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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

Worth mentioning that literally any video under 60 seconds is forced to be a short, which is that stupid type of YouTube video where they remove a bunch of controls and make the overall experience miserable.

So maybe that’s pushing longer-form content as well. Some people making 30 second videos moves to 90 second ones to avoid the bad format, this crowds the format and pushes others up as well?

Totally talking out of my ass here.

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Fortunately, a video does need to have a vertical screen resolution to be counted as a short. So landscape/widescreen videos don't seem to be affected there.

But this can definitely trip people up, especially now the maximum length of a YouTube short is 3 minutes instead of 1. If you recorded a 3 minute video on a phone (or other random vertical screen device like a Game Boy/DS/3DS), YouTube will classify it as a short and there's basically nothing you can do about it.

YouTube has been pushing for longer videos for a while now. I believe it has to do with getting more money for ads. I remember YouTube updated their guidelines suggesting creators to create longer videos (10+ minutes for better monetization)

I couldn't find a source (other than my memory) though, the earliest I could find is a reddit post from 2016 https://www.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/4v6bmy/wh...

More or less there was a shift in how Youtube allocated ad revenue, where instead of paying per view on any video over 10 minutes, they pay based on watch time alone (which makes sense with how they added mid-roll ads instead of just pre-roll ads). This incentivized longer videos, or at least didn't penalize them, but then more recently there was another shift in their recommendation algorithm to push these videos harder (I suspect because they found it increased watch time and thus ad impressions overall), and that really pushed the long-form videos into the mainstream.

One thing I don't understand regarding YouTube shorts is that they can't be casted to TV. Whenever I click a short while casting other videos on my phone, it says the casting will be stopped if I continue. Why on earth does such an arbitrary limitation exist?

If you are doing anything with youtube on a TV you should be using smarttube which allows shorts if you want. You can also just turn them off if you despise vertical video like I do.

> where they remove a bunch of controls

For your information, you can view every video through the normal interface by changing the URL to the usual /watch?.

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