• Short version?

    Capitalism.

    Long version, youtube rewards watch time most of all. Youtubers are underpaid and have to try and squeeze as much from their channel as they can if that’s their dayjob. And in the “optimise everything until it is no longer fun” spirit of capitalistic entertainment, youtubers have realised that around 20 minutes is the ideal length for most content (unless you’re in a specific niche for very longform stuff).

    And while I do enjoy Alec’s general rambling and playing around with the gadgets he educates us about – Yeah. I can see it as the byproduct of youtube culture that it is.

    • I will start a youtube / peertube channel soon, but most of the videos are only a few minutes long, even if the research and the stuff I do and build took weeks or even months.

      My concept is, not doing everything for money and don’t optimize everything for money, but do it for sustainability and fun. Maybe I have the wrong concept?

      • /shrug If you’re just doing youtube for the sake of doing youtube, you can do whatever you want. Any audience that comes to you will be your audience and you’ll probably not make much money but maybe you’ll make a bit of it.

        But if you want youtube to replace your dayjob, then yeah kinda?

        And like, most content creators talk about being horribly burnt out and overworked. They quit their nine-to-fives to have YouTube as their main gig, and it starts out as a labour of love, until the bills start coming and the channel starts being more and more of a business, and then they start working insane hours and become slaves to the analytics graphs and (…)