Short Form Content Is BROKEN. Can We Fix It?

Tick Tock is evil it's killing our attention spans and wait what is all this looks like we went from being able to have a normal conversation or watching a slow scene in a movie so now needing all sorts of devilish tricks to keep our attention on something vertical scrolling feeds with Wicked smart algorithms and short beats of content I've invaded every corner of the internet whether you call them shorts reels Tick Tock I mean even Spotify now has jumped on a train The Tick tockification is complete and after these companies turn what we watch into well this now they have a huge problem they now realize that this white dopamine machine that they built is broken at the core but if we look Beyond this noise and what's happening now there is a light at the end of the tunnel a solution that can turn this short form algorithmic Mass it's something really positive not only for the companies that make these but also for us the users for once but to understand it we first have to understand the real reason why everything became a copy of tick tock herberg's reels where they are just the latest in a series of features that they just copied from others Spotify is now making this vertical scrolling algorithm recipe their new homepage to discover music and podcasts and even Amazon who doesn't really have content to show has found a way somehow to let this Inspire feed YouTube added shorts which recently have been taking over more and more of the homepage and even read it as jump on the train because everywhere you look the recipe is always the same take your content make it so that it now becomes scrollable videos make them autoplay add a smart AI algorithm and you're done and there's one specific reason why this makes total sense for all these companies and that is that they have just too much content we went from 6 hours of videos uploaded every single minute on YouTube in 2007 to over 500 hours a minute uploaded today every day 60 000 tracks are added to Spotify that's 21 million tracks a year and just think that in 2008 the entire iTunes music store at only 8 million tracks now let's be clear this is amazing new creativity new points of view new ideas people building a career in this Creator economy but the platforms where visual started now have a problem people's time is limited so how do you surface all this content to your users they've tried having you search for things they've tried having you click on stuff then came trending tabs and light counters all the way to Social and now there's this shiny new thing on the horizon vertical scrolling videos and smart algorithms it seems like it's the perfect solution not only because it's based on videos which is one of the most immediate and engaging types of medium but also because it's an established design pattern now this means that if you show this to someone they will automatically know what to do scroll down double tap to like here are the comments everybody knows how this works it's baked into the minds of billions of people now so if I am one of these big companies I'm incentivized to build something that people are already familiar with so I don't have to reinvent the wheel and this is why company after company platform after platform they all fell victim to this tick tockification but the consequences of this are getting darker and darker when the first movies with sound started to appear in the 1920s and 30s the style of movies themselves change dramatically from being very Visual and having to show what was happening we now have entire movies there are just a bunch of people talking in rooms the medium the way we consume something almost always ends up having a big impact on the content itself the information the art and vertical style Tick Tock videos are no exception to this because now you need to hook people in make them watch as much as possible of that one minute video so people started to realize that they can just use tricks and they started cramming those into the videos like those subtitles that you see everywhere Ultra fast editing even adding unrelated other Clips like Minecraft all of this in pursuit of one thing and one thing only retention or how much are you able to keep users watching a few months ago I watched with my girlfriend one of my favorite movies of all time I watch it hundreds of times Star Wars the first one and she watched it for the first time and she was bored now is she allowed to be bored watching a new movie yeah of course is she allowed to be bored watching Star Wars absolutely not I find your lack of faith disturbing Jokes Aside this movie came out in 1977. this was a time where content entertainment was scarce there was no need of tricks to keep you watching no crazy subtitles no Minecraft Gameplay although I would have been interesting he's heading for that small Moon [Music] third piece but by today's standards it's just slow but retention now is everyone's Obsession because it's the one metric that the mighty algorithms use to decide what to show and what not to show and this is nothing new in the past it was optimizing for the best television slots optimizing the length of a song for the radio this obsession with viewer attention is a spiral towards keeping you watching Keeping you there keeping you scrolling keeping you addicted watch the pretty coin of gold so that you can see more ads and the cycle continues so earlier today I emerged from my last 25 minutes random scrolling session on Tick Tock and I think I watch pretty interesting stuff there were some interesting videos in there but then I thought to myself how much do I remember about what I watched and the answer is basically nothing and when I look at this new wave of short form videos even though they are able to keep me there for long periods of time I feel like I'm not getting anything in return our short-term memory has been defined by cognitive psychologists and Lasting 15 to 30 seconds while the average length of a tick tock video at the end of 2021 was 24 to 31 seconds this is also leading to all kinds of consequences like lower attention spans especially for children of people growing up with this so if this is what's happening to us the users the company is making this should be massively profiting now they should be swimming in money right well the reality is that the short form video formula is already falling apart these feeds are a constant stream of videos where it's hard to focus on anything so how much do you think a random advertisement from a big corporate company is going to perform in this show Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent investor call that the monetization efficiency of reels is much less than feed so the more the reels grow even though it adds to the engagement to the system overall it takes some time away from the feed and we actually lose money and then right after that they took away the reels Creator fund the way they were paying creators making reels on Instagram and meanwhile while we look at tiktok who's been incredibly successful and has been growing so much it's still losing money while YouTube makes money from those 5 to 15 second ads that companies use to do brand building this is simply not possible on Tick Tock now even if Tick Tock loses money this is not a big deal they are controlled by a big company by then so it's not a big problem but it's clear that today the short form video formula is not even working for the companies that made it in the first place and this is also showing on the other side the side of the people making held the content the creators while Instagram is just same kit and removing the whole Creator funnel together tick tock's Creator fund has been heavily criticized for giving incredibly low payouts even if you get millions of views because it's a fixed amount and everybody's just scrambling to get a piece of a fixed pie and if you look at Tick Tock reels or even YouTube shorts many creators that started with these platforms now realize that they cannot build long-term and sustainable business on these platforms so they're always looking to move to long-form content whether it's YouTube videos or a podcast or any other ways where they can build a more solid business so in the end this whole system is bad for everyone it's bad for the companies that made it it's bad for the creators and it's bad for the users that fall into this black hole of scrolling and it turns out that there is a solution to this but to get to it we need to look at the complete opposite direction while this tsunami of short form videos has been taking the spotlight and wiping everything in its direction something else has been happening behind the scenes and no one's really talking about it because long form content had a Renaissance in this new world of super fast media people who didn't want to play the game said it and just double down on the entire opposite direction podcasts are making the biggest examples with some of the most successful ones worldwide like the flagrant podcast or Joe Rogan topping even three or four hour conversations the podcasting Market went from 4 billion dollars in 2020 to 18 billion dollars in 2022 with no signs of stopping then came newsletters and long-form written content often that you pay for with substack leading the pack and gathering over 500 000 paying subscribers for their newsletter content and on YouTube with the introduction of shorts the normal videos have been getting longer and longer so if people are getting brainwashed by these Tick Tock style dopamine hits short attention span Extravaganza why are we seeing an explosion of three hour podcasts and 40 minute YouTube videos even movies are going in a completely counter-intuitive Direction in 2021 the average length of the top 10 highest grossing movies was 131 minutes well back in 1981 it was just 110 minutes people are getting addicted to that fast dopamine heat type of content yes but they are more than willing to spend 30 minutes watching a YouTube documentary if they are able to find the right one and this this is the solution The Missing Link so let's look at what we have here on one side we have Tick Tock Instagram reels shorts whatever you want to call them they have cracked the code on how to bring Discovery to a huge library of contents to billions of people but at the same time they have created a massively addictive machine of short-term dopamine hits it's an incredible tool to discover new stuff but that's the only thing you can do you cannot go deep into anything and on top of that the companies that make this are starting to show the first cracks because they're not able to monetize as well as they expected and as soon as a Creator gets some success well the first thing they want to do is move somewhere else where they can build a real business and on the other side it's clear that people still want to spend three hours enjoying a conversation or a very deep movie and this is extraordinary but this side has a problem it lacks a way for people to find this interesting stuff have you ever tried searching for a podcast episode on a specific topic it's an atrocious experience and so I mean are you getting it this is the solution what can finally give some sense to the scrolling machine allow creators to finally Thrive and giving interesting long-form content the discovery engine that it really needs and in the meantime as always the companies will make billions of dollars so now these companies have billions of dollars tens of thousands of Engineers um but thousands of Engineers designers and product managers but there are three things that they need to nail in order to make this work the first one is of course the link short form content and long-form content in a seamless way but that keeps them still separate this vertical scrolling Carnival is not the right way to watch a 30 minute documentary and at the same time you wouldn't watch a series of 10 second Clips on normal YouTube and in practice there's many ways to do this for example one can be to show the long form content at the end of a short like in this random design that I made and just a product manager guy making videos on YouTube so I leave this to them to figure it out but what they absolutely need to make this work is number two which is changing what the algorithm optimizes for currently these platforms optimized for the retention of a single video how much people watch that single short or whatever but to make this Missing Link work they need to change the algorithm to make sure it optimizes for the overall retention so for the show short content all the way to the long form content this way you will push on the platform people that are yes able to hook people in with the flashy stuff but that then are able to make people keep watching long form and deeper content because this is the only place where platforms can really monetize with ads and this brings us to points number three which is creating a platform where creators can build the real businesses if you do this properly these companies will be able to make tons of cash and it's important that they give something back to the creators because this is what fills the machine in the long run and actually companies are starting to make the first baby steps toward this the new tick tock like homepage of Spotify has been received not in the best way for music but I think it's amazing for podcasts on the other side Tick Tock has increased the maximum length of a video from 15 seconds to 1 minute and now to 10 minutes and one of the requirements for a video to be eligible to be monetized for their new Creator fund is that the video is at least one minute long so it's clear that they are starting to go into the longer video territory but the problem here is still that with the scrolling Behavior they have instilled in their app people on Tick Tock are just primed to swipe away this is not the right place to show these longer videos I really hope this is the way we get out of the Mindless Doom scrolling without any purpose but I may be wrong here maybe yes everything will collapse into one minute videos and so you will maybe not end up watching this next video which by the way you should

Channel: Enrico Tartarotti

Views: 1,536,708

Keywords: tiktok, why tiktok is bad, short form content, short content, shorts, youtube shorts, instagram reels, why instagram reels, why tiktok videos, moon, meta, tiktok terrible, tiktok mashup, tiktok mashup 2022, tiktok mashup 2022 january

Id: 1F85wJmhDkA

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Tue May 02 2023