If you’re here, it’s probably because you’ve been checking your retention curves and noticed that they’re dipping in the middle. The graph can tell you where, but not exactly why or how, which is what this post is for.
But losing retention in the middle feels a bit counter intuitive. You’d think that once you’ve hooked your audience, if the rest of the video is good then it’s just a cakewalk. So why does it happen?
It’s all in the script.
You Aren’t Fulfilling Your Promise
Your hook promises something to the audience. That is why they keep watching.
The script continues to build on that promise so that when you deliver it at the end of the video it feels satisfying, earned and insightful.
If at any point in the script, you aren’t building up to answering that promise you made at the beginning, then your retention suffers.
It’s pretty crude when you strip it back like that but really that’s all that retention is.
If you’re writing a video about the hidden history of Parisian architecture but your sections don’t build up to what that hidden history is, then you’ve lost your viewers.
Mitigating this retention loss is about tying each section back to the main point. This doesn’t have to be a robotic “and this means x for y” type of structure, if anything, it’s more effective when it feels incredibly natural.
Let’s take that example and say you have a section where you want to talk about how the second world war impacted Paris’ architecture. This will build into a larger point about how the scars of the war are still visible today which will help you transition into the current architecture of the city.
Option 1: The war destroyed Paris. A lot of architecture dissapeared in the rubble.
- This is true of course, but it implies that there are no secrets to be discovered. They were all blown up.
Option 2: The war destroyed Paris. A lot of it’s architecture crumbled in bombardments, but under the rubble….
- This version has a little hook a the end that doesn’t directly say “hey this relates to the reason you clicked” but it does imply it.
Overexplaining and Under-Analysing
The urge to overexplain is incredibly natural and oftentimes subconscious. You’ve spent a lot of time doing the research and figuring the script out, so you are operating from a position of more knowledge than your audience.
This means that things will likely seem obvious to you, but then on a read through of the script you realise it may confuse an audience. You do the right thing and break it down further, but maybe you do so a bit too much.
From the outside it looks like this breakdown is for the audience’s benefit, and it is, but it isn’t a breakdown that occurs from their perspective.
As a writer, you operate from a position of okay I need to make this understandable. The audience wants to understand too, but they also need to understand how your explanation links into the wider topic.
The best way to adress this is to never, ever, ever assume that you are smarter than your audience. You may know more about a topic, but assuming you are smarter than them will inherently make you write like you’re talking down at them.
Repeating Yourself for the Audience’s Benefit.
I won’t name names but I recently watched a video on a topic that I was super interested in, and I ended up clicking away halfway through. Why? Because this channel often repeated themselves in the middle of the video.
Their analysis was killer, but they re-re-reinforced it a bit too many times to the point where I felt that I already understood the idea, so the video didn’t have more to offer me, at least in that section.
This is largely a structural problem.
I find it’s always helpful to break down each section into 3 or 4 core points that flow on from one to the next. This way you have a map that ensures you explain what you have to without doubling back on yourself.
Cracking Retention
At the end of the day, like I said at the beginning, retention is less complicated than it sounds. It is just keeping the audience’s attention, and if you can figure out what they are paying attention to, and do more of it throughout the script, then that dip in the middle will quickly disappear.