I analysed 103 YouTube Shorts that generated 18,000,000+ views.

And found the exact template to generate highly-converting short-form videos.

Ilya Tsykunov

Founder, hook.you · June 14, 2026

About the project

My team at hook.you partners up with different creators and influencers to help them eliminate production bottlenecks, better monetize their content (sometimes causing a 5x increase in revenue!), and start growing exponentially.

One of the channels we've worked with recently was Crashsune Academy. One of the ways we supported the creator was by introducing the regular production of short-form videos across all of their social platforms (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook & X).

These videos (ghostwritten and edited by our in-house team) have helped the channel grow from 55,000 to 170,000+ subscribers since the start of this year.

I fed Claude Opus 4.8 the data from 103 short-form videos, which generated 18M views between January and June 2026.

Additionally, I provided it with our Notion library of scripts these videos were based on.

1 · Views ≠ likes ≠ comments ≠ subscribers

It's very tempting to treat all of these metrics equally. But as the breakdown below shows, they're essentially 4 separate numbers — each of these videos dominated one metric and flatlined the rest.

2 · Subscribers = sales

We know for a fact that subscribers are our most important metric. Our revenue growth lines up perfectly with spikes in subscriptions — given that the video features a CTA that promotes the product (or rather, its free trial; don't bother trying to promote paid products via Shorts).

3 · Does video length affect subscriptions (and, hence, revenue)?

Yes. The longer the video, the more subs it generates (and more subs means more $).

4 · How long does a Short keep adding subscribers?

I was really hoping Claude would give a simple answer here... but I guess not. Below is each of our top subscriber-drivers, shown as new subscribers per day from the day it posted — same horizontal scale, so you can see how fast each one fades. Hover over a curve to read a specific day.

While MOST videos stop generating subs within 7 days, two videos stand out:

• "Why Making 3D Characters is HARD", which YouTube really enjoyed promoting for a whole month.
• And also "I ALMOST got hired by Epic Games", which happened to be released 24 hours before Epic Games announced a huge layoff — the video lasted as long as the news.

Interestingly, "Blender just said NO to AI money" was about 2 weeks late to the news, and it was still blessed with a 7-day tail.

5 · According to Claude, there are only 4 types of videos

And they don't convert equally!

All of our videos are narrated by the same author with slight background music, and the same strict visual editing. The only real difference between them is the script.

After looking at all of our scripts on Notion, Claude identified just four distinct formats:

• Technical explainer
• Opinion / identity
• Reframe / advice
• Personal story

For the longest time, we focused on making technical explainers (57% of all our videos) since those generated the most views.

But! While experimenting with other formats, we discovered that simply showing "here's how I made this" is not enough to drive subscriptions.

6 · The universal winning template (steal this!)

With Claude, I was able to further dissect the best-converting scripts into just five elements.

Here are the 5 must-have elements for our scripts. The example on the right is our best-converting video "DON'T overcomplicate 3D Modeling!" (10.1 subscribers per 1,000 views).

7 · Bonus: your own winning template calculator

I actually made this tool for our team to generate script skeletons so we always know that a video will do well.

Remember character stats in RPGs? The calculator below works the same way — pick different options and watch the buffs (▲) and debuffs (▼) stack across views, likes, comments and subscribers.

I've also included examples relevant to some of the industries I'm interested in.

This analysis was not just useful. It has transformed our content production pipeline — with the aim of increasing our hit rate while spending less time on a single piece of content. We are already working on adapting this mechanism to other creators and their content.

I believe this template will create a noticeable improvement in our performance within the next few weeks.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg! There's so much more data I will be going through with Claude.

This article reflects my personal experience. I am not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsing Anthropic, Notion, or any other company but hook.you.