retention-audit

retention-audit is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from yaxeen/storytelling-skills. It costs 55 tokens per session (1,321 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for finding where viewers stop watching a published YouTube video by comparing its audience-retention graph with a similar successful video from the same channel.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review a YouTube retention graph, compare an underperforming video with a winner, and connect audience drop-offs or rewatches to script sections.
Why use it?
It turns a falling line on a chart into likely problems in the script, such as a weak opening, unclear promise, or slow section. This helps separate general channel differences from what went wrong in one video.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to review a YouTube retention graph, compare an underperforming video with a winner, and connect audience drop-offs or rewatches to script sections.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/yaxeen/storytelling-skills/retention-audit
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add yaxeen/storytelling-skills --skill retention-audit
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yaxeen/storytelling-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for retention-audit

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yaxeen/storytelling-skills/retention-audit/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/yaxeen/storytelling-skills/retention-audit)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yaxeen/storytelling-skills/retention-audit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yaxeen/storytelling-skills/retention-audit/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for retention-audit

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yaxeen/storytelling-skills/retention-audit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yaxeen/storytelling-skills/retention-audit.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,321 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00055 $0.01321
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00660
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00264
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00132

Measured 12d ago against content hash a1daf05109fd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

retention-audit scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/retention-audit/SKILL.md · 77 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 77 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Retention Audit

  • A retention graph is the story's autopsy: every drop is a moment the script broke a promise, every spike is a beat viewers rewound to see again.
  • Audit by zones, not by staring at the whole line — each zone has its own failure causes and its own fix.
  • Always diagnose against a baseline: the same channel's best comparable video (same length/format). Absolute numbers mislead; the gap between winner and loser is the finding.
  • Built on the six levers — see storytelling-hooks. Recap: 1. Curiosity gap · 2. Emotional mirror · 3. Conflict engine · 4. Relatability · 5. Pattern + surprise · 6. Three-act.

When to Use

  • A video got clicks but died (decent CTR, low average view duration).
  • YouTube stopped recommending a video after its first test batch.
  • Comparing a flop against the channel's winners to find what broke.
  • Any niche; needs the retention graph (screenshot is fine), the script or beat outline, and ideally one winner's graph.

Intake (Before Auditing)

  • Get: this video's retention graph + length, the script or beat list with rough timestamps, CTR and impressions if available, and a winner's graph from the same channel/format.
  • Also get the thumbnail + title + the video's first frame — the #1 retention killer lives in that triangle, not in the script.
  • Missing the winner baseline? Use the gray "typical retention" band as a weak substitute and say so.
  • No graph, no audit. Never estimate or invent retention numbers — ask for the screenshot; offer only hypothesis-level guesses clearly labeled as such.

The Five Zones (Quick Reference)

Zone Where Healthy sign Failure means
Cliff 0:00–0:30 ≥65–70% still watching packaging↔opening mismatch (confirm-the-click failure)
Intro 0:30–2:00 slope flattening throat-clearing, promise not restated, stakes missing
Body 2:00–sag tracks/above typical band; small spikes a loop closed without opening the next; pacing monotone
Sag ~40–60% of runtime a visible re-hook bump or held line no planned re-hook; mid-video drift
End last 10% gentle taper fine unless a cliff — outro started too early

Read the full file on GitHub · 77 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 77 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A a1daf05109fd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

retention-audit is a skill published in the GitHub repository yaxeen/storytelling-skills (9 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 1,321 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.