What’s up, warriors 🤝⚔️

Coming Friday, I will leave for a ‘‘vacation’’ with my family to go to Dubai for two weeks. Although it’s not really a vacation, as I’ll still be calling clients every day, I won’t do any extra work.

Very much looking forward to it after going insanely hard in the last twelve months.

Of course, in true Leroy fashion, in the last week, I’ve developed some health issues. I am scheduled with my doctor tomorrow, and I would not be me if it didn’t become something big that will jeopardize my trip, lol 🙋‍♂️

Anyway, enough about me. It’s time to teach you legends something again.

If you think this newsletter of mine is valuable, please share it with people who you think can benefit! I truly enjoy writing these and I hope to reach as many creators as possible.

What is the perfect length of a YouTube intro?

A question I get in my DMs a LOT. Either directly or indirectly.

And the answer is not one-dimensional at all, making it worthy of a newsletter issue.

First off, we need to understand what a YouTube video intro is.

A YouTube intro is the first and contextual segment of a video.

Let’s visualize it:

Of course, this is dumbed down, but it is not about what a perfect story looks like today. If you’d want me to dive deeper into that in another issue, let me know on X in a reply.

But now that we know what a typical YouTube story looks like, we can deconstruct what parts actually move a story forward and where context is given to keep the viewer informed about what is to come:

Context is necessary to give viewers enough information about where the story could go.

However, too much context in one segment can lead to viewers getting bored and leaving. That’s why a great story doesn’t use contextual stacking.

The easiest way I could give you an example of how weird it is outside of YouTube is a movie scene.

Let’s take Liam Neeson in Taken and the famous scene where he finds out that his daughter is kidnapped. For the people who do not know, here it is:

So, the transcript of this scene would look something like this:

Perfect. Strong, scary, punchy. If there would be contextual stacking like in a lot of YouTube videos, it would look a little bit like this probably:

The issue here is glaring, right? It loses all punch, and people probably checked out by the end of it.

And although it is so damn obvious here, a lot of creators on YouTube tend to do this in their content.

In short, contextual stacking adds more context than necessary in a specific part of your story.

And the place where that tends to happen most?

The intro.

So, that brings me to the final answer: how long is the ideal intro on YouTube?

The easy answer?

As long as it needs to be to reel someone in.

The less easy answer?

It depends wholly on your concept. Are you going to hunt a mythical creature with a level-one weapon? It could be five seconds.

Don’t believe me?

‘‘This is a level one sword, and I am going to hunt the final boss with this sword only!’’

Boom. And into the story.

It does what it needs to do.

Are you going to travel a continent with just one dollar?

‘‘This is my only dollar, and I will be traveling the whole length of Asia with this dollar. I will have to rely on the kindness of strangers and find ways to make money along the way. And I start here, in Tokyo!’’

It takes around twelve seconds in total before we get to the first progressive part of the story.

The biggest thing you need to take away from this newsletter is this:

Does every sentence you wrote for the intro need to be there? Can you scrap anything that will not make the concept harder for your viewer to understand?

If you can, scrap it.

Keep in mind:

A viewer always looks for a reason to click off, not a reason to stay.

Ideate and conquer fellas, see you next week.🤝

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💡Ideation: 1of10.com

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👁️See your packaging: thumbnailcheck.com

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