Is the value of video really proportional to length? I think Iād rather 100M people watch a 2min intro than 4M people watch a 1hr deep dive, holding everything else constant. In general I expect diminishing marginal returns to longer content, as you say the most important things first.
It doesnāt seem to me like your methodology is able to really support your claim that the top cost-effectiveness is not short-form videos; instead thatās something that falls pretty directly out of the metric you chose.
I might prefer 100M people watch a 2-minute video than 4M watch a 1-hour video, but Iām not sure and Iām pretty sure I would take 5-6M people watching a 1hr video over 100M watching 2 min. What do you think the tradeoff is? I think itās sublinear but not very sublinear to the point that approximating as linear seemed fine.
I thought about this for a while, and what you are really trying to buy is engagement/āthought or career change or protests or letters to the government, etc.. This is why in the future, article reads/ābook reads are going to be weighted higher. Since reading a book is more effortful/āengaging than passively watching a video.
Actually, based on the metric, I adjusted for how much of the video is watched, not just views*minutes. Longer videos have a lower watch percentage and only the viewer minutes watched count.
I want to make a very weak claim that traditional-length Youtube videos 5-30 min are better. There just isnāt a significant enough sample here. I think if a random person were to start making shorts vs. podcasts on a random topic, theyād get similar viewer minutes since you can make many more shorts in the time it takes to make a podcast, etc.
I have some intuitions in that direction (ie for a given individual to a topic, the first minute of exposure is more valuable than the 100th), and that would be the case for supporting things like TikToks.
Iād love to get some estimates on what the drop-off in value looks like! It might be tricky to actually applyāwe/ācreators have individual video view counts and lengths, but no data on uniqueness of viewer (both for a single video and across different videos on the same channel, which Iād think should count as cumulative)
The drop-off might be less than your example suggestsāitās actually very unclear to me which of those 2 Iād prefer.
AI safety videos can have impact by:
Introducing people to a topic
Convincing people to take an action (change careers, donate)
Providing info to people working in the field
And shortform does relatively better on 1 and worse on 2 and 3, imo.
A way you can quantify this is by looking at ad CPMsāhow much advertisers are willing to pay for ads on your content.
This is a pretty objective metric for how much āinfluenceā a creator has over their audience.
Podcasters can charge much more per view than longform Youtubers, and longform Youtubers can charge much more than shortform and so on.
This is actually understating it. Itās incredibly hard for shortform only creators to make money with ads or sponsors.
There is clearly still diminishing returns per viewer minute, but the curve is not that steep.
Another question is not just what happens when the viewer is watching your content, but what happens after. The important part is not awareness but what people actually do as a result of that awareness.
Top of the funnel content like shortform is still probably useful, but I decided against doing it because short form creators famously have very little ability to influence their audience. They canāt really get them to buy products, or join discords, let alone join a protest.
But podcasters and longform Youtubers certainly can, as evidenced by a large chunk of people in AI safety citing Rob Miles as their entry point.
Longform CPMs for YouTubeās ad platform are roughly $3-10 for every 1,000 views.
I donāt really understand the CPM scaling between the length of videos. On my longest video of 40 minutes, I made roughly $7 per 1000 views. On my shortest video of 10 minutes, I made $4 per 1000 views. But that is just because Youtube shows more ads in that time. However, Iām not entirely sure how many ads they display per viewer per minute. Iām pretty sure the longer your content is the less ads they show per minute.
Sponsorships are usually 5-10x the ad CPM. So if you have a video that gets a million views, you could expect to make anywhere between $30-70k (but with wide error bars).
Shortform views are worth roughly 10-100x less on both ads and sponsorships.
It sounds pretty reasonable to me that a sponsorship on a longform video with 1 million views would convert more sales than a sponsorship on a shortform video with 100 million views.
Which is why you typically see almost every shortform creator struggling to break into longform, whereas longform creators can pretty easily make shorts without too much difficulty.
CPM is something I thought quite a bit about for audience quality. Someone like Dwarkesh Patel has a very high audience quality. Many billionaires, talented college kids, etc., watch. As expected, he gets to charge a ton for ad sponsorships.
Is the value of video really proportional to length? I think Iād rather 100M people watch a 2min intro than 4M people watch a 1hr deep dive, holding everything else constant. In general I expect diminishing marginal returns to longer content, as you say the most important things first.
It doesnāt seem to me like your methodology is able to really support your claim that the top cost-effectiveness is not short-form videos; instead thatās something that falls pretty directly out of the metric you chose.
I might prefer 100M people watch a 2-minute video than 4M watch a 1-hour video, but Iām not sure and Iām pretty sure I would take 5-6M people watching a 1hr video over 100M watching 2 min. What do you think the tradeoff is? I think itās sublinear but not very sublinear to the point that approximating as linear seemed fine.
I thought about this for a while, and what you are really trying to buy is engagement/āthought or career change or protests or letters to the government, etc.. This is why in the future, article reads/ābook reads are going to be weighted higher. Since reading a book is more effortful/āengaging than passively watching a video.
Actually, based on the metric, I adjusted for how much of the video is watched, not just views*minutes. Longer videos have a lower watch percentage and only the viewer minutes watched count.
I want to make a very weak claim that traditional-length Youtube videos 5-30 min are better. There just isnāt a significant enough sample here. I think if a random person were to start making shorts vs. podcasts on a random topic, theyād get similar viewer minutes since you can make many more shorts in the time it takes to make a podcast, etc.
I have some intuitions in that direction (ie for a given individual to a topic, the first minute of exposure is more valuable than the 100th), and that would be the case for supporting things like TikToks.
Iād love to get some estimates on what the drop-off in value looks like! It might be tricky to actually applyāwe/ācreators have individual video view counts and lengths, but no data on uniqueness of viewer (both for a single video and across different videos on the same channel, which Iād think should count as cumulative)
The drop-off might be less than your example suggestsāitās actually very unclear to me which of those 2 Iād prefer.
AI safety videos can have impact by:
Introducing people to a topic
Convincing people to take an action (change careers, donate)
Providing info to people working in the field
And shortform does relatively better on 1 and worse on 2 and 3, imo.
A way you can quantify this is by looking at ad CPMsāhow much advertisers are willing to pay for ads on your content.
This is a pretty objective metric for how much āinfluenceā a creator has over their audience.
Podcasters can charge much more per view than longform Youtubers, and longform Youtubers can charge much more than shortform and so on.
This is actually understating it. Itās incredibly hard for shortform only creators to make money with ads or sponsors.
There is clearly still diminishing returns per viewer minute, but the curve is not that steep.
Another question is not just what happens when the viewer is watching your content, but what happens after. The important part is not awareness but what people actually do as a result of that awareness.
Top of the funnel content like shortform is still probably useful, but I decided against doing it because short form creators famously have very little ability to influence their audience. They canāt really get them to buy products, or join discords, let alone join a protest.
But podcasters and longform Youtubers certainly can, as evidenced by a large chunk of people in AI safety citing Rob Miles as their entry point.
Do you know what this looks like, roughly, on a per-minute basis?
Longform CPMs for YouTubeās ad platform are roughly $3-10 for every 1,000 views.
I donāt really understand the CPM scaling between the length of videos. On my longest video of 40 minutes, I made roughly $7 per 1000 views. On my shortest video of 10 minutes, I made $4 per 1000 views. But that is just because Youtube shows more ads in that time. However, Iām not entirely sure how many ads they display per viewer per minute. Iām pretty sure the longer your content is the less ads they show per minute.
Sponsorships are usually 5-10x the ad CPM. So if you have a video that gets a million views, you could expect to make anywhere between $30-70k (but with wide error bars).
Shortform views are worth roughly 10-100x less on both ads and sponsorships.
It sounds pretty reasonable to me that a sponsorship on a longform video with 1 million views would convert more sales than a sponsorship on a shortform video with 100 million views.
Which is why you typically see almost every shortform creator struggling to break into longform, whereas longform creators can pretty easily make shorts without too much difficulty.
CPM is something I thought quite a bit about for audience quality. Someone like Dwarkesh Patel has a very high audience quality. Many billionaires, talented college kids, etc., watch. As expected, he gets to charge a ton for ad sponsorships.