Image Courtesy: Hugo Holmquist
The internet is in overdrive. In an era where TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube decide what rises and what disappears, brands are scrambling to capture even a flicker of attention. Scoring a handful of views is tougher than most care to admit. It takes precision, instinct, and an almost forensic reading of audience behavior. I caught up with Jay Neo, a 21-year-old social media expert, whose work has generated more views than there are humans on earth.
At 18, Neo left his high school in the south of England and went straight into the eye of the internet’s biggest storm: MrBeast. Suddenly he was working on videos that would dwarf the populations of countries. “It was a long, strange trip,” he says. “I remember being on a flight to South Africa, sitting next to this old lady. She asked what I was up to, and I had to explain that we asked a random kid in North Carolina what his favorite animal was, he said ‘cheetah,’ and now I’m flying to Africa to film him with some cheetahs.” The video in question ended up pulling in more than 900 million views.
Jay’s work there sharpened his sense of what virality actually demands. He directed the record-breaking Would You Go to Paris for A Baguette video, which is the most liked YouTube video of all time, boasting over 1.6 billion views.
His career continued its impressive trajectory when he moved to Manhattan to work on Derail, where he and a team of like-minded twenty-somethings built up a factory of virality. Around the end of 2023, there was a huge trend of thematic TikTok pages where stories were told over satisfying gameplay visuals. If you saw them, you likely saw many crafted by Jay himself. “We handcrafted every single story to maximize their chance of virality.” At the peak of the operation, Derail was producing over 60 optimized videos a day.
In just a few months, Derail had pulled in more than two billion views and roughly $600,000 through TikTok’s monetization fund.
Jay breaks it down simply: the only metric that really matters is retention — how long people stay, and why. He spends most of his time figuring out the exact second viewers leave, and the exact moment they decide to stay. Then he builds the next video around those insights. “Don’t just look for the minutes where they drop off,” he tells me. “Look for the seconds they lean in.”
His advice is that going viral requires planning and strategy, not luck. He notes that YouTube and TikTok promote videos people want to watch until the end. Therefore, to beat the algorithm, you must focus on retention. “There are systems and tools you can use to do this,” Jay went on to reveal, “at Derail, we had a spreadsheet that tracked every video, the AVD (average-view-duration) and everything else, we would then scan the sheet every day for patterns.”
Neo’s larger point is that virality isn’t magic, it’s a process. “People think the algorithm is some mysterious thing judging them,” he says. “It’s not. It’s just measuring whether real humans want to keep watching.”
Jay is now bringing his content strategy to the company Palo, which is backed by some of the world’s biggest investors, to bring his science to more creators. “Palo feels like a natural evolution, I want to help as many creators as I can to truly understand their content and their audience.”
Palo is in its early stages — with a tight cohort of around 20 creators who together reach more than 250 million followers. “We’re experimenting with a range of creators in different niches, from cooking to faceless videos, and starting with the top so we can get it really right.” One Palo member, Jalo, reached over a million followers on a new account in less than a month, with the help of Palo.
Jay says the goal is to help liberate creators from the drudgery of finding ways to beat the algorithm, creating a system that does that for them, and in doing so “amplify their creativity.”
For founders, marketers, and creators, he offers three non-negotiables:
- Treat each video as a product.
What’s the hook? What’s the user benefit? What’s the friction? It’s product design, not art.
- Build a feedback loop.
At Derail, every post fed into a database tracking AVD, drop-off points, CTR, pacing, and structure.
“We’d watch for tiny patterns that repeated. If something works twice, it can work ten times.”
- Keep improving the system, not the video.
“Most people try to fix one video. The real gains come from fixing the process.”
In Neo’s view, the next era of social media won’t belong to the creators who use AI tools to spam posts, but to the ones who understand their data the best, and make content that touches a visceral part of the viewer. “The algorithm isn’t the enemy,” he says. “It’s feedback. And the people who learn to use that feedback are the ones who win.” It’s a fitting philosophy for someone who has already helped shape billions of views, and one Palo now hopes to scale, turning the craft of virality into something surprisingly democratic.
