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I analyzed 5,463 podcast episodes across 25 of the top podcasts on YouTube, including Diary of a CEO, Huberman Lab, Tim Ferriss, Mel Robbins, and more. These channels together have over 30 million subscribers and have gotten combined over 10 billion views. I wanted to see if I could find some patterns that could help us grow and monetize our podcasts. And what I found shocked me. The difference between an episode that gets seven views and an episode that gets 19 million views. Well, it comes down to four specific patterns in your episode titles. And if you are trying to grow your podcast on YouTube or even anywhere else, you need to hear this. The worst performing titles in my analysis got as low as seven views. The best over 19 million. And the only difference were following these four rules. This is grow the show, the podcast that grows your podcast. I'm Kev Michael, and today I'm breaking down the podcast titling rules that you can steal so you can grow and monetize your podcast. All right, let's start with rule one. Now, the most common mistake killing podcast growth on YouTube is cramming too much into your title. Episode numbers show names, multiple topics, hashtags. It's like trying to tell your entire life story in the first handshake. And here's what the data shows. Every winning title makes one specific promise. So rule number one is only make one promise in your title. Take Huberman Lab, for example. A 2.6 hour deep dive conversation covering everything from mindset to physical training to psychology is titled simply, how to build immense inner strength. One promise, one transformation. 19.6 million views. Now look at what most podcasters do. Something like this. 298 releasing control, celebrating your successes, and tossing your to do list. That episode got 10 views. 10. And this data is consistent across all 25 channels analyzed. From those averaging 500 views per episode to those averaging over 2 million views. Titles without episode numbers performed 62 to 715% better across individual channels. And channels of all sizes. See? Nearly double the views when they drop the episode numbers. Your title is prime real estate. Don't waste it on information that nobody cares about. Okay, so rule number one is easy to fix. Rule number two, you might not like, but you need to know it. And this one, after I saw it, I could not unsee it. So in our analysis of over 5000 titles, negative framing consistently outperformed positive by over 2x. So, first of all, negative titles appeared more often. Words like mistake appeared twice as often as words like tips did. In our data set, nearly Double. But they also perform better. Compare this episode that has positive framing. The discipline experts, successful people, all have this. This one got 1.2 million views. Compare that to this one that has negative framing. Harvard professor revealing the seven big lies about exercise. That one got 12.3 million views. Same channel, same quality content. The negative framing got 10x more views. Here's a few other examples. Body language expert, stop using this. It's making people dislike you. 10.7 million views. Jordan Peterson. Stop lying to yourself. 5.1 million views. The childhood lie that's ruining all of our lives. 4.2 million views. In our data set, negative framed titles averaged 445,000 views, while positive framed titles averaged just 185,000 views. Across all of these channels, that's a 2.4x better performance with negative framing. Here's why this works. Our brains are wired to pay more attention to threats than opportunities. It's survival psychology. And when you frame your episode around what people should stop doing, what mistakes they're making, or what's going wrong, you tap into that primal trigger. You may not like that, and you may want to stay positive, but it's important for you to know this now. So that's rule two. Use negative when you can. Now this next rule is where podcasters completely miss an opportunity. But first, here's something that you need to hear. Nobody cares about your guest's name unless that guest is Taylor Swift. Look at how two different channels titled episodes with the same guest. Alex Harmozi. Channel A used to Title 41 harsh truths nobody Wants to Admit. Alex Harmozi. This episode got 974,000 views. Channel B did not use Alex's name in the title. That channel said, the man that Makes Millionaires how to turn $1000 into $100 million. That one got almost 4.5 million views. Same guest. The credential focused title got 4.6x more views. This reigned true throughout my analysis. Look at how some of these outlier videos included credentials in the title instead of guest names. So leading neuroscientists got 16.3 million views. Harvard professor, 12.3 million. Former FBI agent, 2.9 million. Ex Google officer, 11.4 million. The divorce expert, 8.8 million. The money expert, 6.1 million. In Diary of a CEOs channel alone, titles starting with credentials average 2.96 million views, while titles starting with names average 2.06 million views. That's a 43.5% better performance. And in absolute terms, it translates to a million extra Views. This works because the credential creates instant authority and curiosity. It tells viewers why they should care about that person's perspective. But if you include the guest's name, you're relying on people already knowing who that person is and wanting to hear what they have to say. And the problem with that is when you see a name you don't know, that name might as well be Joe Schmo. And it's not even neutral. It's actually a detractor. People would rather hear nothing than to hear a stranger's opinion. And I know you might be thinking, yeah, yeah, but everybody knows my guest. I'm telling you, I have worked directly on over 500 podcasts. Every host thinks that everybody knows who their guests are, but most people don't. And if you're not sure, ask your grandma if she's heard of your guest. And if she hasn't heard of them, you're not allowed to put their name in the title. So Rule 3 is, instead of names, use credentials in the episode title. But the final rule might be actually the most powerful of them all.