I watch like 80% of that video when it showed up on my feed the other day before I realized I never even played SM64 (I had a SNES and then Playstation, never N64), and I really don't care about it that much. It was interesting enough to keep me that long though, so it's a good video.
Pannenkoek is a god when it comes to SM64 and its quirks. He teamed up with a streamer to make SM64 crash due to a float to signed integer conversion. They theorized the idea and used a real console on normal speed and timed it, so the crash would happen precisely at New Year's 2023. Performing this particular crash takes 39 days, 14 hours and about 52 minutes.
I got like 3 hours into a 50 hour Chris Chan documentary before I realized I had no idea who this autistic kid was and I wasn't even invested in if he ever found a "boyfriend-free girl".
I think you might be like me and be an unmedicated ADHD person.
I had a 3 day period where I watched DIY men's fashion videos. I have never sewed, have barely any interest but I have theoretical knowledge on how to make a pair of knickerbockers.
Hey man, just because someone smokes weed and enjoys learning about the connected universe of a tv show they've never watched or a 4 and a half hour in-depth history of a character from an obscure fps franchise that leads you down a rabbit hole of even more weird and obscure videos untill you're sitting there at 3am watching the rise and fall or a 500bc civilisation getting furious at a king that's been dead for so long they've turned into coal like he's personally slighted your family, now you're sitting here trying to find more information so you can finish what your ancestors started so your family curse can end and your grandfather can finally rest....
Quinton Reviews is the Darksouls boss of long commentary videos. His latest (that was taken down) was actually 38 hrs of his dad talking about Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction.
I really hate these really long videos. They don't have to be all sub-10 minutes for me, but lately I have seen some previously pretty solid Youtubers post 1.5 hour long videos, consisting for at least one third of rehashed older videos. The rest isn't all that much content either, and could be half shorter with some good editing.
I love the long videos if they have the content to support it. But I have definitely bounced from some that are very clearly just trying to pad the length for more ad revenue. The people I tend to watch seem pretty well paced in every video, no complaints about them. I hope the solid YouTubers you like are just having a down month or something.
'video essay' is such a cringe attempt at re-branding. You're too lazy to fucking read and won't consume any content unless it's effortless and entertaining.
I call a class of video video essays, and I think the term has value. Those videos have the form of an essay, they follow an essay structure. Lindsay Ellis makes video essays
That's different to a video lecture, which is a much more common type. A video lecture tries to teach you something. Lindybeige, and Astrographics and many others do lectures
Then there are a dozen other genres. I think it's the lectures that get long.
I watches a four and half hour video on string theory I can tell you it was not effortless. it was entertaining but holy fuck I had to stop a few times to even wrap my head around some concepts