What I would like more people on the Internet to follow is the old newspaper method of writing. It worked a lot like this:
Headline level summary (five words)
Sentence level summary (twenty or thirty words)
Paragraph level summary (maybe a hundred words)
Topical detail (a thousand words).
Newspapers did this in part to cater to readers who skim and in part to make it easier for editors to trim or expand articles when they had more or less space available. The beauty of it for something like a YouTube video is that impatient people can get the thirty-second how-to out of the way, and the ones like you who want experience, stories and conjecture can hang on for the rest.
For me, the real problem with watching anything in a video format is that I can read faster than they can talk, especially when I can easily skip to the sections that I prefer. Given a choice between a transcript and a talking head, I’ll take the transcript every time. I don’t even frequent news sites that only offer videos. (For example, on a site like cnn.com, I skip right over pages that don’t have a written story.
Some people are looking to be stars. I watch a lot of tutorials on a certain subject and have learned to skip the first couple of minutes of the videos because they almost always consist of intro music and mugging for the camera, then a bunch of content-free chatter.
This has been known for years. A known principle called the Wadsworth Constant states that the first 30% of any video can be safely skipped.
At one point, YouTube added a feature to help ameliorate the problem–simply append “&wadsworth=1” to your video URL and it will start playing at the 30% mark. Sadly, the feature appears to no longer work.
When I first started doing little home videos I chopped out heaps and left just the interesting bits. When I looked at them later, I realised they were still way, waaay-the-hell too damn long. So I started editing even more out of my videos. I look at those videos now and they are *still *way, waaay-the-hell too damn long.
The extreme editing down process that seems to be required to produce a decent video takes a while to learn, even assuming one is capable of the self-examination required to realise you need to learn it.
There is a quote that is to be attributed to Mark Twain, Blaise Pascal and probably anyone else who is vaguely memorable. “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” This is an old old problem.
Very true but the problem is heaps worse with video because there is physical effort in writing a long rambling letter (even if there is less mental effort than writing a concise letter). That effort limits people.
There is practically no effort in leaving video camera running while you blather.
I’m not sure if the video makers have this in mind, but all else being equal AFAIK the Youtube search index score will be higher if the video is longer. So padding it out could make it get more views, which means more money.
There are podcasts and podcasts. And then there are podcasts.
On the one hand: Professionally done podcasts, made by people with brains and talent, are as great as anything you’ll find in any other journalistic or artistic medium. Poster children: Radiolab, This American Life.
On the other hand: Listening to Kevin Smith endlessly dribbling words from his face, after he’s smoked a joint, is a sure-fire way to make you want to kill yourself in very short order (although I do quite like listening to Kevin Smith talk in some other contexts, I should add).
So is, say, listening to a few random 20-somethings blather on about something while arranged around a table, for no apparent reason other than that they happened to be at the office that day, which seems to pass for a podcast over at Slate.
All part of the democratic miracle that is the internet, I suppose. You take the bad with the good. Wait, no you don’t. You throw the bad out the nearest window, and then take the good.
Yeah I think people follow a structure like this, without thinking, even for situations where it doesn’t fit so well, like how-tos.
I’ve complained previously about presentations where the first thing they do is list out all of the sub-concepts that they’re about to define for you, and the specific ways that they will discuss them. It seems like a sensible idea in the abstract, but so often you would need to already understand the content of the presentation for this not to go whoosh. So it’s just babble.
Obviously when recording a video or doing a presentation, you need to establish with your audience that they are watching the correct thing. But if that requires more than a couple of sentences, something is wrong. In the case of youtube videos, often the title is sufficient.
If there is too much filler then it wasn’t edited well. That in itself is an editing “flub”. We could argue about whether “not edited well” means it is therefore un-professional. I would say it is, but then, I am a professional editor.
Admittedly, sometimes it is out of the editor’s control. Sometimes a professional editor will be given a script that is awful but tries to tighten it up. But that improved version might be nixed by the client who insists on going with the horrible, completely long and loose version.
But if a editor is professionally skilled and has some control over the final look and timing of the video, than it should be tight enough to keep a viewer involved.
The editing on most YouTube videos is dismal and it drives me up the wall.
A related personal pet peeve of YouTube video production/editing: What is up with the horrible selection of music added to so many videos? The song might not be that bad (though it usually is), but often the song selection is completely inappropriate for the video it accompanies.
In addition, so often the music is so horribly mixed it buries or completely replaces the important natural sound that was recorded along with the original raw video. (e.g. sports highlights compilations where the crowd and announcer sound is completely missing from the final edited version).
Oh great, you just gave me a nightmare flashback to cutting a “humorous” video clip for a law firm. They had 45 minutes of material, and it took hours to get them to let me cut it down to 30 - everyone wanted their “bit” in, and they all seemed to be sitting in the editing room with me.
If they had just let me do my freaking job, I could have made it actually, you know, funny. But the result would have been only 3 to 4 minutes, tops.
Well, I can agree about the unnecessary ‘introduction’ stuff. However, not everyone is quick learner. Some people need things explained more slowly and very clearly, so a 30-sec ‘how to’ video for them wouldn’t exactly be helpful. They’d probably end up watching it several times before they finally learn ‘how to’.
I appreciate the more lengthy and thorough ‘how to’ videos some people make.
Perhaps the length and redundancy is a habit they picked up from television, where actual content is expensive, so they pack it front and back will bumper shit next to the commercials, so the 43 minutes of an hour show works out to more like 17 minutes worth of unique content[sup]*[/sup]. Which cuts the cost of production.
But I decry a new editing style that might be interesting in small bits, but not for three full minutes of video. I speak, of course, of this nasty practice of sniping out the lulls between phrases, so that where the speaker might have taken a breath or paused for punctuation, that is cut out, so that the dialog has a sort of machine-gun urgency. It is wrong, and it must stop.
Just pour the molten aluminum into the ant hill. We didn’t click on your video to hang out with you like we’re friends or particularly admire you.
Just give me your two cents about elevatorgate. Don’t tell us the entire history of elevatorgate first. We know it. That’s why we entered “elevatorgate” in the search field.
Often trying to get around YouTube automated copyright ContentID hits. A lot of weird stuff happens there, either because the automated system tends to err on the overly broad side, or people abusing the system to try and get some diverted revenue, or both.
In some cases, they may upload their video, are surprised when one section of audio gets flagged, and then quickly have to edit up some sort of replacement audio for a re-upload.
Someone took the time to sit down and explain some piece of kit, and they keep mumbling “sorry, let me get it to focus” and their microphone sucks and they have shaky cam and so on.
It’s doubly annoying when the video is about photography gear or techniques, meaning that the person on the video should know better.
Why don’t they spend five minutes and clip out all of the annoying blurry/shaky-cam attempts before they got the good shot? You can even do that much right on your iPhone.
A close second is YouTube videos by people with annoying mannerisms (e.g. sucking their teeth every third word). I don’t know why it seems that such mannerisms more common in YouTube than in real life.
I think your estimate of 17 minutes of unique content is spot on.
Besides the bumpers, they also have to spend a solid minute before the commercial break explaining what is going to happen later on, and they have to spend two minutes after the break recapping what they already said, for the fifth time. At one time I found that I could watch an hour episode of Mythbusters in 20 or 25 minutes, skipping all of the repeats and padding.