Why are so many YouTube videos portrait rather than landscape now?
The sheer number of videos taken "the wrong way round" (for my computer's monitor) is mind-boggling. I get that some people watch videos on their phones, but is it really that many?
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YouTube started monetizing Shorts and reduced the payouts to regular long form YouTube videos which is anything wide screen and over 60 seconds. It's pretty much forcing content creators to start doing Shorts if they want to try and not lose as much revenue
TIL, that's just screwed. Sometimes short form content can be interesting, but 99% of the time I want a video I can watch along to. It's terrible and I don't understand the intense appeal these have. Didn't Vine start it all?
I think there has been a major culture shift. YouTube used to prioritize the subscriber feed where you curated your own content. Now it is the home feed where it is fed by algorithm. Shorts seems to be an extension of this where it is pretty much non stop algorithmic feed. If you were used to the old way the new way seems strange, but if not I guess the new way is more intuitive? I couldn't say
I don't know that there's actual appeal outside of the fact that the format seems to be optimized to give our lizard brains the quick hit. There isn't anything inherently wrong with divided attention - we don't think it's bad when we're having a conversation while watching fish in a pond, for example - but I think Vine, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube Shorts et al are the result of years of data corporations honing in on capitalizing our attention.