Should I Make Shorter Videos?

Two announcements up front! This week I appeared on Season of the Bitch, the leftist feminist podcast with the coolest hosts in the universe! I talked about everything from the radical roots of my teaching philosophy to my approach to making TikTok videos. Go check it out wherever you get your podcasts! (Spotify) (Apple) (Soundcloud)

Also, my summer course is now registered with SPIRE! If you’re a Five College student in Western Massachusetts, you can take my “Plastics in Society” class during Summer Session II. This is essentially my Polymer Processing & Sustainability course, but curated for a general, non-ChemE audience.

That’s right, you can take a course with ME, and you don’t even need to be a STEM major to do so! I want to make plastic education accessible to as many people as I can. See below for more info, and see my website for the complete syllabus. Follow this link to register for the course before July 7th!!

Every now and again, I get a comment on TikTok that rubs me the wrong way. It’s always presented with the best intentions, so I don’t get mad per se, but it cuts to the core of my anxieties as a creator, so I’d like to talk about it this week.

The comment is usually something like this: “This was such a great video! Have you considered making shorter videos? [insert reason why I should make shorter videos]”

It’s true; I do make very long videos, and there is a chance that it’s hurting my view counts, preventing me from getting important messages out to the people who need to hear them.

This type of comment concerns me for several reasons, the first of which is that it says something about the person who makes it. On some level, it amounts to “Hey, I really loved this piece of art! I just wish there were less of it.” This offends me slightly as an artist; imagine walking up to the director of your favorite movie and saying, “yeah, that was great, but if it could be condensed to the length of a YouTube Short, that would be great”.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to bemoan our society’s alleged “falling attention span” (a questionable statistic to begin with, although I am very alarmed by the recent trend of adding Subway Surfer clips to increase watch time). It’s fully within my expectation that an app designed for 15-second dance challenges might not be the best hosting site for 10-minute video essays about gender, science, politics, and culture. When you’re scrolling TikTok for hours at a time, seeing short video after short video, and you come upon a more “long-form” work, it can be frustrating to sit through no matter how high the quality of that video is. (I recently got a comment reading, “someone leave a Like on this comment so that I remember to watch it after work”.)

Most often, when a viewer urges me to make shorter videos, they’re trying to help me reach my goal of educating the public. “You would get more views if your videos were shorter!” “People would watch the whole video if your videos were shorter!” Maybe so; I do think my videos are informative, important, and of good quality (that’s why I do them), so I should be doing whatever I can to get people to watch them, right? Views at all costs!!

There are even cases where watching my entire very-long video is important; in my Tide Pod video, which got half a million views, I bring up laundry sheets as an example of a “greener” product, only to pull the rug out ~4 minutes into the video by revealing that laundry detergent sheets also have PVA in them, and thus also pollute our water with microplastics. I pulled this trick to make a point to viewers about greenwashing, but I shudder to think of how many thousands of people watched only the first half of the video and then bought some detergent sheets, thinking that they were doing something great for the planet. Longer videos can have a cost when executed poorly.

Many content creators are incredibly paranoid when it comes to The Algorithm. Fans of mine will know that I’ve produced numerous multiple hours’ worth of content devoted to algorithmic bias against trans people on social media and what algorithm-based media is doing to our communities. Content creators are constantly sharing tips about how to achieve Big Number; followers, subscribers, watch time, views, click-through rates, CPM, impressions, view duration, and more.

Some of these methods are more practical; for example, in 2012, YouTube changed their algorithm to prefer watch time over other metrics, meaning longer videos became preferred. That meant if you were making minute-long animations in 2012, you were out of luck. Other methods of increasing views are more rooted in paranoia & anecdotal experience: should I be using trending sounds in my videos? How many hashtags should I be putting in the caption? Are in-app Stitches and Duets preferred over regular videos? Are videos edited in-app preferred over those edited using third-party apps like CapCut? Does it matter if I post my video in the morning or afternoon? How often should I be posting to Stories? Should I be using “YT” or the white circle emoji (⚪) in my captions because I might get shadow banned for saying the words “white people”? Am I allowed to say the word “kill” or do I have to use “unalive”? What’s stopping the platform from also banning the word “unalive” if “kill” is already censorable?

You could go on like this for hours, scrutinizing your content for everything that you think the opaque TikTok algorithm would like you to do. I sure have. As it turns out, according to insights from creators who have close relationship with Instagram, the Meta platform is currently preferring *checks notes* in-app video editing over CapCut, at least 3 but no more than 5 hashtags per post, vertical video over square or landscape video, posting to Stories 6 times per day (distributed evenly throughout the day, of course, so that’s 2 in the morning, 2 during the day, and 2 at night), and several other pieces of highly-specific guidance.