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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

YouTube has recently have had massive, competitive attacks on their business and have had to quite drastically amend their offerings.

TikTok, SnapChat and instagram has all had huge success in their short form formats.

It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together.

While the battle is far from over, had YouTube not reacted, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these mobile first competitors would have started experimenting with long form content by now.

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I feel like that is a different niche. Most of the videos i watch on youtube are long form, although i have no idea how much that is the norm.

A data point: I watch highlights of sport events, videos that explain how to do things, some music videos (rarely.) Those are only on YT at scale.

The silly funny videos I see people looking at on TikTok all day long? Not interested.

There are also lot of experts (obviously its the internet so anyone could be anyone) who post educational content on their field of expertise in the 20min - 1 hour length video format. I don't see that type of content anywhere else.

It truly is amazing the sort of learning resources on the internet you can find if you are really truly interested in a topic.

> There are also lot of experts (obviously its the internet so anyone could be anyone) who post educational content on their field of expertise in the 20min - 1 hour length video format. I don't see that type of content anywhere else.

Exactly. This is the kind of content that I love to watch (in particular also lecture recordings from top experts).

In my observation, this kind of content is hard to monetize by showing ads: I notice that the ads shown at such videos (for me and friends - which may be a biased sample) simply neither fits my interests nor the subject area of such videos.

Imagine watching a dev talk and get a very loud/bright/cheesy ads about some construction tool. That's the kind of stuff that makes me download those videos instead.

While it's a different niche, the worry for YouTube is that younger viewers generally consume a lot of short form video. They might eventually shift to watching more long form content as they get older, but if they're accustomed to one provider it's going to be easier for that provider to expand into long form content than for YouTube to persuade them to switch or use a second provider. So YouTube feels it has to move into short form in order to ensure long term maintenance and growth of its user base.

YouTube used to be mostly short videos. 2-3 minutes was typical. They've moved to longer videos by changing their algorithms to encourage creators to waffle on.

TikTok is much closer to how YouTube started out.

Every three days I have to close the "shorts" bar in YouTube, which has been returning ever more quickly when I remove it. I yearn for the days before even the "Okay, we'll remove it for two weeks" or whatever. It was obvious that things wouldn't stay that way.

TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram had the capital and the advertising parts completely figured out. They sidestepped a lot of legal troubles by limiting the length and by insisting on the vertical video format, unsuitable for pirated movies, shows, and most musical clips.

>It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together.

We're doomed

What if one is scrolling HN and the other instagram? Or if they are reading different books?

The commenter mentioned instead of an activity together "watching tv" so other activities that they could do together is the actual alternative

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