The very first video 24-year-old Midwesterner Quinton Hoover uploaded to his YouTube channel in 2013 was one minute and 48 seconds long; his next offering lasted just nine seconds. Eight years later, Hoover’s most recent video, uploaded on November 8, is a breakdown of the noughties Nickelodeon sitcom Victorious—it runs, in total, for five hours, 34 minutes, and 59 seconds.
Who in the world wants to sit down and watch an adult man talk for almost six hours about a kids’ TV show that lasted less than three years? Trick question, easy answer: 1.5 million people. Hoover’s Victorious video is just 23 minutes shorter than the first two Lord of the Rings films combined; it is five hours and 22 minutes longer than the average video posted on YouTube’s most popular channels. In it, Hoover recaps every single episode of the show via voiceover, plays with Victorious Happy Meal toys, including a clip-in hair extension and a plastic brush, and dons a blazer to muse into a microphone about whether the show exists in a “metaverse.” It was a recipe for disaster that somehow became a feast for the eyes, but questions remain. What exactly provokes someone to make a five-hour pop culture analysis video—and what prompts a million others to watch it?
Hoover’s video wasn’t his first foray into superlong content. In June, he attracted 1.9 million viewers with “iBinged iCarly,” a four-hour, 45-minute video about another Nickelodeon show. Naturally, it was just the first installment. Hoover’s second iCarly analysis ran for three hours and 35 minutes, attracting another million viewers. That’s over eight hours of iCarly content. “People keep calling them video essays—I don’t like the term, I think it’s really pretentious,” Hoover says. “I want to start calling them breakdowns, because it’s funny for numerous reasons. I think it’s completely fair to call a five-hour rant about Victorious a breakdown.”
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Hoover is not the only creator making such “breakdowns,” but before we get into that, let’s examine some ancient history. In 2012, the Pew Research Center found that “the median length of the most popular YouTube videos was two minutes and one second.” In 2019, when analyst and journalist Julia Alexander wrote “YouTube Videos Keep Getting Longer,” she referred to videos that were 20, 30, and 60 minutes long. Today, few people would refer to a half-hour YouTube video as “long.” In the same month Hoover uploaded his Victorious video, YouTube’s recommendation box fed me a one-hour, 52 minute analysis of teen drama Pretty Little Liars (“part 1” of course) and a one-hour, 42-minute video about the history of Disney’s FastPass system. Combined, these videos have more than 3 million views.
The trend seemingly started in earnest in January 2021, when a YouTuber named Action Button uploaded a five-hour, 56-minute review of the video game series Tokimeki Memorial, though he didn’t hit the million-view mark. Later that month, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson released a two-hour, 33-minute video about the supernatural drama The Vampire Diaries and accumulated some 6 million views. “It’s actually my most-viewed video now,” says the 30-year-old Nicholson, who is based in Los Angeles. “I definitely didn’t expect it to do as well as it did.”
Nicholson’s very first videos, uploaded in 2011, were slightly more than a minute long. Over the years, they've slowly crept up in length, until she released her first half-hour video (about The Greatest Showman) in 2018. More widely, YouTube videos began regularly exceeding the 10-minute mark around 2016, when the platform’s algorithm seemingly began prioritizing “watch time” over views, leading YouTube’s then-largest creator PewDiePie to complain: “If you want to make it on YouTube these days, just make long-ass videos, fuck any type of pacing, quality, ain’t none of that, fuck that.” Back then, videos had to hit 10 minutes to qualify for midroll advertisements; shorter videos could run adverts only at the beginning and the end. The more adverts a video has, the more money a creator can make.
But in 2020, YouTube changed its policy so that eight-minute videos qualified for midroll ads, and that same year its social team issued an apology after tweeting a joke about creators who “jump straight into the video” “after talking for 15 minutes.” So why did videos continue to increase in length? YouTube did not respond to a request for comment, and its algorithm is a closely guarded secret, but regardless of whether it favors longer content, many creators (including Hoover) feel that it does. After all, the more ads that play during a video, the more money YouTube makes. While there is no way of knowing exactly how many people YouTube recommended Hoover’s Victorious video to, numerous people have joked on social media about the video being pushed onto them.
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So is it—as it nearly always is—a simple story of cash making the world go round? “Sometimes long videos are worth the gamble even if you don’t get a million views, because I get money from each ad, and ads on longer videos pay more individually,” Hoover says. But Nicholson says it’s not always that simple: If she runs clips of TV shows or movies in her videos, she runs the risk of a copyright strike, meaning her video will be demonetized and she’ll earn nothing. Nicholson says support on Patreon has enabled her to put more and more work into her videos without having to worry that they’ll end up demonetized. (She has more than 13,000 patrons each paying her at least $1 a month).
But beyond money, both Nicholson and Hoover say they’re motivated to make long videos so they can tackle topics definitively. Hoover began making lengthy videos on his channel, Quinton Reviews, well before the algorithm favored them—he made a 41-minute video in 2016. “It was 50–50 a lack of knowing what I was doing and also wanting to be really in depth and trying to take the audience on some kind of voyage,” he says. He didn’t plan to make his iCarly video more than four hours long—it just sort of happened, so he thought, “I’m just going to do it and hope it pays off.” Nicholson also didn’t plan for her Vampire Diaries video to last two and a half hours: “It definitely felt like a crazy amount of time as I was editing it.”
There are multiple reasons, then, why someone would make a five-hour YouTube video, but why exactly do people watch them? And do they actually, really, truly watch them, you know, all the way through?
A viewer retention chart for Nicholson’s Vampire Diaries video shows a sharp drop in the first minute—this is extremely common on YouTube, because its auto-play feature can lead people onto videos they don’t want to watch. YouTube’s analytics tools told Nicholson that “75 percent of viewers are still watching” at the 30-minute mark, “which is above typical”—after that, viewership remains incredibly steady, with no dramatic drops at any particular point in the video.
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As for who’s watching and why, Hoover says he gets messages from truckers who play his videos to stay awake on long journeys, while other people say they enjoy having them on in the background while doing the dishes. Nicholson points to the subreddit Mealtime Videos, where people share videos to watch while they eat. “I like to watch YouTube while I eat, but I’ll also put it on to fill any silence,” she says, explaining she watches videos when cleaning, exercising, driving, and doing her makeup. “I even get a lot of comments from people saying they’ll put my videos on when they go to bed, because the audio levels are even and they can fall asleep to them.” Remarkably, both Hoover and Nicholson say numerous people left comments on their Victorious and Vampire Diaries videos saying they watched the whole thing despite never having seen the respective shows the videos were about.
Confession time: Those people in that last sentence? I’m one of them. I watched the entirety of Hoover’s Victorious and iCarly videos (on 2X speed) despite the fact that I grew up in the North of England with four TV channels and no access to either series. I clicked the Victorious video out of sheer curiosity about the time stamp, but because Hoover’s commentary was interspersed with clips from the show, the video quickly became compelling—a look back at a strange time when Nickelodeon filmed dodgy foot clips and Ariana Grande was a supporting actress, not an internationally famous singer. I watched the video in parts, returning to it whenever I needed a soundtrack to a boring task or chore.
Perhaps, then, this is all a consequence of the content age—we’re increasingly uncomfortable with silence and need larger and larger amounts of content for background noise. Or perhaps there’s nothing new under the sun—many people from older generations, after all, often leave the radio on all day. Still, it feels unlikely that the multi-hour video trend would’ve happened without the big P trapping us all at home with more free time than ever before. “We are a little bit more isolated as the human race than we used to be,” Hoover says. He also feels that long videos are an antithesis to TikTok, which blew up over the pandemic. “TikTok has regenerated the idea of short-form content where you watch and you flick and you watch and you flick. I feel like the reason so many people want to do these long videos is because they want to go on in the opposite direction,” he says.
Yet Hoover also points out that view counts on long videos can be inflated, as YouTube’s view counter doesn’t count unique views but instead counts every time someone returns to a video. So, for example, if someone watched Hoover’s video over four days and didn’t leave it open on their browser and instead reopened the video each time, that would count as four views. It’s also possible other people, like me, clicked on Hoover’s five-hour video out of pure curiosity, wondering what on earth he could say to fill the time, and the novelty of long videos will eventually wear off, leading to fewer clicks.
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Still, it’s likely that the success of the iCarly and Victorious videos will lead to copycats, and neither Hoover nor Nicholson have plans to stop making multi-hour epics. “It’s gotten to the point where I look at a video I did that’s 20 minutes long and I’m like, I can’t remember how I did that,” Hoover says. “I want to push it a little further to see what I can get away with. One day I would absolutely love to put up a video that legit goes up to the second that YouTube will let me upload,” he adds. At present the maximum permitted length of a YouTube video is 12 hours. “That’s the dream.”
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