Abrupt Endings = 5x More Views

In the world of YouTube, long outros can be more detrimental to your success than Kanye live-tweeting on Ambien. 

For over a decade, creators have ended their videos with boring sh*t like this:

• Thanks for watching! I really appreciate it!

• It was really fun to make this video!!

• Make sure to subscribe to my channel!

• Make sure to hit the like button!

• Check out my Patreon!!

• Check out my only fans!!

• Check out my mom’s only fans!!!@!@#!@#

Ok, it doesn’t usually get to that last one, but you get the point.

One huge secret to getting more views is to just skip the outro completely, and end your video abruptly.

Let’s take a look at how the King of YouTube, Mr. Beast, ends his videos.

Here’s EXACTLY what he says after the main content is over.

As you can see, Mr.Beast ends his videos quite abruptly.

No nonsense rambling at the end, just one sentence and cut to the end screen so people can watch more of his videos.

Why abrupt endings work REALLY well.

1 - It doesn’t give people time to click away.

When people hear stuff like “alright thanks so much for watching….” they know the video is about to end and many of them click away.

Here’s a retention graph from a creator I work with who had an outro that was over 1 minute long:

See that dramatic dip at the end? Yep, that’s people clicking away as the outro goes on and on.

Here’s a retention graph from that same creator after they stopped doing outros and implemented abrupt endings:

If the viewer doesn’t know the video is ending, they won’t click away.

2 - It increases “average percentage viewed”, and this is favored by the algorithm gods.

Less drop off on your video tells the algo gods that people are very interested in your video, which will lead to more promotion in people’s feeds.

With that said, keep in mind that the longer your video is, the longer your outro can be.

A 1-minute drop off is gigantic when your video is only 7 minutes long (that’s 14% of your video).

However, a 1-minute drop off is not as big of a deal if you have a 1-hour video podcast (that’s only 1.6% of your video).

This alone can potentially 3x, 10x, or even 50x your amount of exposure by the algorithm and therefore your views as well.

3 - It increases the click-through rate on your end screen

Let’s look at these graphs again:

In Graph A (long outro), only about 10% of people stick around long enough to see the end screen (which should feature another video of yours that they can click on)

In Graph B (abrupt ending), over 30% of people will see the end screen, which means you will ~3x the number of clicks to another video of yours. This is also favorable to the algorithm gods.

**Note: random tangent but I have very strong reason to believe that end screen clicks are much more important to the YT algorithm than we think. I’m doing statistical analysis on 10+ viral channels and will report the results in a future email!

Conclusion

Stop doing long outros and just end the video abruptly. And the MOST IMPORTANT THING is to always remember to—

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Best,
Kong

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May the algorithm gods be ever in your favor.