An editor recut just the first five seconds of a struggling video and views jumped from 4,000 to 850,000. The opening hook captures 80-90% of your traffic, so spend less time perfecting the rest and more time getting those first seconds right.
One of our editors were looking at a short video that they're like, man, I really thought this was a good video and it totally tanked. It got like 4,000 views, which for us was a tank. They looked at it, made some notes, and all they did was they chopped the first 5 seconds. Basically just redid the first 5 seconds of the video. And that one change took it from 4,000 views to 850,000 views with that one change. That's a 200x increase from one change, which is how people framed the value that they were about to consume. If the first 5 seconds is what immediately sorts 80, 90% of the traffic that you have, then isn't it crazy that we don't spend more time testing that one piece?
