Why people click off your videos

Imagine you enroll at Stanford to get a proper business education.

It’s the first day of class and you can’t wait to see what your first lecture will be about…

Scope out the local talent… (iykyk)

And ultimately put the $80,000 you spent for the first year to good use.

You stumble though campus only to realize 2 minutes before class starts that you might be in the wrong section entirely.

Just to feel like you tried, you hop into the classroom to your right.

And it’s pre-med.

The content actually seems pretty interesting but after a few minutes you realize that this is not what you paid to be here for.

Is it valuable?

Of course.

But it’s not why you enrolled in this school.

This is exactly what happens when the PREMISE of your YouTube video doesn’t match the PACKAGING (title an thumbnail).

Yes I know your content is so value packed and soooooo loaded with value you’re practically spraying them with value

“It’s just so much value” you tell yourself as your video gets 4 likes and brings in exactly 0 new leads

But because the value is disconnected from the viewers expectation of what they thought they were getting, it doesn’t matter.

It’s not why they clicked.

A friend of mine who info operates for a bunch of people in the trading space sent me one of his client’s YouTube channels to audit and this was the exact problem.

The title of the video would be something like the “the exact strategy that makes me $x a day day trading”

And the thumbnail would be something chart related, strongly implying that this is going to focus on a a particular setup

But nope, it’s a bunch of regurgitated talking points about “mindset” and “psychology” that sounds like it came straight from the GPT factory

It’s not even so much that it was generated by AI, but more so the fact that it was so disconnected from what I expected when I clicked on the video

The video was already bad, but what made it so much worse it that it wasn’t even remotely what I was looking for (especially for someone who’s actually looking for a solution)

You see this often with people who try to cram in EVERYTHING they know about a topic into a particular video with a title/thumbnail that implies it’ll be about a singular thing

The viewer doesn’t want the world!

They just want their question answered

But you’re cramming in what should be for a 2 hour free course into a video that should just help them better handle objections on sales calls

The measure of “how good a video is” isn’t always about how much value you can cram into a single session, it’s about how succinctly and thoroughly cover the highlighted topic/question posed in the title

Even if the video itself is objectively a 6/10 from a content perspective, if it’s well aligned with the premise you hinted at in the title/thumbnail to your ICP who really needed help with that thing it could be a 11/10 in their mind

Because they needed that solution right there and then

Last analogy I’ll leave you with is when your Xbox was broken and you needed to figure out how to reset it without having to bring it to the store and getting stuff replaced

Somehow you’d find a blurry video from a dad who looks like he’s filming on a potato

He literally crawls behind the TV and poor cable management to show you how it’s done

And magically, your Xbox is working again in the next 10 minutes

The video quality and muffled audio you just sat through becomes irrelevant

Think about that when you go make your next YouTube video

-Presley

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The Clip Curator: Our DFY YouTube + ads agency for B2B service providers, coaches, and consultants