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We live in the age of the short attention span. And yet: Finding a recipe in a blog post requires first scrolling past a novella detailing the chef’s personal experience with the dish. Streaming shows run long, dragging into feature-film territory. Episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast are sometimes longer than Avatar. Even platforms once known for short-form media are stretching the limits: Gone are the days of the 280-character tweet; on X, a user can now pay extra to post up to 25,000 characters (this article, for comparison, is under 6,000). YouTube videos once had a hard cap at 10 minutes long; now they can (and do) reach 12 hours. Even TikTok is going long, reportedly testing a new limit of up to 15 minutes for some creators.
Surely some of this is born of genuine audience interest. Length, after all, is sometimes associated with quality. Reading all 1,000-odd pages of Infinite Jest, or watching all three hours of Oppenheimer, is considered a worthwhile accomplishment in a way that watching a 60-second TikTok dissection of shower grout is not. Sometimes, storytelling merits a prodigious length.
Other times, it does not. Online media are frequently padded not because the subject demands it but because creators are attempting to game algorithms or make more money. On TikTok, people filibuster, delaying their ultimate point, or divide their videos into needless “parts”—strategies to hook viewers and drive up valuable engagement numbers. All of this behavior is a side effect of our algorithmically powered reality. These systems, on the most basic level, are supposed to recommend videos, text, and whatever else people post online (sorting through everything would be impossible without them). Yet in the process, they end up creating incentives for people to generate a lot of junk—and bloated junk, at that. Anything shorter than a minute isn’t even eligible to be monetized on TikTok.
Some of these apps seem to realize what they’ve done. TikTok and YouTube give users the ability to speed things up, watching videos at double speed if they so choose. But the solution only underscores the problem: Everything is too long. Much of this stems from all those ads that run before videos or between paragraphs—for laundry detergent, jewelry, tax software, whatever. Any extra real estate for these ads, be it space on a page or time on a podcast, is a chance for platforms to make more money. Longer articles and videos have more room to seed in advertisements while avoiding the feeling of overwhelm that might come from stuffing them into shorter material.
Back in 2019, one YouTuber found that videos upwards of 10 minutes long brought her triple the revenue than shorter ones, according to The Verge. “It’s a lot easier to monetize content when it’s longer-form,” Scott Kessler, the technology-sector lead at Third Bridge, a market-research group, told CNN last month. A spokesperson for TikTok told me that, in 2023, creators who made longer-form content more than doubled their revenue year over year. (Google, which owns YouTube, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Algorithms promise to do one basic job: pluck the supposedly best content possible from the deluge of the internet and surface it to users. Some algorithms may in fact prioritize length metrics (such as time spent watching) as an indicator of quality. But it’s hard to say for sure, because tech companies tend not to give many details about their inner workings. Longer videos, like all other content, are recommended based on the preferences and interests of viewers, the TikTok spokesperson said.
In some ways, whether an algorithm is actually hard-coded to prefer longer-form videos matters less than whether creators think an algorithm prefers longer-form videos. Folk theories of algorithms end up influencing what kinds of content get made. If people start believing that longer videos or podcast episodes do “better,” they’ll make more of them.
Content creators are doing their best with limited data. From December 2020 to July 2022, Ashley Mears, the chair of cultural sociology and new media at the University of Amsterdam, conducted research while embedded with a company that made videos specifically designed to please Facebook. “At one point, it was three-minute videos,” she told me. “That was the minimum amount of time that a video needed to be in order to make money.” The company would script its content accordingly, adding in cliff-hangers or delaying resolution into the second minute to keep people watching. Sometimes platforms fight back against this so-called engagement bait, penalizing those who do it. “Content creators are really savvy, especially if they’re professionals,” Mears told me. “They study the numbers and the metrics. And they really will give platforms whatever it is that platforms want.” But what platforms want can change, leaving creators scrambling.
People are afraid that generative AI will pollute the internet. But more basic forms of the technology—social-media and search algorithms—have been doing that for years. “In a way, what we’re already getting is people who are making culture in response to machines and these machine-learning codes,” Mears explained. Generative AI makes content even cheaper and easier to produce than it is today. All of this behavior is just a taste of what’s to come.
None of this is to say that good writing or video content can’t be long. But, as any quality writer or YouTuber will tell you, a story should dictate its own length, running only as long as it needs to.
Tyler Fields is your internet guru, delving into the latest trends, developments, and issues shaping the online world. With a focus on internet culture, cybersecurity, and emerging technologies, Tyler keeps readers informed about the dynamic landscape of the internet and its impact on our digital lives.
