Companionship Content is King
Companionship Content is King
Theory #29 | Why short-form video has a ceiling & how companionship content escapes it.
Greetings fellow theorists — this essay is a deeper dive into one of the 24 ideas I shared for this year. This post’s admittedly a bit long-form, so I won’t be offended if you skip to what catches your eye.
If it resonates, please give it a like, share it with someone, or leave a comment below (i.e. tell the Substack algorithm gods to let more people read it). P.S. You can also ask a question or suggest a topic for a future working theory here. :)
In 2019, I went to a media founders get together in SF. It was pre-pandemic, IRL. I remember a venture capitalist asking me what kinds of things were interesting to me (as any good VC would). I said passive, long-form content.1
Yet, at the time, TikTok was the rising star, and short-form video was becoming the thing. For the past 4 years, we’ve marveled at the format and the formidable company that’s synonymous with it. Now every platform is Tiktok-ifying itself.
But I believe short-form video has a ceiling, and we’re going to start seeing it. I’m not predicting the format’s demise, but it won’t scale infinitely either. Even TikTok is searching for its “second act.” It’s not just about competition or politics.
On the other hand, long-form passive content, what I call companionship content, doesn’t have nearly as low a ceiling. It emerged long before modern short-form video and it’ll stay on top far longer. Companionship content is, and will be, king.
What is “companionship content?”
Companionship content is long-form content that can be consumed passively — allowing the consumer to be incompletely attentive, and providing a sense of relaxation, comfort, and community.
Companionship content isn’t consumed just for information or entertainment, but as a proxy for having company around, a way to mitigate the awareness of lacking it, or to make an otherwise dull task enjoyable — with a companion.2
Here’s how I see companionship content in the modern content landscape:
Long-form, passive content of this kind lives mostly on a few popular platforms.
YouTube is arguably the home, the king, the Google search of long-form video. Podcasts are distributed by Apple podcasts, and to an increasing extent, on YouTube and Spotify too (and with podcasts moving to video, there’s more overlap). Twitch is uniquely low fidelity in the sense that content isn’t edited yet goes on for hours.
Traditional radio, podcasts, audiobooks, and music are anchors of audio-only companionship content. Interestingly, each individual “unit” of music is short-form (e.g. a 3-5 minute song), but how we consume it tends to be long-form and passive (i.e. via curated stations, lengthy playlists, or algorithms that adapt to our taste).
Then there are streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max. Much of their content is a high-quality production; it’s meant to be watched intently, but it isn’t always. If you’re rewatching a show or movie, it’s likely to be companionship content. (Life-like conversational sitcoms can be consumed this way too.) As streaming matures, platforms are growing their passive-watch library.
Other types of companionship content aren’t formally represented on the diagram above. One example is sports, which again can be active (e.g. for a championship game) or passive (e.g. watching a full day of golf). Sports has historically been owned by legacy television networks and is now moving on to streaming platforms or being licensed to modern media bundles.
Social and community platforms can arguably play a companion role when they’re quite passive and always-on. Having Twitter open on a second monitor, having a busy Discord channel open or even streaming video or games into a Discord community are examples (there are many more).
All this is to say that content isn’t always prescriptively passive, rather it’s rooted in how consumers engage it. That said, some content lends better to being companionship content: Long-form over short. Conversational over action. Simple plot versus complex. And delivered via an app or platform with a largely hands-off interface.
Short-form video has a ceiling
Consuming content requires attention, and everyone has an attention ceiling. This is the basis of my belief that short-form video has an upper limit.3 It’s not that short-form isn’t as good or as entertaining as long-form, it’s that it’s distracting and ultimately draining.
The mental energy consumed per minute of content consumed must be higher for short-form video than many types of content. I think of this as the “drain ratio” (as in energy drain) for a given piece of content or even a whole genre. (I doubt if anyone’s scientifically measured this, but I’d willingly commission a study on it).
What is the cause of this excess energy consumption? Short-form video requires more attention & action in a few ways:
Context switching, i.e. wrapping your head around a new piece of context every 30 seconds, especially if they’re on unrelated topics with different styles
Judgment & decision-making, i.e. contemplating whether to keep watching or swipe to the next video effectively the entire time you’re watching a video
Multi-sensory attention, i.e. default full-screen and requires visual and audio focus, especially since videos are so short that you can easily lose context
Interactive components, e.g. liking, saving, bookmarking, commenting
Short-form video has arguably reached peak zeitgeist.
Almost all legacy players (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, even Netflix) have been in TikTok format cloning mode (and they’re usually late to the scene)
Many startups are chasing a slice of the short-form video pie (e.g. unbundling TikTok by vertical / audience or adapting the format to more private networks)
A sign of maturity at least, TikTok’s U.S. MAUs and downloads may be plateauing at ~140-150 million and 4 million per month respectively (2023)
We’re in the big push for monetization phase and there are whispers that the hyped strategies are not panning out for either the platform or creators
On the latter — the allure of putting a plethora of ad spots between short-form videos meant high hopes for TikTok ads. But it’s not clear that this is in fact the advertiser’s dream format. I haven’t seen many other people predict the deceleration or decline of short-form video, but I agree with author-turned-creator economy expert Mark Manson, who cites weak ad performance as one reason he expects platforms are and will start pulling back even more.
TikTok watch time has grown fast, but it’ll plateau.
It’s not surprising to see TikTok time shot up from 2019 to an average of almost 1 hour per day by 2023. Netflix was plotted a bit above and YouTube a bit below. Interestingly, the “average” means that someone who binges a Netflix show — say for 12 hours — would bolster the “daily average” stat, and same for YouTube.
I’m not predicting that short-form video will start to freefall. But I’m betting that the amount of time that a given person can spend per day consuming short-form video is limited, and it won’t keep rising.4 And I’m more focused on why saturation happens at the individual level, not at what exact number of hours it happens.
Short-form video will cannibalize itself.
I believe there’s a fundamental flaw in the short-form video format —something that tempers how much humans can ever relate to it. With how performative, edited, and algorithmically over-optimized it is, TikTok feels sub-human. TikTok has quickly become one of the most goal-seeking places on earth. I could easily describe TikTok as a global focus group for commercials. It’s the product personification of a means to an end, and the end is attention.
I’m convinced very few creators even like creating short-form video (though they may like playing the game). And you can see how even TikTok creators are adapting the historically rigid format to appeal to more companionship-esque emotions and improve retention. It’s no surprise then that TikTok is making moves in to long-form to take YouTube on head-on. The push includes longer videos, horizontal videos, and even paywalled video series. Since platforms compete towards each other, it’s not the platforms that I’m tracking but the kind of content that’s deemed long-term valuable and hence the true north.
Companionship content has no limits
Luckily, short-form video has a foil: long-form, passive, companionship content.
Companionship content is more human.
Companionship content is the most durable in its closeness to human experience, to being around people. When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.
While short-form content edits are meant to be spectacular and attention-grabbing, long-form content tends to be more subtle in its emotional journey
Long-form engagement with any single character or narrative or genre lets you develop stronger understanding, affinity, and parasocial bonds
Talk-based content (e.g. talk shows, podcasts, comedy, vlogs, life-like sitcoms) especially evokes a feeling of companionship and is less energy-draining
The trends around loneliness and the acceleration of remote work has and will continue to make companionship content even more desirable
As we move into new technology frontiers, we might unlock novel types of companionship content itself, but I’d expect this to take 5-10 years at least
Long-form is the final destination for creators.
If you use TikTok enough, you know that the pipeline for successful creators is to YouTube. Go viral on TikTok, gain followers, funnel to YouTube. TikTok is where you connect with an audience, YouTube is where you consolidate it.5 Long-form content also earns creators more, with YouTube a standout in revenue sharing.
This is a great encapsulation of the state of creator platform monetization (courtesy of Chris Dixon via Tim Ferris’ blog):6
“Four out of five of the largest social networks … Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter — have take rates of about 99% or above. Youtube has a take rate of 45%, meaning it pays out 55% to creators. Almost all of the payouts to creators come from YouTube alone …YouTube paid out $16 billion to creators in 2022 (which is 55% of its annual $30 billion in revenue) and the other four social networks paid out about $1 billion each from their respective creator funds. In total, that yields $20 billion.”
Mr. Beast, YouTube’s top creator, says YouTube is now the final destination, not “traditional” hollywood stardom which is the dream of generations past. Creators also want to funnel audiences to apps & community platforms where they can own user relationships, rely less on algorithms, engage more directly and deeply with followers, and enable follower-to-follower engagement too.7 If dedicated long-form platforms want to stay on top, they’ll have to make this more seamless.
Interestingly of course, an increasing amount of short-form video, including formats like clips and edits, seems to be made from what originally was long-form content.8 And in return, these recycled short-form videos can drive tremendous traffic to long-form formats and platforms. This recent breakdown from Jules Terpak highlights the value of edits in the attention ecosystem. I don’t discount the value of short-form as top of funnel; I see it precisely as this, an accessory.
YouTube is the king of companionship content.
YouTube is the most popular platform among teens, with over 90% adoption among U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 (this based on the percentage of teens who say they ever use the following apps or sites). It’s followed by TikTok, then Snapchat, and Instagram. Notably, the rest of the legacy or newly dominant apps are at <35%.
