[bdndndndbve]

Pretty sure the answer is ads. "Long-form" content has more opportunities to insert ads or sponsored content. There's not a lot of money to be made being quick and to the point.

People's viewing habits have also changed in response, rather than having the algorithm bounce them around they'd rather half-pay-attention to a 3 hour video. But I think the trend of ever-growing video lengths was spawned by a desire for more revenue.

[AlotOfReading]

The market bifurcated. Short form content became Snapchat and tiktoks and YouTube shorts. There were never any significant competitors to YouTube for long form content because of how expensive streaming it is, so all of that content remained on the one platform with an audience and decent payouts.

[galangalalgol]

I only go to youtube when I want to learn something that is hard to explain with pictures. Usually that is diy stuff for me, but I can see it being something like a dance move or a boss fight in a game, those things take longer than a minute to explain but never take more than 15 unless it is padded.

[singron]

Youtube used to add mid-roll ads to videos that were at least 10 minutes, so your video would basically make twice as much if you stretched it that long. I think the threshold is 8 minutes nowadays.

Short form is hard to monetize (if you are Google 8 years ago) since you need to split ad revenue and attribution among the several videos you watch between ads. This goes against a ton of prior trends in the ad industry where last touch attribution is still king and ad fraud is hard to combat. If course tiktok did it late with creator rewards.

[xnorswap]

> Youtube used to add mid-roll ads to videos that were at least 10 minutes

YouTube used to not let you go over 10 minutes at all, but that's a very long time ago now. You'd get guides split up into "... Part 3 of 7"

[jamesy0ung]

I quite like to grab the transcript from youtube and ask chatgpt to give me the key points.

[bredren]

What is your workflow for this?

I recently described a manual workflow that includes extracting comments and combining them with the transcript using a system prompt.

I’m curious how others are approaching this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42901077

[jamesy0ung]

YouTube generates a transcript that’s on the sidebar (above the recommended videos). It is kind of broken text though, so I copy and paste the block into Gemini (it’s free and has a huge context) and ask it to read it and generate the points for me

[ashoeafoot]

Also you can split out shorts.