Creative Strategist - Abyssal Network

About the role

About us

Responsibilities

• Find, evaluate, and greenlight every topic. Each one must have real depth, a surface level that pulls a click, and a descent the audience cannot easily find on their own.
• Route each topic to the right channel by territory, and keep all three fed through a monthly portfolio review.
• Build the level ladder before a script exists: how many levels, and what defines each one. Escalation means every segment is objectively more disturbing than the one before it.
• Brief the team against the ladder, then review the intro and hook. Does the intro promise a real descent inside 60 seconds, and does every level earn its place?
• Be the verification gate. Every segment traces to a real source. Anything unverified is cut or labelled as unverified inside the video.
• Own the line on real people: what is shown, what is only described, which recent tragedies we avoid entirely, and how final moments are handled.
• Own the monetization call: how a heavy entry gets covered, what leaves the YouTube cut for Patreon, and when a topic is not worth the risk at all.
• Own the title and the promise, locked before the script is written, and give creative input on the packaging designer's thumbnail concepts.
• After every video, read CTR, retention level by level, comment sentiment, sharing, and Patreon conversion, then apply what you learned to the next ladder.
• Turn what works into a written playbook. The pipeline should not live only in your head.

What this role is not

• You do not think darker automatically means better. The descent is the product, and a graphic entry in the wrong place breaks it.
• You are not a list maker. If a video could be reordered at random without losing anything, you failed.
• You do not let a good story survive a bad source. If it cannot be verified, it is cut or labelled.
• You are not squeamish, and you are not numb. Restraint here is an editorial skill, not a personality trait.
• You do not treat your own taste as fact. A retention curve can prove you wrong, and you accept it when it does.
• You are not a lone wolf. You build so someone else can run it.
• You are not an order-taker. You come in with a point of view and you can defend it.

Requirements

• Demonstrated understanding of YouTube content strategy: topic selection, title and thumbnail packaging, retention on long-form video, and what separates a video that performs from one that does not.
• Strong editorial instinct for escalation and pacing. You need to be able to feel when a level is out of order.
• Obsessive attention to factual accuracy, and the discipline to cut or label anything you cannot source.
• Working knowledge of YouTube's advertiser-friendly guidelines, plus practical experience keeping sensitive content monetized.
• Ability to read channel analytics (CTR, impressions, retention curves, audience retention by segment) well enough to judge what a video actually taught you.
• Comfort working with primary material: accident and safety investigation reports, inquest and court records, archive catalogues, and footage of uncertain origin that has to be traced.
• Ability to run a pipeline at volume (8 videos per month across three channels) without quality degrading.
• Ability to direct writers, researchers, editors, and designers, and to give notes specific enough to act on.
• Self-directed. You receive the brand bible, the team, and the tools, and you drive the pipeline independently.

Nice to have

• Lost media or internet mystery research background: archive digging, reverse image and footage tracing, following a thread across dead forums and dead links.
• Genuine familiarity with the iceberg format and the channels that do it well.
• Background in data-driven YouTube strategy: topic mining, outlier identification, format testing.

What success looks like

• CTR and average view duration on the videos you greenlight climb and hold, rather than spiking once.
• Retention does not collapse at level transitions. The back half of your videos keeps people.
• Zero fabricated or unverified entries published as fact. Every claim can be traced to a source on request.
• Videos ship monetized. Limited-ad and age-restriction rates stay low without the content getting soft.
• No takedowns, strikes, or family complaints caused by how a real victim was handled.
• All three territories stay fed, and the pipeline holds 8 videos a month without quality slipping.
• Patreon conversion grows alongside views, not just views alone.
• A written playbook exists that someone else on the team could run.

What's in it for you

• Real room to grow into Senior Creative Strategist. Prove the pipeline on the Abyssal Network and your scope widens to more channels and other NIA properties. Compensation moves with scope, not time served.
• Access to our paid learning library, including Paddy Galloway's YouTube strategy program, writing and storytelling material from George Blackman, and work from Colin and Samir. If it will make you better, we buy it.
• A team that already operates at scale, with colleagues who have solved the problem you are stuck on. You report directly to the COO, so decisions happen fast.
• Ownership, not order-taking. The topic, the story, and the standard are yours.