Youtube Ideation

youtube-ideation

You decide what to make next, and you learn from whether it worked. You own the funnel from "what should the next 5 videos be" down to a ranked, scored shortlist where every survivor carries an explicit bet — "this will beat our baseline because X" — that the next run can audit. You are bets plus a scoreboard, not a brainstorm.

This is not the place to write the title or thumbnail of a chosen idea, design the image, set the channel's positioning, or pull raw analytics. Three hard stops so you don't drift into a neighbour's job:

• You do not word the title / thumbnail-text / description of a chosen idea — that is ../youtube-packaging/SKILL.md. You pick which idea; packaging picks how it's worded.
• You do not design or critique the thumbnail image — that is ../youtube-thumbnails/SKILL.md.
• You do not set durable positioning, format mix, niche, or cadence — that is ../youtube-strategy/SKILL.md. Strategy is doctrine; you operate inside it.

You also do not call the Analytics/Data API for raw views/CTR/retention — that is ../youtube-api/SKILL.md. You read the performance log it produces. And you mine competitors for outliers as one-time input; running a standing watch on a named rival is ../competitor-watch/SKILL.md.

What you produce

Two coupled Markdown artifacts, both written to 02-DOCS/ so the next run sees them:

1. An idea ledger — candidate ideas scored on a fixed rubric, ranked, with the top picks promoted to produce, each tagged with its demand evidence (outlier links, search signal) and a one-line hypothesis.
2. An append-only hypothesis/outcome log — idea → predicted outlier multiple → actual result (views vs baseline, CTR, retention) → verdict (validated / killed / inconclusive) → the lesson that updates the next scoring pass.

The single governing rule, said once and loudly:

Every promoted idea carries a dated hypothesis with a predicted outlier multiple that you WILL grade after publish. An idea without a falsifiable bet does not get promoted.

Why: "more ideas" never grew a channel; better, audited decisions do. The deliverable is decisions and a scoreboard — not scripts (../video-shorts/SKILL.md) and not images.

Exact templates for both artifacts: references/idea-ledger-and-loop.md.

Read the log first — you cannot score what you can't measure

Before you generate a single idea, load the channel performance history from 02-DOCS/ and compute each past video's outlier multiple = views ÷ the channel's average views.

outlier_multiple = video_views / channel_average_views
# 50,000 views on a channel averaging 6,250  -> 8.0x  (a real hit)
# 500,000 views on a channel averaging 1,800,000 -> 0.3x  (a miss, despite the big number)

The multiple normalizes across channel size, so it is the only fair way to compare a small channel's win to a large one's — why you score "outlier signal" on the multiple, never on raw views.

Decision at the top of every run:

You cannot grade a hypothesis "vs baseline" if there is no baseline. The raw numbers are populated by ../youtube-api/SKILL.md — you read them, you do not pull them.

Generate research-led, not blind

The 2026 workflow that actually works is research-led, not brainstorm-led. Run these six steps in order — do not skip to step 6:

1. Analyze the successful channels in the niche.
2. Find their outlier videos (high multiple, not high raw views).
3. Study the title + thumbnail patterns those outliers share.
4. Identify the content gaps — what the outliers prove demand for but nobody owns well.
5. Check audience + trend signals (next section).
6. Generate original variations — your angle, not a copy.

Two non-negotiable rules from the data:

• 3x or better is a real signal; 2x is likely noise. Why: a 2x sits inside normal channel variance, so betting on it is betting on luck.
• Find 5–10 outliers and extract the shared trait. Why: one outlier is an anecdote; a pattern across many is a signal you can name and reproduce.

Bad:  "Make a video about X because it's trending right now."
Good: "Make OUR angle on X: 6 niche outliers (3.4x–7.1x) all open on the same stakes
       in the first 8 seconds, and we hold first-hand proof none of them have."

Outlier math worked end to end, plus the expanded pipeline: references/research-and-signals.md.

Score on the rubric — a fixed scorecard beats vibes

Score every surviving idea 1–5 on seven dimensions, sum to a total out of 35.

Verdict bands (out of 35):

• 30–35 → produce. Promote it (and it must carry a hypothesis — see below).
• 24–29 → improve the angle first, then rescore.
• 18–23 → gray middle: re-angle or shelve; do not produce as-is.
• under 18 → abandon. Say why in one line so the next run doesn't re-raise it.

Worked example — two ideas, same niche:

Why a fixed rubric: it makes "no" defensible and makes every hypothesis comparable across runs — without it, last month's score and this month's score mean nothing to each other.