Storytelling was part of humanity from the first day we existed, people connected through stories, today the good story it’s the difference between 1M views and 100M views. Here is 16 simple lessons about storytelling on YouTube to help with audience retention

1. It's not necessary to act or talk fancy when telling a story; this sets a tone that is only necessary for certain types of audiences. In fact, it could even make a creator feel inauthentic if it doesn’t suit their personality.

2. Storytelling is about passing on information from one person to another. To improve storytelling, consider what you intended the story to do for the viewer versus what it actually did for the viewer.

3. Stories don't have to teach serious, important life lessons all the time. Some YouTube videos are just fun recollections of what happened.

4. Exposition is background information. On YouTube, scenes with too much explicitly stated exposition tend to perform worse than those where the information shows itself naturally.

5. The difference between storytelling for movies and online content is viewer intent. Viewers intend to watch movies to completion, while they watch online content until they lose interest or feel satisfied.

6. Storytelling isn’t the opposite of retention editing; retention editing goes hand in hand with storytelling. Retention editing is simply a strategy to optimize a story for a better viewing experience.

7. Creators are characters; everything you do and say influences how people perceive you. This perception significantly affects whether people will continue watching based on character liking.

8. The "show, don’t tell" rule also applies to YouTube; we want to visually show rather than vocally state details of our story.

9. Viewers won’t feel suspense just because of some suspenseful music. If they don’t truly believe something exciting is going to happen, they’ll feel nothing. Suspenseful music is there to complement instead of substitute suspenseful story beats.

10. Many creators leave out things that go wrong, but these moments make for a more interesting story as things become more uncertain.

11. It's okay for people to know how our story ends as long as the path we take to get there is unknown and promised to be exciting.

12. When you tell viewers to “watch until the end,” you’re signaling that the video itself is most likely not interesting enough to watch in its entirety.

13. Being authentic is helpful, but it’s more about making what you’re telling believable in the story world. If this rule weren’t true, it wouldn’t explain why scripted content performs so well.

14. Visual storytelling is more engaging than verbal for most YouTube viewers; however, there is a market for both. Optimizing for both kinds of viewers makes for widely appealing content.

15. Immersion, which happens when people are fully invested in the story, helps with audience retention because it distorts time perception for the viewer.

16. Storytelling on YouTube doesn’t need to be simple; however, complexities should be introduced gradually to prevent viewers from getting overwhelmed by the information.