On the 23rd of October, I discovered something that's probably changed my life. It resulted in me posting this video that went on to get over 4.5 million views. But what most people don't see about this video is if we come into the analytics, look at the view graph here at the beginning of this video's lifespan, you can see that it got basically no views. It was dead in the water. But then something happened here and we went from 11,000 views to over a million views in just a couple of weeks.

And today I want to talk about what caused this inflection point here. because, and this is going to sound crazy, but I believe this inflection point could not have happened without the 2-minute hack I'm going to show you. And granted, this is an extreme case, but I've since used this hack on multiple other videos that went on to get hundreds of thousands of views, both on larger channels, but also really small channels that have just started.

So, let me show you how it works. And to do that, we need to go back to the 28th of August, 2022. Now, this is around a time that I was growing the YouTube channel you're watching right now. And I kept getting these comments from people. People being like, "You suck. Why don't your own videos get views? how come your channel isn't growing? And to be fair, these are reasonable comments. All they see is this small YouTube education channel that doesn't seem to be getting millions of views.

And so, they're calling that out. And even though I have a lot of confidence in what I talk about because I've used it on other channels, it kind of hurt my ego a bit, not going to lie. But eventually got to the point where there were so many of these comments that it was like really frustrating. And I set out to create a viral video on this channel to prove all the haters wrong. So, I researched a video idea, researched trends, blah blah blah blah.

I have a whole video of what I did that I'll link at the end of this one if you want to watch. But long story short, I landed on creating a video about how Mr. Beast was a YouTube genius, which seems very cliche now, but back when this video was created, there were far less people talking about Mr. Beast. Now, the hack I'm going to show you has nothing to do with the fact that I was creating a Mr. Beast video or the fact that I'm an education channel or whatever.

This can work on any channel with any video. And I'll show you why in a sec. But anyway, I created this video. I posted it and like you can see from this graph, just flat, just nothing. And I started questioning myself. I'm like, have have I lost touch? Like what what's what's going on? And so I jumped into this video's analytics to diagnose what the problem was. And when I did that, I came down to my audience retention graph here.

And that's when I noticed a big problem. See, your audience retention graph represents how long people are watching your video for. So what you ideally want to see is flatline, people not leaving the video, or at least as flat as you can possibly get it, cuz that means a high percentage of people are actually watching the video. To oversimplify things, makes the algorithm love that video and promote it to more people.

But what I saw in this Mr. Beast video were two things. One, I saw some drop offs kind of like the ones you can see in this example here at random points within the video. And also, I saw a much steeper decline during the intro than I would have liked. And that means two things. One, my intro wasn't really engaging people. And two, there was certain clips or moments within this video that were triggering people and making them click off the video.

I don't want to play with you anymore. And I remember being super bummed out cuz I'm like, "Man, we've put all this effort into this video and these dud moments are killing my entire video." But then I remembered something. See, not long before that, YouTube had released the YouTube editor. If we come to the YouTube editor, it kind of looks like this. There's a feature in here called trim and cut. And if you click on this, there are a couple things you can do.

One, you can trim down your video by dragging this handle to cut off something from the intro or cut off something from the outro. Or you can come and click on new cut, which will add like a cut within the video like this. And you can drag these handles to cut out a certain portion within the video. And so I came in here and trimmed off the intro. And then also the clips within the video that people didn't seem to resonate with, I cut them out as well.

Then I hit save on my video. And all this probably took me 2 3 minutes to do. But what happened was amazing. My retention got better. And eventually YouTube found the right audience for my video. And because of my higher retention, it had enough confidence in my video to push it out to literally over a million people in the course of a few weeks. And I really believe that if it wasn't for me cutting out those friction points, this would never have happened. and those hater comments would still haunt my dreams to this day.

And now I've done this to multiple videos across my channel. I would say about 30% of my most successful videos, I've done this exact process, too. And it's improved their retention, got them hundreds of thousands, some even millions of views that wouldn't have happened without this 2-minute hack. So, if you have a decent video, but when you check your retention, you see a couple of points that are really hurting your retention, go into the editor, cut them out, and hey, if your video really is as good as you think it is, best case scenario, something crazy like this might happen.

And if you want help making sure your video is good in the first place, click the video on screen to see exactly how I made this video that I'm showing you right now from coming up with the idea, the title, the thumbnail, etc., so you can give your next video the best possible chance of blowing up. Check it out.