Hacker News Reader

This is great, but I am frustrated to see the effects of Google's 10 minute "minimum". The video did not need to be 13 minutes long and the filler parts were obvious. At scale, this is uncountable thousands of hours of human time. I dont know if that's important, but it makes the experience less genuine.

View on HN

This might be true if there were mid-roll ads, which there aren't on this video. I just liked it this way.

What is Google's 10 minute "minimum"?

I think you either only get paid for, or get paid a great deal more for, videos that are at least 10 minutes. Even high quality YouTube produces often make videos that are exactly 10 minutes and 30 seconds, and it's sometimes fairly obvious.

Videos under 10 minutes can only have 1 ad (I'm not sure but I think it's only short ads too) so you get less revenue per video. The algorithm also favors longer videos because more watch time means the video is more likely to be recommended to viewers. But there are rumours that being over 10 minutes specifically is what matters most to the YouTube algo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com