“How is this different than any other technique to maximize engagement/readership, eg. inverted pyramid format for newspaper articles?”

Because it’s extraordinarily effective?

He made it to the top of YouTube with it. If it’s the exact same thing as other existing techniques how come others haven’t been able to match his success with those classic formulas?

Presumably because journalism is centuries old, and techniques like this eventually become "industry standard" and you don't notice it. Once people figure out what the strategy is, they're going to try replicating it to capitalize on his success. Afterwards I suspect he'll still have a first-mover advantage, but he's going to be nowhere near as popular (comparatively). It's not any different than say, the reality show "format" being eventually copied by other production companies/networks.

Did you read my summary and not the full PDF?

If you’ve only read my summary then we are discussing this with completely different mental models of what he actually does.

I skimmed the summary and it describes every aspect about his production company, whereas your "summary" only described one aspect (ie. figuring out how to keep engagement up), so I only responded to that. You can't treat the entire document as "gaming the algorithm". For instance, the document also mentions only hiring A players, which could hardly be described as "he is very carefully gaming the algorithm".

Go and read pages 6 through 10 of the PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...

They do not describe the same process everyone else uses to make content. They are much more specific than that.

So far as I can tell his "gaming the algorithm" is having a few short clips near the start to hook people in (ie. an summary/abstract), and periodic bursts of excitement to keep people engaged. The first is so banal that it's hardly worth discussing. Articles in scientific journals have abstracts/summaries. It's not anything nefarious. The rest seems like standard narrative/storytelling advice, eg. hero's journey[1], or how broadcast TV shows have cliffhangers/plot developments to get people to watch the next episode or ad break. Do you think 24[2] is "gaming the algorithm" by presenting 24 action packed episodes where there's always some new/unresolved plot point at the end of each episode?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_(TV_series)

What he’s doing is very clever and very effective.

Correct but that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with intentionally gaming an algorithm. TV never had an algorithm and some people were a lot better at making TV that others wanted to watch than others.

You seem to be of the belief that for anyone to be the most successful at this field they have to be gaming an algorithm. But perhaps there’s really no algorithm, or perhaps (my opinion) the algorithm is so good at showing people what they want that you can instead just focus on making videos people want.