Long-form video is the next big thing for young audiences

It’s often said that the digital era has bestowed young people’s brains with short attention spans and wired them to seek the thrill of the next pixelated dopamine hit. When it comes to journalism, it’s true that young people have gravitated towards short-form video for their news, with TikTok and Instagram becoming major sources.

News organizations have not been blind to this shift. Many have attempted — with various degrees of success — to attract young audiences to their brands via establishing themselves and their reporters in these platforms. However, solely focusing on short-form video to temper those pesky attention spans is a disservice to people in my generation (and those younger than me) who regularly consume long-form content whether it be through podcasts, YouTube, or Twitch.

YouTube is Gen Z’s default video home. YouTube’s dominance is not only highlighted by our research at the Reuters Institute, but also by the Pew Research Center and British regulator Ofcom.

Ofcom has also noted that about half of trending YouTube videos now resemble traditional TV (long interviews, game shows), with viewing on TV sets growing. While the pendulum might not swing completely back towards an era dominated by long-form video, this suggests that an appetite for long-form content among young people is on the rise.

Another indication of this is podcasts, which have regularly been a medium of news consumption preferred by the young and have become billion-dollar businesses. Many of these podcasts are now ironically primarily video podcasts, with a significant chunk of audiences primarily consuming podcasts via YouTube.

Video podcast episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy not only regularly rack up millions of views, but episodes hover around the 3-hour and 1-hour mark, respectively. You don’t need to look further than the last U.S. election to see the role video podcasts are playing when it comes to speaking to the youth, as both main presidential candidates opted to do a podcast interview circuit.

Twitch is perhaps the dark horse of this prediction (our researchers tell me that usage in selected markets hovers around 5%). The video live-streaming service popular with gamers is becoming more mainstream. Live streaming, Twitch’s bread and butter, skews to hours-long sessions, with billions of hours watched per year. While most of Twitch’s user base is there for video game streaming, non-gaming and talk-style categories are steadily and continuously growing, like expert commentary and even news.

When I have reported on young audiences, I’ve noticed the advice often given to news organizations is to go where young people are. If we, as journalists, enclose ourselves in the promise of short-form video content as the future, we’ll lose sight of all the possibilities that actually come with engaging with younger audiences.

A significant advantage of Twitch and YouTube is that young people on those platforms are already accustomed to watching content that is longer than 30 seconds, with videos and livestreams lasting hours. In our ever-changing and ultra-fragmented media consumption environment, long-form videos are making a comeback — at least for a not-insignificant portion of young people.

Despite what the “kids-these-days” brigade might tell you, my demographic is not only interested in minute-long TikTok videos. Many of us also watch a 15-minute video on the endurance of Putin’s rule, a 30-minute video on North Korea’s criminal groups, or even a two-hour video on the NFT bubble.

If newsrooms keep convincing themselves that young people can only give them a minute of their time, they will miss millions of minutes we are already giving to others, including news influencers. The question is no longer whether young people have the patience for depth and length, but whether news organizations have the imagination to meet them. Others are already filling in those gaps.