Speaker 1: Tiktok is evil, it's killing our attention spans, and... Wait. What is all this? It looks like we went from being able to have a normal conversation or watching a slow scene in a movie to now needing all sorts of devilish tricks to keep our attention on something. Vertical scrolling feeds with wicked smart algorithms and short bits of content have invaded every corner of the internet. Whether you call them Shorts, Reels, Tiktok, I mean, even Spotify now has jumped on the train. The Tiktokification is complete. And after these companies turned what we watch into, well, this, now they have a huge problem. They now realize that the swipe dopamine machine that they built is broken at the core. But if we look beyond this noise and what's happening now, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. A solution that can turn this short-form algorithmic mess into something really positive. Not only for the companies that make these, but also for us, the users. For once. But to understand it, we first have to understand the real reason why everything became a copy of Tiktok. Zuckerberg's Reels, where they are just the latest in a series of features that they just copied from others. Spotify is now making this vertical scrolling algorithm recipe their new homepage to discover music and podcasts. And even Amazon, who doesn't really have content to show, has found a way somehow to let this inspire feed. YouTube added Shorts, which recently have been taking over more and more of the homepage. And even Reddit has jumped on the train. Because everywhere you look, the recipe is always the same. Take your content, make it so that it now becomes scrollable videos, make them autoplay, add a smart AI algorithm, and you're done. And there's one specific reason why this makes total sense for all these companies. And that is that they have just too much content. We went from 6 hours of videos uploaded every single minute on YouTube in 2007 to over 500 hours a minute uploaded today. Every day, 60,000 tracks are added to Spotify. That's 21 million tracks a year. And just think that in 2008, the entire iTunes music store had only 8 million tracks. Now, let's be clear. This is amazing. New creativity, new points of view, new ideas, people building a career in this creator economy. But the platforms where Vizel started now have a problem. People's time is limited. So how do you surface all this content to your users? They've tried having you search for things. They've tried having you click on stuff. Then came trending tabs and like counters, all the way to social. And now there's this shiny new thing on the horizon. Vertical scrolling videos and smart algorithms. It seems like it's the perfect solution. Not only because it's based on videos, which is one of the most immediate and engaging types of medium, but also because it's an established design pattern now. This means that if you show this to someone, they will automatically know what to do. Scroll down, double tap to like, here are the comments. Everybody knows how this works. It's baked into the minds of billions of people now. So if I am one of these big companies, I'm incentivized to build something that people are already familiar with. So I don't have to reinvent the wheel. And this is why company after company, platform after platform, they all fell victim to this TikTokification. But the consequences of this are getting darker and darker. When the first movies with sound started to appear in the 1920s and 30s, the style of movies themselves changed dramatically. From being very visual and having to show what was happening, we now have entire movies that are just a bunch of people talking in rooms. The medium, the way we consume something almost always ends up having a big impact on the content itself, the information, the art. And vertical style TikTok videos are no exception to this. Because now you need to hook people in, make them watch as much as possible of that one minute video. So people started to realize that they can just use tricks. And they started cramming those into the videos, like those subtitles that you see everywhere, ultra fast editing, even adding unrelated other clips like Minecraft. All of this in pursuit of one thing and one thing only, or how much are you able to keep users watching? A few months ago, I watched with my girlfriend one of my favorite movies of all time. I watched it hundreds of times, Star Wars, the first one. And she watched it for the first time. And she was bored. Now, is she allowed to be bored watching a new movie? Yeah, of course. Is she allowed to be bored watching Star Wars? Absolutely not. I find your lack of faith disturbing. Jokes aside, this movie came out in 1977. This was a time where content, entertainment was scarce. There was no need of tricks to keep you watching, no crazy subtitles, no Minecraft gameplay. Although it would have been interesting. Look at him, he's heading for that small moon. That's not a moon. To me, this movie is a masterpiece, but by today's standards, it's just slow. But retention now is everyone's obsession because it's the one metric that the mighty algorithms use to decide what to show and what not to show. And this is nothing new. In the past, it was optimizing for the best television slots, optimizing the length of a song for the radio. This obsession with viewer attention is a spiral towards keeping you watching, keeping you there, keeping you scrolling, keeping you addicted. Watch the pretty coin of gold. So that you can see more ads and the cycle continues. So earlier today, I emerged from my last 25 minutes random scrolling session on TikTok. And I think I watched pretty interesting stuff. There were some interesting videos in there. But then I thought to myself, how much do I remember about what I watched? And the answer is basically nothing. And when I look at this new wave of short form videos, even though they are able to keep me there for long periods of time, I feel like I'm not getting anything in return. Our short-term memory has been defined by cognitive psychologists as lasting 15 to 30 seconds. While the average length of a TikTok video at the end of 2021 was 24 to 31 seconds. This is also leading to all kinds of consequences like lower attention spans, especially for children of people growing up with this. So if this is what's happening to us, the users, the companies making this should be massively profiting now. They should be swimming in money, right? Well, the reality is that the short form video formula is already falling apart. These feeds are a constant stream of videos where it's hard to focus on anything. So how much do you think a random advertisement from a big corporate company is gonna perform in this show? Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent investor call that the monetization efficiency of reels is much less than feed. So the more the reels grow, even though it adds to the engagement to the system overall, it takes some time away from the feed and we actually lose money. And then right after that, they took away the reels creator fund, the way they were paying creators making reels on Instagram. And meanwhile, while we look at TikTok who's been incredibly successful and has been growing so much, it's still losing money. While YouTube makes money from those five to 15 second ads that companies use to do brand building, this is simply not possible on TikTok. Now, even if TikTok loses money, this is not a big deal. They are controlled by a big company by then, so it's not a big problem. But it's clear that today, the short form video formula is not even working for the companies that made it in the first place. And this is also showing on the other side, the side of the people making all the content, the creators. While Instagram is just saying, and removing the whole creator fund altogether, TikTok's creator fund has been heavily criticized for giving incredibly low payouts, even if you get millions of views. Because it's a fixed amount and everybody's just scrambling to get a piece of a fixed pie. And if you look at TikTok, reels, or even YouTube shorts, many creators that started with these platforms now realize that they cannot build long-term and sustainable business on these platforms. So they're always looking to move to long-form content, whether it's YouTube videos, or a podcast, or any other ways where they can build a more solid business. And so in the end, this whole system is bad for everyone. It's bad for the companies that made it, it's bad for the creators, and it's bad for the users that fall into this black hole of scrolling. And it turns out that there is a solution to this, but to get to it, we need to look at the complete opposite direction. While this tsunami of short-form videos has been taking the spotlight and wiping everything in its direction, something else has been happening behind the scenes, and no one's really talking about it. Because long-form content had a renaissance. In this new world of super-fast media, people who didn't want to play the game said, fuck it, and just doubled down on the entire opposite direction. Podcasts are maybe the biggest examples, with some of the most successful ones worldwide, like the Flagrant Podcast or Joe Rogan, topping even three- or four-hour conversations. The podcasting market went from $4 billion in 2020 to $18 billion in 2022, with no signs of stopping. Then came newsletters and long-form written content, often that you pay for, with Substack leading the pack and gathering over 500,000 paying subscribers for their newsletter content. And on YouTube, with the introduction of shorts, the normal videos have been getting longer and longer. So if people are getting brainwashed by this TikTok-style, dopamine-hit, short attention span extravaganza, why are we seeing an explosion of three-hour podcasts and 40-minute YouTube videos? Even movies are going in a completely counterintuitive direction. In 2021, the average length of the top 10 highest-grossing movies was 131 minutes, while back in 1981, it was just 110 minutes. People are getting addicted to that fast, dopamine-hit type of content, yes, but they are more than willing to spend 30 minutes watching a YouTube documentary if they are able to find the right one. And this, this is the solution, the missing link. So let's look at what we have here. On one side, we have TikTok, Instagram Reels, Shorts, whatever you wanna call them. They have cracked the code on how to bring discovery to a huge library of content to billions of people, but at the same time, they have created a massively addictive machine of short-term dopamine hits. It's an incredible tool to discover new stuff, but that's the only thing you can do. You cannot go deep into anything. And on top of that, the companies that make this are starting to show the first cracks because they're not able to monetize as well as they expected. And as soon as a creator gets some success, the first thing they wanna do is move somewhere else where they can build a real business. And on the other side, it's clear that people still want to spend three hours enjoying a conversation or a very deep movie. And this is extraordinary, but this side has a problem. It lacks a way for people to find this interesting stuff. Have you ever tried searching for a podcast episode on a specific topic? It's an atrocious experience. And so, I mean, are you getting it? This is the solution. What can finally give some sense to the scrolling machine, allow creators to finally thrive, and giving interesting long-form content the discovery engine that it really needs? And in the meantime, as always, the companies will make billions of dollars. So now, these companies have billions of dollars, tens of thousands of engineers, thousands of engineers, designers and product managers, but there are three things that they need to nail in order to make this work. The first one is, of course, to link short-form content and long-form content in a seamless way, but that keeps them still separate. This vertical scrolling carnival is not the right way to watch a 30-minute documentary. And at the same time, you wouldn't watch a series of 10-second clips on normal YouTube. And in practice, there's many ways to do this. For example, one can be to show the long-form content at the end of a short, like in this random design that I made. I'm just a product manager guy making videos on YouTube, so I leave this to them to figure it out. But what they absolutely need to make this work is number two, which is changing what the algorithm optimizes for. Currently, these platforms optimize for the retention of a single video, how much people watch that single short or whatever. But to make this missing link work, they need to change the algorithm to make sure it optimizes for the overall retention. So from the short content all the way to the long-form content. This way, you will push on the platform people that are, yes, able to hook people in with the flashy stuff, but that then are able to make people keep watching long-form and deeper content. Because this is the only place where platforms can really monetize with ads. And this brings us to points number three, which is creating a platform where creators can build real businesses. If you do this properly, these companies will be able to make tons of cash. And it's important that they give something back to the creators, because this is what fuels the machine in the long run. And actually, companies are starting to make the first baby steps toward this. The new TikTok-like homepage of Spotify has been received not in the best way for music, but I think it's amazing for podcasts. On the other side, TikTok has increased the maximum length of a video from 15 seconds to one minute and now to 10 minutes. And one of the requirements for a video to be eligible to be monetized for their new creator fund is that the video is at least one minute long. So it's clear that they are starting to go into the longer video territory. But the problem here is still that with the scrolling behavior they have instilled in their app, people on TikTok are just primed to swipe away. This is not the right place to show these longer videos. I really hope this is the way we get out of the mindless doom scrolling without any purpose. But I may be wrong here. Maybe, yes, everything will collapse into one minute videos, and so you will maybe not end up watching this next video, which, by the way, you should.