Okay, this is truly mundane and likely just stupid. A lot of short videos show up on my FB page. Some few are entertaining, but most are just pointless, as far as I can tell. A popular genre seems to be in the nature of “your parents never taught you this”, and they all seem to relate to paranoia about hotel rooms. One that I saw had someone smearing toothpaste on a bathroom mirror and then exclaiming “two way mirror!”.
Others are clearly clickbait with words like “watch til the end!” I’m assuming that people are just looking for bragging rights because of how many people watched their idiotic videos. Is this really a thing? Are people really that desperate for attention? What am I missing here?
Yeah, I understand that this is a thing. I just don’t understand the why of it. So eight billion people click on a crappy 30 second video. . .and then what? Profit!
If there’s an ad shown before the video, then yes, profit. If there’s not an ad, then they’re trying to get enough views to convince YouTube to let them monitize.
All (almost all?) of the short videos that show up on my Facebook feed involve time lapse photography of someone doing a craft or cooking something unusual or demonstrating “life hacks”. I sometimes stop and watch them, so I guess that’s reinforcing the algorithm to send me more and more. Some of them are clearing advertising a service, though (e.g. time lapse of someone cleaning a carpet is presumably advertising the carpet cleaning business).
(I saw that video this morning myself on YouTube Shorts. The algorithm is pretty good at showing me both mindless entertainment and interesting things I want to watch based on my browsing history, but it’s peppered with crap like this.)
I watched a couple of cooking videos from the Reelz feed. The cooking was bizarre and the food looked disgusting. That’s enough to show me the what, but I can’t answer the why.
The people who post videos earn money based on how many people watch their videos, plus for how long people watch the videos. That’s why you see “Watch until the end” captions, hoping it keeps viewers from moving to the next video (too soon).
I really, truly hate watching videos. Sometimes my husband will call me over to see one he finds amusing, but mostly, the ones I’ve seen are inane and a waste of my time. So I just don’t bother. It helps that I keep the sound off on my devices and have the setting that videos don’t automatically play. Saves a lot of irritation.
So I don’t have to watch an unknown video, what was so horrifying that her OB called the cops?
And I hate the fad [?] for instead of a nice block of writing I can enjoy, the news item is delivered in a craptastic video that I really don’t want to dick around watching. How freaking hard is it to write 250 words telling me what the frell is going on. Sigh.
The Reels (no “z”) portion of Facebook doesn’t have a ton of ads. What they’re doing to collecting data about what sort of does you watch, so that they can a) show you more similar videos to keep you on Facebook and b) aggregating marketing information about you which they sell.
I don’t click on an unnamed video unless it is from one of probably 5 people - and they don’t tend to give unnamed video links, the links would be embedded in a conversation =)
Most videos I pick up off Faceblort tend to be in a specific person’s feed - I will almost always click on one by Jacques Pepin demonstrating something [and he has some killer food suggestions, the tarte tatin is heavenly!!!]