HookSpot

Find your best clip moments — from your own YouTube audience retention data.

HookSpot is a Chrome extension that works inside YouTube Studio. Open any video's Analytics tab and it reads that video's own audience retention curve, then ranks the moments most worth clipping into a Short — each with a one-line reason.

What it does

• Ranks the moments where your video held viewers best, using YouTube's own retention data for that specific video.
• Shows how each moment compares with the median YouTube video of the same length, so you can see whether a moment is strong in absolute terms or only strong for you.
• Flags the points where viewers leave hardest, labelled "cut before this" rather than offered as clip candidates.
• Cuts the clip. Pick your source file and HookSpot trims the moment, reframes it to 9:16, and saves it — on your machine, with nothing uploaded anywhere.

How it works

HookSpot uses YouTube's official Analytics API with your own Google sign-in, and only ever reads data for channels you own. It requests two read-only scopes: yt-analytics.readonly to read the retention curve, and youtube.readonly to read video duration and titles.

There is no server. The analysis is ordinary arithmetic running in your browser, the clip is cut locally, and the results are cached on your own device. Nothing is sent to the developer, because there is nowhere to send it.

Free and Pro

Free shows your top-ranked moment, the full retention chart, the drop-off points, and lets you export that clip with a watermark. Pro unlocks every ranked moment, watermark-free export on all of them, and CSV export. One payment, no subscription.

Honest about what it knows

Moments are ranked by how well they held viewers inside the video. That is a strong signal, not a promise — a Short lands differently without the context around it, and nothing can predict how one will perform.

Requirements

A YouTube channel you own, with enough watch time for YouTube to report retention. Very new videos will not have data yet; analytics also trail by two to three days.