[dorkwood]

It's funny how videos such as this, which are optimized for engagement over learning, explain things in a backwards fashion. Instead of explaining how the thing works, and then showing you how to make the parts to build one yourself. They show you how to make the parts, and only explain what it is you're building at the very end.

[xmprt]

He never said the video was supposed to be about learning. The entire channel seems to be based around technology crafts. It's not my cup of tea but that doesn't mean no one else shouldn't enjoy it.

[dorkwood]

Oh, I didn't say no one would find it enjoyable. It's quite the opposite, actually: videos optimized for engagement tend to be more enjoyable for most people. You don't get to 2.4 million subscribers by making videos that no one likes to watch, after all.

[manigandham]

It depends on the video. Other projects on this channel have more descriptions upfront. Overall it's a general interest channel, not purely about the mechanics of how things work.

[sukilot]

It's explained in the beginning of the video.

[dorkwood]

The general idea of what he's building is explained ("a system that allows you to retain eye-contact with whoever you're talking to over the internet"), but how it works is not covered. He dives straight into how to build the collapsible shrowd while saying "this is super important for the whole system to work, as you will see", and only covers its purpose much later in the video.

[RandomBacon]

It's also annoying when they don't show how the finished result works until the very end. This video is also guilty of this (you see the device, but the video call where it's being used is at the end).

Why waste 10+ minutes watching it being built, then finaly get to the end and discover it you don't like the result. Of course smarter people will just click to the end at first, but I'm guessing much less than half of people do that.

Sidenote: Does anyone know why these videos all seem to be at least 10 minutes long? Is there better monetization after a certain threshold?

[sulam]

There's a couple factors going on. One is the fact that Youtube's algorithm recommends videos based on a set of engagement-related metrics. Hitting Like/Subscribe is a big measure of engagement, but according to people do this for a living, the most important metric is watch time. This is true both for the video _and_ your channel, so having a lot of long, fully watched videos will cause your channel and its videos to be recommended more often.

The second factor is that one factor you get paid on as Youtuber is video length. Getting people to watch longer videos makes your revenue go up.

[manigandham]

!0 minutes allows multiple midroll ads. These videos were also recommended over shorter ones, although the lift is no longer as significant as it used to be.