[nomius10]

I remember a time when crossing the 10 minute mark was really stretching it on YouTube. Nowadays most videos hit the 1 hour mark... I'm not sure if this is what the market demands, or this is just Google nudging creators in this direction.

Fortunately people still make short videos, like this (relevant) one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0WWbpBxLCI

[csa]

> Nowadays most videos hit the 1 hour mark... I'm not sure if this is what the market demands

For many genres, this is simply what pays the most for the creators.

Some people just flip on a video and let it play — maybe just in the background, maybe as they fall asleep. The ads that get played when they aren’t paying attention still generate revenue for the creator.

This is one reason why any working streamer should pretty much always have some sort of a long-form channel. It makes bank for relatively little additional effort.

[mindcrime]

Fortunately people still make short videos

Interesting. I don't see anything fortunate about that myself. I guess it's a "different strokes for different folks" thing. Personally, I rarely watch any video that's less than 20 minutes long. I think of short videos as being too small to contain enough useful info to be worth my time (although that's obviously not literally true for all short videos). And generally speaking, I prefer videos that are 30 minutes to an hour long, that really dive into the nitty gritty of some topic.

I don't know how representative of "the market" I am (probably not very) but I can at least attest that there are those of us out there with this particular preference.

[LPisGood]

The problem with everyone making long videos is that it leads to a situation where, intentional or not, it seems like everyone is trying to waste your time.

Some things just aren’t worth talking about for that long.

[bowsamic]

In my experience long videos on YouTube are extremely inefficient at conveying information, often repeating themselves in order to pad out the length. This is even the case for the better creators

[lupusreal]

A lot of long videos have very little informational content but they become long because their creator rambles, repeats himself, tells shitty repetitive jokes and wastes time with sarcasm and then clarifying those sarcastic remarks because otherwise some people won't get it, etc.

Drachinifel is a prime example of this. The channel "WWII US Bombers" is an example of the opposite, somebody creating information dense short videos because he has laser tight focus and no time for joking around. (Examples chosen for the conceptual proximity of their content, historic military ships and historic military aircraft.)

[bdndndndbve]

Pretty sure the answer is ads. "Long-form" content has more opportunities to insert ads or sponsored content. There's not a lot of money to be made being quick and to the point.

People's viewing habits have also changed in response, rather than having the algorithm bounce them around they'd rather half-pay-attention to a 3 hour video. But I think the trend of ever-growing video lengths was spawned by a desire for more revenue.

[AlotOfReading]

The market bifurcated. Short form content became Snapchat and tiktoks and YouTube shorts. There were never any significant competitors to YouTube for long form content because of how expensive streaming it is, so all of that content remained on the one platform with an audience and decent payouts.

[singron]

Youtube used to add mid-roll ads to videos that were at least 10 minutes, so your video would basically make twice as much if you stretched it that long. I think the threshold is 8 minutes nowadays.

Short form is hard to monetize (if you are Google 8 years ago) since you need to split ad revenue and attribution among the several videos you watch between ads. This goes against a ton of prior trends in the ad industry where last touch attribution is still king and ad fraud is hard to combat. If course tiktok did it late with creator rewards.

[jamesy0ung]

I quite like to grab the transcript from youtube and ask chatgpt to give me the key points.

[ashoeafoot]

Also you can split out shorts.

[chowells]

You should try watching the video instead of complaining about it's length. It turns out that it actually takes a bit of time to cover the history of Russia and Germany sufficiently well to explain the situation. Yes, those turn out to be relevant to answering the question.

[nomius10]

I gave it a go, not to the video in the OP, but another one that caught my eye - the one about gatcha and korean gender wars. I got through the end and found out that it was actually a part 1, the second part being almost 2 hours. I'm low-key upset about this situation.

[labster]

I remember a time when YouTube was limited to 10 minute videos, and we watched Hollywood movies on there, 10 minutes per segment.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

That was back before Google purchased YouTube and they had their own video service called Google Video. Google Video was great because they didn't have that limit.

[vunderba]

I'm guessing you're either missing or deliberately excluding the HUGE push by Youtube for "Youtube Shorts". Personally, I vastly prefer long (20+ minute) videos. However short videos are good for quick DIY / tutorials when I'm unable to find a written equivalent.

[RockRobotRock]

I don’t think the rise of shorts is mutually exclusive with longer videos being pushed on the platform, as well.

Many people leave YouTube on in the background, but it doesn’t make sense to do that with TikTok style clips

[fsckboy]

the huge push for youtube shorts is to compete with tiktok and instagram for that segment of the market. the longer form videos are a different segment of the market, they aren't entirely related

[phreack]

They used to pay by the view, now they pay by the minute. I think it's that simple.

[RockRobotRock]

People also use YouTube in different ways than they used to. Leaving it on in the background while they do something else.

I’m sure YouTube’s algorithm is good at detecting which videos perform well even when you’re only listening to it.

[4ad]

It's exactly backwards, YouTube favours short videos and frequent uploads. People doing long videos do it purely out of passion.

The claim that most videos nowadays are hitting the one hour mark is trivially false.

[cgriswald]

I simply can't believe there isn't some incentive for longer videos. It may be that YouTube only cares about total watch time and doesn't care if a creator pushes lots of short ones or a few long ones, as long as viewers keep viewing. I see so many videos like this:

Tie Shoes Like a Pro "If you're watching this video you probably want to know the secrets to good shoe tying. We'll show you how in this video. It's surprisingly easy, so don't go anywhere. But first, have you ever wondered why we tie our shoes? The first shoes weren't actually tied but were just soles that people nailed to their feet. <Cue hammer sound effect and scream> Haha, actually this didn't hurt at all because... <10 minutes pass> ...and then in 1890 Eritrea was founded, but you don't care about that! Haha! You're here to learn how to tie shoes! Don't worry, we'll get to that too! Anyway, also in 1890 all the leather factories in France burned down and so they couldn't spare leather for shoe buckles, so they began using bits of string..."

[rcxdude]

Not really true anymore. Creators have talked about how youtube's incentive structure is pushing towards longer videos now. Not necessarily higher-quality ones, and posting more volume is still generally going to help, but because youtube's now optimising for watch time instead of views, long videos are pretty heavily rewarded. (In fact, as always, the high-effort but short content like animations are the least 'efficient' genre on youtube).