Shorts are mostly just “here’s a weird or unexpected thing, look how weird or unexpected it is”. There’s also regular, formulaic stuff like Half as Interesting

Shorts are mostly just “here’s a weird or unexpected thing, look how weird or unexpected it is”. There’s also regular, formulaic stuff like Half as Interesting which tend to be about one paragraph of information laboriously spread out over five minutes of generic stock footage and painfully tedious jokes. YouTube, at its best, are the videos where someone genuinely interested in a topic can show you why it’s interesting and hold your attention, allowing the content to dictate the length. CGP Grey probably being the most perfect prototypical example of this. Or it could come in the form of a Richard Feynman lecture, with absolutely no production value needed beyond reasonably intelligible audio.