The multi-billion-view creators dominating YouTube aren’t just getting lucky with their content—they’re applying principles that can be systematically studied and replicated. Behind many of these top channels stands Mario Joos, a former psychology student turned creator economy strategist who is bringing scientific rigor to a field that is only starting to define applicable and useful metrics.

Mario, CEO of Brightrock, has built his reputation by focusing on elements that other strategists overlook. “Everybody talks about this title, thumbnail, and the intro of the videos, but nobody talks about the rest of the video,” he explains. “My thought was very similar to, as when you go to restaurants, would you care about how the outside looks, or would you care about the food? Let’s be honest, it’s the food.”

What makes his approach different is his focus on the human behaviors that algorithms merely try to measure. “I realized the algorithm was just trying to listen to humans and how they behave,” Mario notes. 

After spending two and a half years with MrBeast’s team in Greenville, North Carolina, Mario felt limited by working with just one creator and wanted to make a broader impact on the field. 

“I want to push the industry forward and research things nobody’s ever thought about,” he says. “I felt like I reached my cap within what I was able to reach [with MrBeast]. I was like, ‘I’m just creating all this research and advising Jimmy [MrBeast] and his team. I feel like I could do bigger than this.’”

His ambition extends beyond commercial success to advancing the theoretical understanding of audience psychology. “I want to be one of those names one day,” he says, referring to famous psychological figures like Ivan Pavlov and Abraham Maslow. Hence, he founded Brightrock in 2020 as both a consultancy for top YouTube creators and a research lab investigating the psychological drivers of audience engagement. 

The Sofia, Bulgaria-based company works with 10-15 major creators whose subscriber counts range from 10 million to over 100 million, including the Stokes Twins, who recently surpassed 125 million subscribers.

At Brightrock, Mario’s team doesn’t just track metrics—they investigate the neurological foundations of viewer behavior. “We even look into neuroscience to understand how the brain works, to find out what triggers certain things, or determine what makes us actually pay attention to more?” 

This scientific approach leads him to challenge popular misconceptions, such as the widely-held belief that attention spans are shortening: “The goldfish attention span argument, it’s bogus. It’s not even real.” Instead, he argues that viewers haven’t lost their ability to focus—they’ve become more discerning: “What’s happening is our ability to judge. Why are kids in school paying less attention? Well, because you can go to YouTube, find a creator who is more entertaining to listen to, who doesn’t waste your time.”

Challenging Industry Myths with Data

Brightrock’s research-based methodology frequently places Mario at odds with conventional YouTube wisdom. “There are a lot of narratives that CTR needs to be a certain percentage. There are [narratives] that you need to hit certain retention percentage rates,” he notes. “But that’s all factually incorrect. There’s so much data and so many analyses that prove that there are no numbers to hit because it doesn’t make sense.”

His stance extends to metrics that many creators obsess over: “For most creators, CTR is useless. Retention chart retention percentages are useless.” Instead of chasing arbitrary benchmarks, Mario advocates for understanding the patterns in retention charts and simply tracking whether changes increase or decrease overall views.

He’s equally dismissive of formulaic advice about thumbnails and video structure. “I’ve heard people say, ‘You have to have a face in your thumbnail or people say you cannot have text in your thumbnail,’” he recounts. “I’m like, yes, but I found this video with 50 million views, and the entire thumbnail is almost text.”

This evidence-based approach has delivered notable results. As Retention Director at MrBeast from October 2020 to May 2023, Mario helped shape some of YouTube’s most successful videos, including the “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life” video. His work with the Stokes Twins has been equally effective, contributing to their growth rate. “There’ve been multiple months where we beat Jimmy in terms of growth,” Mario reveals about the Stokes Twins’ trajectory.

Retention Insights from Audience Psychology

Mario’s work on retention strategies—having conducted over 150 sessions on the topic with just one creator—has yielded specific insights about what keeps viewers engaged. He emphasizes the importance of progressive pacing in content: “Is every single sentence progressing to the next one? That decides the progressive pacing that a video content piece has.” Modern audiences expect tighter pacing, though not so quick that it creates cognitive overload.

He also highlights the importance of eliminating unnecessary repetition: “If you’re an educational creator and you have two minutes to explain something, and then you spend another 30 seconds summarizing what you just explained. Why is there a need? The person can just rewind and watch the same thing if they want.”

Visualization represents another key factor in modern content strategy. “Right now, you have visually exciting content all over the place. If you expect to create a basic vlog with just one camera angle, yes, there are channels where this approach works, but if you want to win, visualization is where it’s at,” Mario explains.

These insights have directly contributed to his success with clients like Futcrunch, which recently reached 10 million subscribers, and Matthew Beem, among the top 10-15 major creators Brightrock has worked with.

Bringing Science to VidCon

VidCon, founded by YouTube creators John and Hank Green and now part of the Fan Expo business, is the world’s leading gathering for digital creators, platform innovators, and their fans. The event, taking place from June 19 to 21 at the Anaheim Convention Center, brings together content creators, industry professionals, and fans to celebrate and advance digital culture.

Many of Mario’s insights will be shared at the upcoming VidCon panel, “The Growth Playbook: Debunking the Lies and Finding What Works.” The session, co-presented with Farhad Meher-Homji, Director of Strategy at Changer, on Saturday, June 21, promises to reveal data typically reserved for top creators.

“We’re going to show what CTR looks like for a video with 10 million views, and what the retention chart is for a video with the same number of views. Because that’s data you never get to see,” Mario explains. The panel will address misconceptions about data, packaging, intros, retention, and business scaling—topics Mario has spent years researching with top creators.

While the session will benefit creators at all levels, Mario believes it will be particularly valuable for established channels: “The one who’s going to get the most value out of it is anybody from 100k to 100 million subscribers.” For smaller creators, the panel offers insight into what success looks like at scale: “If you’re a smaller creator, you can be like, ‘Wait, my retention chart actually doesn’t look that much different than somebody with 10 million subs. Maybe there are more similarities in the learning.’”

Beyond sharing specific tactics, Mario hopes the session helps shift industry understanding toward a more scientific approach: “If you’re taking YouTube seriously, this is the thing, if you’re not afraid of data, if you’re not afraid of those kinds of things, that’s the type of talk.” This commitment to evidence-based strategies aligns with VidCon’s growth into an event that serves both fans and industry professionals.

The Future of Creator Strategy

The creator economy is maturing, which is why Mario sees great potential in bringing scientific rigor to content strategy. He’s particularly pleased about VidCon highlighting the growing number of professionals beyond just the creators themselves.

“For the longest time, creator and creator teams have been like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s just the creator and an editor,'” he notes. “And I think right now people are slowly starting to realize, like, hey, there are full teams, a vlog channel, full 15 people.” This change reflects his experience with major channels, where teams of 10-15 people are standard, with the largest approaching 100 staff members.

This developing field creates opportunities for specialists who prefer behind-the-scenes roles: “Writing a script for a creator is fun. You don’t have the pressure of running a business. You don’t have the pressure of being on camera, of being recognized.”

For Mario, this growing industry represents the advancement of a global creator economy where research-based decision-making will increasingly separate successful channels from those that plateau. His parting advice for creators summarizes his approach to the science of YouTube success: “Stop looking at CTR!”

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