I’m not talking about makers dedicated to transferring knowledge in some form like Veritasium, but even those channels tend to get long-winded sometimes.
I was looking for a how-to video for something I was working on. Youtube is FBFW one of the go-to places for such videos. As I tried to find the info, I noticed that there appears to be an inverse relationship between the production quality and the ability to concisely transfer the needed info.
Say you’re trying to change a part on a car…
Higher quality video: spends inordinate amount of time talking about themselves and their videos. Lots of time spent talking about what they’re gonna do. Lots of time talking about all the things related to the thing they’re gonna do, but they’re not gonna do them on this project. If there’s two or more people working on the video, plenty of time taking about things tangential to the job, telling jokes, talking about other jobs they’re doing, other videos they’ve done. We’re 60-70% of the way into the video now. They show up where the work is to be done, and now they introduce guy #3 who will do the work while they bullshit and ask a couple semi-intelligent questions. The camera is far back and showing them poking around the thing, then zooming in briefly on the thing being done, then back out to show them. Now we’re done, and reverse the order of how we got to the work part - other videos, joking, tangential stuff, things they didn’t do…etc etc like and subscribe. Hope you caught the info you needed.
All the while the camera is operated skillfully to keep the shot right, well lit, keep the people in frame, good sound, etc.
25 minute video for 3 minutes of barely showing how the job is done.
Poor production quality video:
Some guy recording using a cellphone in one hand with a hand held shop light. You walk with him into a messy garage with poor lighting. He’s trying to maneuver both to show the viewer what needs to be seen. Hear the guy breathing. Camera swings around a lot. Dude’s pointing with a screwdriver at the places you need to access, what bolts need to be undone, and watch out for the thing you might break if you aren’t careful. He has to set the phone down to work on the thing, and he’s doing the work and picking up the phone to show the viewer what’s done. That’s it. Hope this helps. Thanks for watching.
Takes five to ten minutes, you’re probably screen sick from the cam moving so much, but you could successfully do the same job yourself.
“Why make a good product if you can put your effort into making it just seem like your product is good? This way you can pivot around more flexibly. Instead of having to possess a wide array of hard-earned skills you can make specific content about, you can simply learn the skills of marketing, branding and style, and now you can bullshit your way through anything you want.”
-many modern business practices
By the way veritasium isn’t really good. I have some issues with the ways he oversimplifies but at some point you gotta and I respect that, but much worse is his inability to actually cover truth, instead choosing to only parrot what the company “graciously” hosting him told him.
I still prefer Veritaisum over a channel like Mark Rober which has almost 4x the subscribers, with content that sounds informational, but is really just dumbed down. Maybe Mark Rober is more aimed at younger kids, but they both are very similar with trying to make math and science accessible, but executed differently and I think Veriatsium done better.
With videos with exclusive access, i’d imagine it’s difficult to do all the fact checking of everything the company is telling you. Tom Scott also dealt with this, and it requires a tremendous effort. If there are lies being spread and the description isn’t updated or a pinned comment on the video set, then yeah, that’s shitty behavior, but generally I haven’t seen that from Derk.
I agree, they’re not perfect. It was more the format than the material. Veritasium is supposed to be informative\educational in format. Yes, there is some license taken with these channels to be entertaining and engaging, but I just wanted to separate that style out of just looking for “how to” videos - things that one would hope would be informative and concise, but more often are blathering and unfocused.
One reason is that YouTube needs to be certain minimum length to qualify for monetisation or to enter trending.
Absolutely correct. YT/Google rewards ad space, longer videos offer more ad space, more ads push longer videos to the top via the algorithm that rewards ads, therefore creators make longer videos full of garbage instead of content so they get the most views and paid more.
