The Rise of the Long Form Reel

Recently while using Facebook and Instagram I noticed two things. The first is that photos are almost gone. The second is that videos went from being a few seconds each, to a few minutes each. This means that if you open the FB or IG apps and begin to watch a video you’re going to spend more time than you had expected to spend.

To put it another way, Facebook and Instagram have become more like television than web browsing activities. They have become more like radio, or television because they have become hot, rather than cool media. You scroll, and you watch, and you’re asked how many songs you recognise, or you’re getting a history lesson about priest holes in England (Where catholic priests hid under protestant reform) and more.

In the past you might have popped over to Facebook and Instagram to see what friends, family and colleagues had been up to. Now you scroll, but without trying to find conversations, or engagement. You’re just scrolling, watching, and then scrolling again. We’re watching a video, and then a second, and then a third. In the end it’s easy to lose two to three hours. Part of the reason for this is that the content is long.

If it’s ten seconds per video, then you scroll compuslively, but when each video is two to three minutes long, then you lose two to three minutes, or more if you’re not careful.

It’s about engagement, and creating the perfect rat hole, or time suck. If content is short, then you scroll before adverts can play, but if content is long then after a minute or two an ad will play, and you have just made money for FB and IG, as a reward for them deliberately wasting your time.

On the one hand Reels provide us with a new way of wasting our time, but if content creators are purposeful about how they use reels, such as history content creators, and more, then we have a new documentary niche. Instead of going to YouTube where discovery has become awful, we can search for a field of interest, watch videos, and, with time, get more content of this type.

One positive aspect is that the thumbnails are not clickbait yet, and the titles are invisible, so we can find videos that are worth watching, and as we like, and subscribe, we begin to become consumers, shifting away from antisocial media, towards passive broadcast media once again.

Is it sad to see Facebook and Instagram shift away from human connection? Of course, but on the flipside everyone is online now, so it’s by running, and cycling, and going to book clubs that I meet people, not by wasting time on social media. Social media stopped being social in 2019 which is why I went for hikes, cycling and now running. Social media is now a way to be isolated, and radicalised, rather than happy and social.

Through creating podcasts, reels and more, historians, and others are taking advantage of a new niche and medium that requires far less than broadcast television for content creation.

Whilst I feel negative about all the videos that currently do waste my time, in reel form, I see an opportunity for worthwhile content being produced for the new medium of vertical videos. I think this format is interesting.

It’s also interesting to note that I have seen a new type of job offer recently, for video content creators, rather than camera operators, or video editors that do graphics. I think the new niche is far more interesting, for someone like me.