kind of sucks. It’s too hard to actually get to a screen that just shows you all the paywalled content you just paid for, and the UI for navigating that content isn’t great. I have paid for a channel membership several times, and it was not an experience that filled me with joy, delight, or enthusiasm at the prospect of doing it again. So they definitely need to change that.
And a related issue to “making it suck to pay for content through the app”, YouTube also has a feature where you can sell courses, and I am shocked by just how much it sucks. I think it’s literally broken. Like I’ll go to a 30-video course where several of the videos are paywalled, then it just shows the text, “This video requires payment to watch.” And it doesn’t prompt me to pay. There’s no button taking me to a page with an interface where I can pay. It literally feels broken. I don’t know why YouTube is allergic to me trying to give them money through their website or app.
And lastly, I would like more control over the recommendations. I know that this is dangerous to mess with because this is the “secret sauce”; clearly they shouldn’t trust my stated preference over the revealed preference over millions of users, but I think it would be nice to have a “temperature slider” where I can say, “I’m in the mood for something totally different today, feel free to get creative”, or “right now I’m watching a specific type of video and I want my recommendations to look very similar to this.” You can kind of do that with the clickable categories but I’d like more ability to fine-tune it.
Popularity prediction hash: b4f1f9d78560319493df5add7ecf4729fa24bdf8f8ad8ff477736de49c2f7797
didn't read but best thing to do is ship projects and learn to tell a story about your work. Seth Godin is my source of marketing knowledge
I work for Google but not youtube. Every so often my personal feed replaces a video with a button that essentially says "pleased regenerate and remix my recommendations". Which is very similar to the slider you asking for. Though you can't explicitly ask for it. Kinda strange tbh