So what made you start counting in the first place? I did the same thing with jobs when I was running solo, just ticking marks on a clipboard with no real plan behind it. Around job 300 I sat down and did the actual math on drive time, fuel, and what I was charging, and the number was ugly. Turns out I was taking every little job that called, even the ones an hour away for a fifty buck sweep. I started grouping jobs by town and quoting a small trip fee for the far ones, and my weekly take went up while my hours went down. Maybe pull your last few months of work and see which jobs actually paid off, because the tally itself won't tell you that.

The "talking at the bench while he worked" thing is the whole answer, everything else was just noise. When you voiceover a video you can hide behind a script, but talking live while you work makes people feel like they're actually in the room with you. That's what makes someone binge 200 videos in one night, it's not the info, it's the company. Retro repair is boring to watch on paper, so the only thing keeping eyes on screen is the guy's personality coming through in real time. Thumbnails might get the click but they don't make people stay for hours, so no way that alone did it. The algorithm just rewarded what was already working, it didn't cause it. Dude accidentally stopped performing and started hanging out, and that flipped the switch.