Article 37 · Beginner
Long intros kill retention before the real content begins
You're not putting context.
You are wasting other people's patience.
The long intro is one of the most elegant ways to scare away viewers while telling yourself that you are being clear. The creator loves it because it gives him a feeling of control, order, and preparation. The viewer tolerates her less and less because they know, sometimes before you do, that they haven't yet started what they came for.
Every second before the value erodes attention. That's the point. Not because every introduction is a sin, but because most are inflated much more than necessary. Greetings, background, clarifications, thanks, redundant context. Everything added together builds a heavy door. And modern attention, no matter how much some people insult it out of nostalgia, you have no obligation to push heavy doors if there are light ones around.
Look at this: Direct opening does not mean confusing opening. It means putting the landed promise, conflict, question or consequence first. The context serves later, dosed, when there is already a reason to load it. The classic mistake is to think that the viewer needs all the preparation before feeling interested. It's almost always the other way around. Interest first. Then context.
One creator justified long intros by saying that this way the video “was better put together.” What was best armed was his tranquility. The audience left before they got to the current content. Not because he was impatient by nature, but because he was taking an unnecessary toll on the most fragile part of the route.
The real villain is this attachment to warming up, this idea that clarity requires dragging your feet for half a minute or more. No. Real clarity is often shorter than the creator's ego would like. The rest is habit, fear or excessive affection for one's own voice before having earned the right to listen to it longer.
Try this: Take your starter and eliminate anything that doesn't immediately increase understanding or interest. If the video improves by doing so, you didn't lose context. You lost ballast. And that usually feels weird just because you were so used to carrying it around.
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