At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia notes that the experts are all-in on shorter videos, but actual audiences are clearly now more interested in much longer-form treatments:
When I saw the numbers, I couldn’t believe them.
Every digital platform is flooding the market with short videos, but the audience is now spending more time with longform video — and by a huge margin.
Source: Tubular Labs
Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years.
That’s a staggering six-fold increase. But even short videos are now getting longer. Social media consultants call this the “long short” format. Sometimes they are used as teasers to draw viewers to still longer media (often on another platform).
Movies are also getting longer. At first glance, that makes no sense — more people are watching films at home on small digital devices, where Hollywood fare has to compete with bite-sized junk from TikTok and Instagram.
You might think that filmmakers would feel forced to compress their storytelling, but the opposite is true. They are learning that audiences crave something longer and more immersive than a TikTok.
At first, Hollywood insiders tried to imitate the ultra-short aesthetic, but they failed — sometimes in colossal fashion. (Does anyone remember the Quibi fiasco?)
Now they not only embrace long films, but happily release sprawling mega-movies longer than the Boston Marathon. Dune Two ran for 166 minutes — not even Eliud Kipchoge does that. Oppenheimer clocked in at 180 minutes. Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon lasted a mind-boggling 206 minutes.
The studios would have vetoed these excesses just a few years ago. Not anymore.
Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes.
Two of those long hit songs came from Taylor Swift — who has been a champion of longer immersive musical experiences, most notably in her insanely successful Eras tour. She set the record for the biggest money-generating roadshow in music history, and did it with a performance twice as long as a Mahler symphony.
These Swift concerts run for three-and-a-half hours (just like Scorsese at his most maniacal), and include more than 40 songs. They’re grouped in ten separate acts, each built around a different era in her career.
Ten acts? Really?
Even Wagner stopped short of that. But the Eras tour generated more than $2 billion in revenues. And all this happened while experts were touting 15-second songs on TikTok as the future of music.
I’ve charted the duration of Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences.
The New York Times complained about the length of her most recent album — calling it “sprawling and often self-indulgent.” It mocked her for believing that “more is more.”
It summed up her whole worldview with a dismissive claim that she has fallen in love with “abundance”. In fact, the Times opened its article with that accusation.
But I note that a year after the Times laughed at Swiftian abundance, the hottest topic in the culture is a book with that same word as its title. (Full disclosure: I’ll be doing a live Substack conversation with its co-author Derek Thompson in a few days.)
Abundance has dominated the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for the last several months. Even more to the point, the word seems to tap into the public’s hunger for something bigger, deeper, and more expansive than it’s been getting.
