3 ms·

YouTube says more than 1.5B people are watching Shorts each month

5 points by alexrustic 4y ago

PennRobotics 4y ago
1.5B unique users seems crazy, although I'm one of the users in that statistic because I have accidentally clicked on a few of those. I've never been a fan of watching portrait videos on a landscape monitor, and that's what most of the "shorts" I've experienced have been. Also, I think my attention span is too long to be part of the target audience.
al_borland 4y ago
Shorts are an answer to a problem YouTube created. The average video used to be around 3 minutes, but then someone at good realized views weren't the important metric, it was watch time. They changed their systems to incentivize creators to make longer videos. Now it seems the average is up around 10+ minutes. Not everyone wants to sit around for 10-60 minutes to watch a video that should be 45 seconds or 2 minutes. They introduced Shorts (to compete with TikTok) and act like it's some new thing. They could have just fixed their policies for normal videos so there aren't 2 separate worlds inside of YouTube and people can just make a video the proper length to cover the content they need to cover instead of making the video artificially long or short to fit into some model that YouTube spent too much time designing. Ok, I think I'm done with my rant.
- WalterGR 4y ago
  They've done the exact same thing with web pages. Google started penalizing pages and sites with "low content". So now if a page ranks well and could potentially answer your query, you know it's going to have a ton of fluff. That's why on pages for cooking recipes, for example, you have to scroll through the author's life story before getting to the recipe. And people hate doing that. So to solve the problem they created, Google added to search results the "Knowledge Panels" and "People also ask" sections and such. And it has a nice benefit for Google - probably unintentional: people stay on Google properties rather than clicking away to 3rd-party sites. Some relevant links: "The web starts on page four" - 306 points and 239 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166108 "Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019" - 435 points and 289 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477201 I want to add a huge caveat to the latter link: The top-voted comment is true - when only considering Wikipedia and similar sites (e.g. ones with similar missions and ones using permissive licenses for their content.) nend's response is also spot-on, in that it's a problem for other kinds of sites.

5 points by alexrustic 4y ago

1.5B unique users seems crazy, although I'm one of the users in that statistic because I have accidentally clicked on a few of those. I've never been a fan of watching portrait videos on a landscape monitor, and that's what most of the "shorts" I've experienced have been. Also, I think my attention span is too long to be part of the target audience.

al_borland 4y ago

Shorts are an answer to a problem YouTube created. The average video used to be around 3 minutes, but then someone at good realized views weren't the important metric, it was watch time. They changed their systems to incentivize creators to make longer videos. Now it seems the average is up around 10+ minutes. Not everyone wants to sit around for 10-60 minutes to watch a video that should be 45 seconds or 2 minutes. They introduced Shorts (to compete with TikTok) and act like it's some new thing. They could have just fixed their policies for normal videos so there aren't 2 separate worlds inside of YouTube and people can just make a video the proper length to cover the content they need to cover instead of making the video artificially long or short to fit into some model that YouTube spent too much time designing. Ok, I think I'm done with my rant.

WalterGR 4y ago
They've done the exact same thing with web pages. Google started penalizing pages and sites with "low content". So now if a page ranks well and could potentially answer your query, you know it's going to have a ton of fluff. That's why on pages for cooking recipes, for example, you have to scroll through the author's life story before getting to the recipe. And people hate doing that. So to solve the problem they created, Google added to search results the "Knowledge Panels" and "People also ask" sections and such. And it has a nice benefit for Google - probably unintentional: people stay on Google properties rather than clicking away to 3rd-party sites. Some relevant links: "The web starts on page four" - 306 points and 239 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166108 "Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019" - 435 points and 289 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477201 I want to add a huge caveat to the latter link: The top-voted comment is true - when only considering Wikipedia and similar sites (e.g. ones with similar missions and ones using permissive licenses for their content.) nend's response is also spot-on, in that it's a problem for other kinds of sites.