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Here's what the dashboard shows as I resolve the bet:

So to be clear, the measured view percentage ratio continued to drop down from 60% as time went on. This means that while fewer people watched the AWS video, the ones who seemed to watch it, watched all of the way through, and anyone who watched the Dam Collapse video watched less of it.

This could have to do with the Dam Collapse video not delivering on its premise, it could also have to do with it being more boring and longer, or both.

The upshot is, @JimmyDeringer 's instincts were right in his original email to me, so the video was too clickbaity. So, this resolves as NO.

Though I bet on this, I will receive $0 profit.

@PatrickDelaney I must have misunderstood, my profit shows as $M 16. I thought because I had switched partway through that would wipe out my chances. Sorry - I hope no one sees this as uncouth - I'm just resolving according to the original rule and thought I had made a bad set of guesses.

I have sold my YES shares and am switching to the equivalent number of NO shares. Although there have been more viewers on the first video, the clickbaity ratio hasn't moved very much. "Will this Dam Collapse?" went from about 14% percent viewed up to around 15% viewed with an increase of around 100 viewers. I really don't see it getting up to 20%, even with another 500 viewers...though, I could be wrong, I really don't know...it just seems like that's the safer bet for now.

The second one is also pretty clickbaity.

@IsaacKing Not sure if you are more familiar with AWS than me, not sure what your job is, correct me if I'm wrong here...but I would say that the almost losing $50k on AWS is a very real, albiet rare scenario that has happened to multiple individuals and small businesses, which you can Google and read about for yourself. If I hadn't ignorantly placed some stop protections in place, I could very well have been on the hook for $50k due to sheer stupidity/laziness after another couple days. So I would say, a photo of my face cringing and saying that is absolutely not intended to be clickbaity, but I can see why you would say that...it seems unbelievable. However, the image of the Mississippi River flooding and me doing the YouTube face reacting to that...complete fiction - I generated that image with OpenAI...total clickbait.

@PatrickDelaney Perhaps to your point though, maybe AWS pretty much 100% always refunds those charges due to stupid mistakes. I don't know that for sure...

@PatrickDelaney I get the impression you may not know what the word "clickbait" means? Clickbait refers to any title that is overly bombastic in order to attract attention. They're often misleading, but don't have to be. On your video, the title being technically correct doesn't make it not clickbait. Someone who wanted their title to seem serious and respectable would not put "(big money)" in their title; that was done just to overemphasize the already-very-emphasized monetary risk at stake for shock value.

(I didn't bother watching the video, so I don't know how accurate the $50,000 number is, but based on the titles and your comment above, my guess would be that it's at least somewhat misleading.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait

@IsaacKing If you read my original title, I mention that one video is, "more clickbaity," than the other, implying that both are indeed clickbaity. I don't disagree with you, though I'm not sure I understood the full definition of clickbait until you just told me that right now. I would say, both video titles/thumbnail are, "slightly" misleading/bombastic about what the video contains, but the AWS one is like, 2% misleading and the, "dam burst" title/thumbnail is more like, ~20% misleading about the ensuing content, because there's absolutely nothing showing a massive dam burst on the Mississippi like the thumbnail shows. I will say however that the uptake from just discovery on the YouTube features from that dam burst video has been way beyond that of the first video. YouTube by nature highly incentivizes clickbait is what I'm learning.

@PatrickDelaney But, I'm also seeming to find...if you can't deliver at least somewhat on your clickbait, or misdirect and then satisfy the viewer in some way, then it's going to backfire. So yeah, that's what we're kind of testing with this marketplace.

@PatrickDelaney Veritasium did a good video on clickbait: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng

@IsaacKing I think I watched that a few years ago. Now looking at it in retrospect, he has become much more clickbaity and he probably needed to find a conceptual way to justify this because he's that kind of guy. One of his more recent videos right now shows what looks like a bomb dropping on a city saying, "I Tested The US Military's Secret Space Weapon," but if you watch the video it's about dropping weights on sandcastles from a helicopter 😂

@PatrickDelaney I stopped watching Veritasium when they did what was effectivly a paid advertisement for Waymo and framed it as an impartial investigation into self-driving cars.

@IsaacKing I think it's just so hard to be a professional YouTuber covering scientific, math and knowledge topics because they are ultimately boring, and at some point they need to keep the income stream going because they probably have staff...and you have to either push the envelope into unbelievable things that catch attention or get sponsors. So yeah, probably trying to consistently find good, up and coming hobby YouTube thinkers is a good plan to expand one's mind.

@PatrickDelaney Strong disagree with the "boring" part, but it's definitely hard to find people willing to pay for that sort of stuff.

@IsaacKing It's obviously not boring to you or I, we love that stuff, but it's boring to most people.

My prediction has less to do with the click bait and more to do with restructuring the intro.

My prediction is your Current audience retention will be

50% at 10 seconds
25% at 30 seconds

if you changed the title to “How do we ACTUALLY know this dam won’t collapse…”, started your voiceover immediately at 0:00, you’d have a 75% retention in the first 10 seconds and 50% retention at 30 seconds

Audience retention would improve by 25% if you said the following in the intro:

This is the lock and dam number 1 in Minnesota

o it’s buttress dam And it’s the most (or least) dangerous type.

o This website shows type of dam and determines risk profile… “they use a model like I’ll show you”

Present the problem: Dam failures are more common than you think

• Example 1 Brazil How many deaths or damages?

• Example 2 …

• Example 3 …

Rest of the video the same

@JimmyDeringer Yes, well put. Though I will say, the more clickbaity the video, the more important it seems to be to really spend time structuring the intro, as you mention, to ensure you deliver on what your clickbait promises...or at least that's the hypothesis that this bet is testing out.

I can certainly change the title, I don't think that violates the terms of this market. However I'm not willing to re-upload the video...I think that once it's up there, it's up there...I just have to improve on future videos.

I think it would be difficult to make a bet based upon audience retention improving by a certain percentage on the same video. I would say if I'm to do that, I would need to wait until after this Manifold market is over.