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.
I’d love to get some estimates on what the drop-off in value looks like! It might be tricky to actually apply—we/creators 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 I’d think should count as cumulative)
The drop-off might be less than your example suggests—it’s actually very unclear to me which of those 2 I’d 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 CPMs—how much advertisers are willing to pay for ads on your content.
This is a pretty objective metric for how much “influence” 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. It’s 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 can’t 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 YouTube’s ad platform are roughly $3-10 for every 1,000 views.
I don’t 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, I’m not entirely sure how many ads they display per viewer per minute. I’m 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.
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.
I’d love to get some estimates on what the drop-off in value looks like! It might be tricky to actually apply—we/creators 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 I’d think should count as cumulative)
The drop-off might be less than your example suggests—it’s actually very unclear to me which of those 2 I’d 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 CPMs—how much advertisers are willing to pay for ads on your content.
This is a pretty objective metric for how much “influence” 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. It’s 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 can’t 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 YouTube’s ad platform are roughly $3-10 for every 1,000 views.
I don’t 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, I’m not entirely sure how many ads they display per viewer per minute. I’m 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.