Reverse engineering

Take a video that clearly worked, then walk backwards through the decisions behind it. What promise did the title and thumbnail make together. What did the first 30 seconds do to make that promise credible. Where does the structure hand a viewer a reason to keep going, and what got left out. Copying the surface is the failure mode. Matching someone's font, their jump-cut rhythm or their delivery produces a video that looks like theirs and performs like yours, because none of that was doing the work. Your own hits repay this treatment more than anybody else's, and almost nobody bothers, because a win rarely feels like it needs explaining.