So, does YouTube suck now?
When I was younger, I remember spending literal hours each day watching video after video on what was the only social media platform I knew at the time: YouTube. It felt like YouTube grew up with me, or maybe I grew up with it: My friends and I watched silly videos like “How Animals Eat Their Food” by MisterEpicMann on repeat before I graduated to watching more tween, girly lifestyle vloggers like Brooklyn and Bailey. In early middle school, I obsessed over Dan and Phil and the larger Buzzfeed Yellow network (before it went through its many rebrands). After Vine died, I started watching former Viners like Drew Gooden and Danny Gonzalez transition into long-form content (which, at the time, meant a ten-minute long video).
All this to say, I spent ages (ages 9 to 18, you could say) on just one social media platform, and never ran out of interesting videos to watch. I can’t think of a time when, before maybe 2023, I opened YouTube, scrolled, and eventually deemed every video too boring, or long, or, well, stupid, to watch. That’s happened to me the last four times I’ve logged on to the YouTube site.
There are quite a few reasons why this might be the case. For one, videos are longer–in fact, maybe they’re too long. In 2010, the threshold had just increased to allow videos longer than ten minutes on the site. By 2012, mid-roll ads were added to the site, and to take advantage of the extra cash they garnered, videos had to be at least ten minutes long. This, at least partially, explains why you don’t see short, skit-formatted videos like JacksFilms’ “WTF Blanket” or Smosh’s “Beef ‘n Go” anymore.
I started watching YouTube when this ten-minute rule was already in place, and I could sit through ten-to-fifteen minute-long videos from grav3yardgirl’s “DOES THIS THING REALLY WORK?” series or one of Dan and Phil’s baking videos. Maybe some YouTubers at the time purposefully stretched their content to hit that ten-minute mark, but to pad out a seven-minute video to ten doesn’t require much filler content.
In 2020, YouTube started allowing mid-roll ads on shorter videos. So, why aren’t videos shorter now?
Follow the money, people: To earn money on the platform, creators need a certain number of “watch hours,” meaning the number of hours accrued by all viewers on that creator’s page. In 2020, YouTube updated their monetization threshold, and began requiring twice as many watch hours for creators to start earning money. YouTubers are incentivized to create and upload longer videos.
This change coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning many had more time to watch hours of content–and hours of content could now mean just three videos. As TikTok thrived during the pandemic, people also began to seek out more nuanced online content to watch, such as video essays. I myself have been a longtime fan of creators like Jenny Nicholson and Sarah Z, each of whom create long-form video essays on internet and media culture.
Video essays like Nicholson’s or Sarah Z’s, those that are one to two hours long, would be about 30 to 60 pages of writing–about the length of a verbose reading for a humanities class. However, the popularity of video essays has reached a point wherein creators seem to strive to upload interminably long videos. At times, these videos are packed with irrelevant bits or tangents that neglect that original draw of purposeful, nuanced that video essays had.
Part of why I think videos get away with being longer is what media experts call the “second screen.” Usually people talk about this phenomenon with television shows, especially Netflix shows. YouTuber Drew Gooden discussed in a recent video that, on Netflix, writers over-explain and dumb down their dialogue so that viewers on their phones understand. In a 2025 interview, YouTuber Anthony Po talked about YouTubers catering to passive viewers (if you watch the entire clip, you’ll hear an interesting strategy for gaining active viewership–it involves a Buddhist monk).
The YouTube that I, and most of Gen Z remembers didn’t even broach the idea of passive content. We couldn’t look away from Ryan Higa’s “The Ultimate Parkour!“ or Jenna Marbles’ “Full Face Using Only Highlighters Challenge.” Those videos were much shorter, straining our (already diminishing) attention spans less. But shorter videos also meant less mid-roll ads. With the upped number of ads on longer videos, we lose interest much faster.
Ads also feel more intrusive because of YouTube’s tests with unskippable ads. If you stream YouTube on mobile or a browser, these may be up to 15 seconds, and on television-streaming apps, they may be up to 60 seconds. In 2018, YouTube started utilizing “Ad-Pods,” which had users watch two back-to-back ads when they started watching a video. Eventually, these double-ads extended to mid-roll ads, further interrupting the concentration we might have when watching a video.
But can ads actually draw us away from a truly engaging, interesting, creative video, even if it’s a little too long? I would say no–even over the past few years, I’ve really enjoyed some longer videos with creative premises, like Safiya Nygaard’s “I Bought Unrealistic Pinterest Dream Gowns” or Danny Gonzalez’ “Trying Unpopular Social Medias.” But it feels as though it’s getting harder and harder to find authentic, original content on the platform.
Creator Marcus Jones reported a trend he had noticed in an early 2026 video–YouTube privileged Shorts (their counter-solution to TikToks and Reels) much more starting in mid-2024, even reformatting their homepage to focus more on that content. It makes it harder to push long-form content, especially when it’s increasingly easy to steal others’ content or consistently post AI-generated content to YouTube Shorts.
So, I mean, is YouTube done for? In a recent video, YouTuber Jacksfilms tried to deduce when “good” YouTube ended, arguing that 2016 marked the end of YouTube’s “golden era.” He cautions though, at the end of the video, for new creators not to be discouraged, saying that “It’s never too late to get started on YouTube, so long as you have something to say.” For us viewers, I think that means that there’ll never be a deficit of interesting content to watch, so long as there are creative people out there–which there always will be.
I do think it’s hard to find interesting content on YouTube, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. There are many creators who consistently post that I enjoy watching–legacy YouTubers like Jacksfilms and Smosh, viners-turned-vloggers like Drew Gooden and Danny Gonzalez, and some of the ex-Buzzfeed crowd like Safiya Nygaard all still put out truly creative, high-quality content.
And there are newer voices on the scene who I can’t stop watching–Miles Bonsignore started with The Try Guys before leaving to put out his own content, and it’s some of the funniest, most well-produced, unique content I see someone putting out consistently. His Graveyard Shift series is an honest and surprisingly serene look at the customers and workers of 24-hour establishments, and his Justice Miles series is absolutely hilarious, where he acts as a judge presiding over all sorts of minor disputes.
Another amazing channel is Bunch of Friends, a collective of content creators each with their own media careers before joining together to make a YouTube-first sitcom called Bunch of Friends. They subject themselves to insanely creative tasks and challenges each week, and follow a thread across a “season” that culminates in an impressive finale.
All this to say, Gen Z doesn’t have to forgo our storied pastime of binge-watching YouTube videos until we fall asleep. Instead, we can seek out and reward independent, engaging creators for the hard work they put into their content, and hope that whoever’s stacking ads and promoting AI-slop Shorts sees what people really want to watch.