the first job the video Quinton Hoover, 24, a Midwesterner, uploaded to his YouTube channel in 2013 is one minute 48 seconds long; His next offer lasted only nine seconds. Eight years later, Hoover’s most recent video, uploaded on November 8, is an analysis of the Nickelodeon naughties sitcom. Win—In total, it ran for 5 hours, 34 minutes, and 59 seconds.
Who in the world would want to sit down and watch a grown man talk for nearly six hours about a children’s television program that lasted less than three years? Tip question, easy answer: 1.5 million people. Hoover’s Win the video is only 23 minutes shorter than the first two videos Lord of the Rings general movie; it’s five hours and 22 minutes longer than average video posted on most popular YouTube channels. In it, Hoover summarizes each episode of the show through the dub, played with Win The Happy Meal toy, which includes a hairpin and a plastic brush, and wears a jacket over the microphone to see if the show exists in a “super simulation”. It’s a recipe for disaster that has somehow turned into a feast for the eyes, but the question remains. What exactly prompted someone to make a 5-hour pop culture analysis video — and what motivated millions of other people to watch it?
Hoover’s video isn’t his first foray into super-long content. In June, he amassed 1.9 million viewers with “iBinged iCarly,” a 4 hours and 45 minute video about another Nickelodeon show. Of course, that was only the first batch. Hoover’s Monday iCarly The analysis ran for three hours and 35 minutes, attracting another million viewers. That’s more than eight hours of iCarly Content. “People keep calling them video essays — I don’t like the term, I think it’s really pretentious,” says Hoover. “I want to start calling them breakdowns, because it’s funny for a variety of reasons. I think it’s completely fair to call a five-hour sentence about Win an incident.”
Hoover isn’t the only creator to make such “incidents,” but before we dive into that, let’s take a look at some ancient history. In 2012, the Pew Research Center found that “the average duration of the most popular YouTube videos is two minutes a second.” In 2019, when analyst and journalist Julia Alexander wrote “YouTube videos keep getting longer”, she mentioned the videos are 20, 30 and 60 minutes long. These days, few people consider a half-hour video on YouTube to be “long”. In the same month, Hoover uploaded Win videos, YouTube’s suggestion box fed me an hour and 52 minute analysis of teen drama Pretty little liars (Of course “part 1”) and one hour 42 minute video about Disney’s FastPass history system. Combined, these videos have more than 3 million views.
This trend seems to have started in earnest in January 2021, when a YouTube user named Action Button uploaded evaluation five hours, 56 minutes of the video game series Tokimeki Monument, even though he didn’t hit the million-view mark. Later that month, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson released a two-hour 33-minute video about the supernatural drama Diary of a vampire and accumulated about 6 million views. Nicholson, 30, who lives in Los Angeles, said: “It’s literally my most watched video right now. “I certainly didn’t expect it to do as well as it did.”
Nicholson’s first videos, uploaded in 2011, were over a minute long. Over the years, they gradually increased in length, until she released her first half-hour video (approximately approx. The greatest performer) in 2018. More broadly, YouTube videos start to regularly exceed the 10 minute mark around 2016, when the platform’s algorithm seemed start prioritizing “Timed” versus views, prompting YouTube’s biggest creator at the time, PewDiePie, to complain: “If you want to appear on YouTube these days, just make long videos, any kind of pace. , quality , is not without , damn . ” Back then, videos had to reach 10 minutes to be eligible for mid-roll ads; Shorter videos can only run ads at the beginning and at the end. The more ads a video has, the more money creators can earn.
