Meet the YouTuber Who Solved Shorts (Jenny Hoyos Interview)

Summary

YouTuber Jenny Hoyos shares how she creates viral shorts, analyzing thousands to uncover best practices. She focuses on strong visual hooks, simple mechanisms pushing viewers to the end, expectations and twists, and concise scripts at a 5th grade reading level. Retention and rewatching matter more than high view % for virality. She structures shorts with a hook, foreshadow, transition, and storytelling with change. After massive shorts success, Jenny is strategically expanding to long-form for a new challenge and more personal creator-viewer relationships. She believes sharability impacts performance but lacks data, and retention rates don't directly correlate to viability despite assumptions.

Takeaways

• 😲 Jenny analyzes thousands of shorts to understand virality by scraping transcripts and hooks
• 📈 She focuses on strong, visual hooks that could work as video titles to draw viewers in
• ⌛️ Every second counts in a short video - losing even 1 second can significantly impact retention
• 🎯 Jenny aims for around 34 second shorts with at least 90% retention for optimal virality
• 😃 She generates ideas from her own life experiences and thoughts about what would make an interesting video
• 🔀 Jenny always includes a hook and foreshadowing in her shorts to set expectations and intrigue viewers
• 📃 She writes the final line of a video first before filming to have a clear ending in mind
• 👩‍👧‍👧 Jenny visualizes a specific audience avatar like her young nieces when brainstorming video ideas
• 🔁 Content differs across short form platforms - her strategy shifted from leading on TikTok to YouTube
• 📜 Despite her shorts success, Jenny wants to grow her long form channel to challenge herself and build deeper viewer relationships

Q & A

How does Jenny come up with ideas for her videos?

Jenny gets video ideas from watching YouTube and seeing what she wants to recreate or twist, using AI to generate ideas, and from experiences in her daily life that she thinks would make good video content.

What is Jenny's process for narrowing down her many video ideas?

Jenny narrows down her video ideas by first asking herself if she actually wants to make the video and if it's logistically possible. Then she looks at if the hook and mechanism are good and if it has virality potential. She further narrows it down by sending ideas to her video editor for additional filtering.

How does Jenny structure her shorts videos?

Jenny's shorts videos always start with a hook, then a line to foreshadow the ending. She then uses a smooth transition before going into the problem/solution or story. The videos end abruptly after a final surprising twist.

Why does Jenny want to start making more long-form videos?

Jenny feels she has achieved most of what she wants with shorts, so long-form represents a new challenge where she can experience more growth and fun. She also wants the closer relationship with viewers that comes with longer videos.

Who is the target audience for Jenny's shorts versus long-form videos?

Jenny targets a younger audience with her shorts, often imagining her young nieces watching. She expects long-form viewers to be more mature. Some shorts viewers may transition, but overall the audiences are different.

How did analyzing other popular shorts help Jenny?

By analyzing other top shorts creators, Jenny learned what video length, hook styles, pacing, and complexity work well. She also discovered retention and scroll-through benchmarks to aim for.

Why does Jenny believe retention percent is not as important?

Jenny has videos with lower retention that massively outperform videos from others that have incredibly high retention percentages. She believes viewer satisfaction involves more than just retention.

What are Jenny's theories around sharability?

Jenny believes sharability helps shorts success but lacks data to prove it. She shared one example of a video with very high sharing ratio and scroll-through rate, indicating sharing may have driven views.

How does Jenny adapt shorts for different platforms?

Jenny creates YouTube shorts to be slower paced and more story-driven. TikTok gets faster, dense videos under 30 seconds. She adds more visuals and subtitles to Instagram Reels.

What's Jenny's benchmark for retention percent in shorts?

For Jenny's channel, she finds shorts need at least 90% retention to take off and get significant visibility and reach.