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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

This is a really cool video and I don't mean to detract from it, but seeing how its 10 minutes and 8 seconds long annoyed me so much (and not for the reason you think).

"10 minutes" is an ad milestone for videos on youtube. I systematically click away and hide videos that are between 10:00 and 10:20 minutes long: They'll almost certainly have been artificially slowed down to match the ad requirements.

It's infuriating, and once you know about it, you see it everywhere. Anyway, in this instance it matters a lot less as the audio is completely unimportant…

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YouTube just changed the ad milestone to 8 minutes, and this was posted after this change.

extremely recently, like a week ago or so, and this video was from 3 days ago; for the next few weeks I'm still going to look at the 10 min timestamp as more telling than an 8 min one (though I'm sure youtubers will "migrate").

Looking at the channel, 3 of its videos are between 10:04 and 10:09 long. Of course, that's nothing compared to a lot of other long-form youtubers I've seen with like 80% of their videos around that timestamp.

On the same topic, who determines the '10 minute' and '8 minute' time scale perfect for engagement and how did they end up with these numbers?

It's the minimum length of time a video must be in order to enable mid-roll ads.

The 10 minutes one seems pretty arbitrary, but to arrive at 8 mins I suspect that Google studies how much time there needs to be so that mid-roll ads don't negatively affect engagement.

(Shout-out to all the wonderful, brilliant engineers working on figuring out how to minimize the user's reaction to cramming AS MANY ADS as possible down their brain)

I am guessing many uploaders just don't realize that yet.

10 minutes is the the milestone for "mid-roll" ads. As far as I can tell, this video has no ads in the middle.

I saw about 4 full-replacement of video ads. It might be because I selected 4K video. I wonder if they push more ads when you select a higher quality.

"As far as I can tell" by your comment, you did not watch the video. I didn't even finish half the video, and I stopped it just before the 2nd ad break started.

maybe they have an ad blocker? I too watched the entire video and didn't see a single ad. Beginning, middle or end. I'm using adblock plus

don't hate the player hate the game

So they put in effort to make this, you consume it for free and then you complain that they can monetize it?

OK.

The comment was about when videos are artificially slowed down, not about monetisation per se.

But they make it slow to monetize it.

I got the point, but it's not really fair towards content creators.

Yes, people should be able to complain about things that are annoying and damage their experience. In this case, 10 minutes is an arbitrary time and the OP is arguing that this arbitrary number for monetization results in poorer quality videos.