Should I Make Shorter Videos?
Should I Make Shorter Videos?
On content creation and chasing views.
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.
Exhausting, isn’t it? Now imagine you’re me: you already have a full-time job that takes up most of your time, and then you also have to maintain an online presence through well-researched, informative, “long-form” content. (It’s not lost on me that a 5-five minute video would be considered “short-form” on YouTube but is considered “long-form” on TikTok or Instagram.)
No wonder my view counts are low; I guess I’m just not putting enough work in!!
Let’s do a little data collection to see how I can “improve my metrics”, shall we? This morning, I cataloged my most recent 50 TikTok videos (regardless of view count), as well as 10 other popular videos (>10,000 views) from the past 5 months, to see what trends I could extrapolate from them. Mostly, I wanted to see if increased video length relates to decreased watch time. The results may surprise you!
Here are the results, presented on a logarithmic scale to account for my occasional “viral" hit”. Fair warning, these plots look like trash; I’m haphazardly slapping them together on a Saturday afternoon, not preparing for a dissertation.
A linear trend line with a low R^2 value shows that there is little to no correlation between video length and view count. Still, it’s hardly supporting the point that my views would be higher if I made shorter videos. If anything, I might draw the conclusion that the longer I make a video, the more likely it is to be high-quality (at least by my standards), meaning the more likely it is to resonate with an audience.
Here are the results broken down by video topic. (And the award for worst-looking plot goes to…) Broadly speaking, I make videos related to anti-trans news coverage, activism in general (anything political not related solely to trans issues), cultural commentary, general STEM subjects, plastic-specific STEM videos, and Trans Joy. I also post podcast interview clips, which always under-perform (maybe I should add some Subway Surfer clips??)
I also sorted between videos that have some sort of algorithm-friendly approach to them: videos that were a Reply, Stitch, Duet, or otherwise incited audience interaction though comments. Zero correlation here, so either I’m doing something horribly wrong when I do make stitches, or there’s some confounding variable I’m not accounting for (e.g., algorithmic censorship), or the whole exercise is moot.
Finally, I compared videos that used trending sounds to those that don’t. Most often, these are the TikTok trends where I do a short skit to a popular audio (example 1, example 2), hence why they’re largely in the <15 second range. This is actually a meaningful trend: extremely short videos using sounds that everyone else is using at that time do indeed “go viral” more often, as indicated by their higher view counts. Success!
So, how does this inform my practice? Should I shift gears into only using trending sounds, only covering the Hottest Issues Of The Week™, and only keeping my videos <15 seconds or shorter?
Well, no. I mean, I could, but I’m not going to.
Here’s the thing: “Views at all costs” is bad for education and bad for art. Yes, we must find balance in all things; I often open my videos with a quippy one-liner (an equivalent to YouTube clickbait thumbnails on a platform where users don’t choose what they watch), plus I add jokes and nice visuals to my videos to keep my audience engaged during the long run times. But doing every trick in the book—from Subway Surfer compilations to slime videos to keeping my videos under 15 seconds—is a race to the bottom. I am not after Big Number, I am after Quality. I’m on the side of good art, and SOMETIMES that means appealing to the algorithm, and SOMETIMES that means I will get Big Number, but Big Number is not the goal here.
Also, regarding my laundry mishap, I do believe that it’s the viewer’s responsibility to watch a video to completion, and do further research, before making a decision about which products to buy, although when it comes to chemical safety I will definitely be more careful from now on.
There’s a viral video that I think about all the time, especially when a video that I’m proud of gets almost no views. Last summer, TikToker @grace_africa, who had 1.3 million followers at the time, posted a video at a convention where she had set up a meet-and-greet. Despite her ridiculously high follower count, nobody showed up to her event. This incredibly sad video (which she has since deleted and is now only viewable on Reddit or manosphere cringe compilations) is precisely what I fear most about content creation, and why I may never have a meet-and-greet myself:
What if despite my Big Numbers, nobody actually likes me? What if people see my work and Engage with it (by Liking, Saving, Commenting, etc.) but they don’t engage with it (on a personal, political, or spiritual level)? Would I rather have a million people who just think I’m inessential, who could take me or leave me, or would I rather have a few thousand views per video, but those few thousand people’s lives are changed forever, those few thousand people get to connect with me deeply? I’ll take the latter, thank you very much.
Fortunately, I think my audience recognizes this goal of mine. I get very sweet comments all the time from people telling me that I’m they’re favorite creator, that they always love seeing me on their feed, that they wish they had me as their real-life teacher, or even that I helped deradicalize them from becoming a TERF. Every time a video of mine flops, there’s always one or two people who say “Everyone should see this! Boosting!!” This past Trans Day of Visibility, people made lists of the best transgender creators, and listed my name amongst incredible trans activists like Alok V Menon, Chase Strangio, Alexandra Billings, and more. How many creators can say that?
I’m proud of what I do, and it’s not going to change for the sake of clicks.
So long as TikTok doesn’t get banned, that is; if it does, then I’m simping for the Instagram algorithm, baby! Six Story posts a day!!!
Currently Reading
For significantly more profound plots than above, see these two analyses of life expectancy: America vs England and socioeconomic disparities across America. Capitalism is doing great!!!
For significantly worse-looking plots than above, see this Twitter thread of student-made figures.
More news from England: the caretakers of Brianna Ghey, the 16-year-old trans girl who was murdered and then had her transness erased by the British media, were able to raise over £100,000 pounds in her name and gave her the burial she deserved. They also gave some of the money to the Mindfulness in Schools Project. Rest in power, baby girl, I’m sorry you weren’t protected in this life. Let’s also not forget about the numerous Black & brown trans people murdered here in America, constantly.
Rounding that out with some trans joy: I’m currently happy-weeping at Eli Erlick’s colorized photographs of trans life from decades ago. We truly are everywhere, at every time!
Watch History
(A podcast, but still) This snippet of Abolition Science puts into words so much of what I try to articulate about Western STEM education!
The two videos I recommend to people when they ask about my content creation philosophy are this one by CJ the X and this one by Internet Shaquille. Both embody a Seth Godin-esque ethos of “brand marketing over chasing views” which I articulate some of above. If you want to start producing video too, start here!
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna