YouTube Strategist

I'm a YouTube strategist. The work I'm proudest of is a 360K-subscriber US Navy channel I took over after it had been sliding for ten months, down 54% in watch time and 76% in subscriber growth year over year. Within six weeks and eight uploads, retention at thirty seconds went from 60% to 76%. Average view duration rose 74%, from 3:50 to 5:00, while I was making the videos longer. Suggested traffic went from 6.4% to 19.5%, which meant YouTube had started showing the channel to people who had never heard of it. RPM went from $3.82 to $6.36, and August became the strongest revenue month of the previous four.

None of that came from better production. The footage and the edit were fine before I arrived. What was broken was the architecture. The opening thirty seconds announced the topic instead of opening it, and the packaging only ever spoke to people who had already subscribed.

That's the thing I actually do. I think most retention problems are structural rather than qualitative. A viewer doesn't stay because a moment is dramatic. Shock is a spike and it flattens fast. They stay because a moment opens a door they didn't know was there, and that changes what they assume the rest of the video contains. When I build something, I want to be able to point at the specific second that does that and say what it makes the viewer suspect. If I can't, it usually isn't working yet.

I work end to end rather than handing off an analysis. Ideation, research, scripting, cut-by-cut notes to the editor, thumbnail briefs and directing the designer through revisions. I like being close to the script and close to the data at the same time, because the answer to a bad retention curve is almost always a line of writing, not a setting.

On range: I worked on strategy for a sex educator with a US audience, where every video had to hold attention and stay monetized inside strict platform rules. I built Lumio's channel from zero while the product became the number one selling TV on Amazon India, and I've worked on Unacademy's main channel and Gokwik.

What I'm looking for is long-form work where research quality matters and where someone actually reads the retention graph after publishing.