YouTube videos keep getting longer

Take a look at YouTube’s Trending page, and you’ll see that videos from some of the site’s most popular creators have something in common. Jenna Marbles’ newest video is 20 minutes long. Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg’s is 30 minutes long. Shane Dawson’s latest documentary is more than 60 minutes long. YouTube, a site where videos used to hover around seven or eight minutes, is now inundated with videos that are running longer and longer. The change is partially due to what viewers are interested in, but it also represents creators’ latest attempt to earn as much revenue as they can from their videos.

Longer videos have more room for ads, and more ads mean an increase in revenue for creators. Breaking that 10-minute mark is particularly important: that’s the point at which YouTube begins letting creators insert ads into the middle of their videos, rather than just running an ad at the beginning.

One YouTuber, Shelby Church, found that she made three times as much revenue for videos that ran over 10 minutes than those that were shorter. Her longer videos even had more viewers, Church noted, incentivizing creators to make longer videos and plug more ads.

“You can add as many ads as you want, actually,” Church said in the video discussing how YouTube ads work. “I could throw in an ad every 30 seconds, but no one is going to watch that. That’s ridiculous. So I started adding two ads to the middle of my videos, and it’s insane.” She ended up making over $6,000 in June, which is more than the $1,800 she made in January.

Church didn’t change her output or the style of her videos, but they went from seven or eight minutes to 13 or 14. Other creators, like Jake and Logan Paul, started increasing their videos from under 10 minutes to 20 or 25 minutes regularly. Makeup channels started producing 30- to 40-minute tutorials, explainer videos became 30 minutes long, and even apology videos started to run long.

YouTube incentivized this in more ways than one. Not only are longer videos more valuable, but they’re favored by YouTube. The platform’s algorithm prefers content that keeps people engaged, encouraging them to spend even more time on the site. Company executives have tried to pivot to promoting responsible content, but the algorithm still favors longer content.

The result is a change in the type of videos that are dominating YouTube. Longer video essays, more extravagant vlogs, makeup tutorials, and commentary are all on the rise as a result, alongside political content, lengthy explainers, and documentary series. A recent report from the Pew Research Center discovered that the average length of a video among the top 250,000 channels was between 13 and 14 minutes. Coming across a 30-minute video isn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, it’s become the new normal.

“YouTube doesn’t care how many videos you watch, they just want you to stay on YouTube,” Lindsay Ellis, who makes video essays about popular films, tells The Verge. “Whether you’re watching 200 cat videos, or one video bitching about Game of Thrones of equal length, it doesn’t matter. It’s easier for people to stay on YouTube if you’re watching just one thing as opposed to 200 cat videos.”

Ellis said she’s always made longer videos because that works for her style. Some of her videos hit 45 minutes in length, and it’s a trend that’s seen throughout the essayist community. Ellis told The Verge that she feels like she “kind of lucked out that the algorithm eventually favored the type of content that I wanted to make.”

The drawback has been that not everything on YouTube benefits from length, which can lead to worse videos. “I do think that doing longer videos for the sake of having longer videos is bad,” Natalie Wynn, better known as her persona ContraPoints, tells The Verge. “A video should never be longer than it has to be.” Like Ellis, Wynn’s videos have always worked better as longer-form content, usually hitting 30 minutes minimum.

Big names in the YouTube community have been critical of unnecessarily lengthy videos. In 2016, PewDiePie criticized a friend, fellow YouTuber, Jacksepticeye, when he uploaded a video in which he disappeared to use the bathroom, remaining off-screen for more than a minute.

The trend toward longer videos will eventually change, Wynn believes. YouTube is just waiting on a creator to catch the entire community’s attention with a new format and shift directions.

“At some point, someone with a very punk rock attitude is going to come in and change everything,” Wynn says. “People will have gotten sick of long videos. Someone’s going to go really concise, and publish videos that are going to be way better than all of ours somehow and much shorter. Then that’s going to be the new step.”