5 minutes usually… If its longer i tend to have it in the background and not really listen.

And if its a random video i wont watch the entire thing, I will stop watching it if its not interesting in the first 20 seconds. The 5 minute thing is for my own subs.

Length of video doesn’t factor into whether I watch it at all. If I decide to watch the video, I’ll either watch the whole thing, stop halfway, or just skip forwards to various points depending on how well it caught my interest.

What determines if I open it at all has more to do with who sent it to me, why they sent it to me, and what the title/thumbnail looks like.

The who: I don’t bother clicking on videos from most people. Usually I’m away from my pc at the time and don’t have headphones in so I really can’t be bothered. There are a couple of friends that have very consistently sent me hilarious or fascinating content though, and I will either watch those right away or save it to a watchlist for later. This is a very short and exclusive list.

The why: Context matters. I generally don’t bother watching videos that get sent to me without any sort of explanation - if it’s nothing but a link, it might as well be nothing. If the person sending it can’t even think of an emote or a couple of words to add to it, it’s probably not worth watching. In contrast, sometimes friends will send me a video to get my opinion on something, or to share their current special interest, or because it’s something they’ve made themselves. Those, I will always watch regardless of length. If my close friends are invested in it, I am too to some extent.

The what: If the video has a clickbait title/thumbnail, I’m not clicking it no matter how interesting it sounds.

I most cases, the decision is made long before I even notice the length of the video

Honestly, my answer is zero. It’s a rare day when I click on one.

I particularly dislike talking videos. I would always prefer to read instead of hearing someone talk.

About 5 seconds. Give me an article instead.

I really do not like video as a medium for things that could be written. I don’t really care for “wow look at this wacky thing that happened”. I really dislike videos that are just someone talking at the camera. (Standup comedy gets a pass, but that’s also not something I watch much)

So I’m probably not watching most videos.

For a random moderately interesting subject, I’d rather read a blog post.

If I didn’t ask to be sent a video, I will almost certainly not watch a video of any length.

Any length… As long as its content related…

Why 15/20 rambling minutes of banality to describe something that needs 2 minutes. I don’t care about you, your fucked up goofy smile, a cross fade to your dog doing stupid shit, banal commentwry on the state of the world etc while you are there to show me how to wire an electric plug.

If it’s from a good friend, maybe twenty minutes. If it’s from an acquaintance, maybe five minutes. If it’s from a stranger, I’m not gonna watch it unless I find the subject very interesting.

Considering its only moderately interesting and is not of any particular intrest to me, the maximum I would spend is like a minute.

5/10 interestingness gets 0 seconds of watch time for me, there’s just too much quality content produced in my topics of interest every day for me to keep up with. I already have to miss some 7/10 projects just because there’s only so much free time in a day.

Regarding the time question, for something that barely crosses the “okay I’ll watch it” threshold, 10-15 minutes is probably what I’ll give it. It can be longer than that, I’ll just skip through parts of the video for the gist to decide if I want to give it more time.

Worth noting though, that for extremely interesting content, a 15 minute duration actually dissuades me from watching it, as I doubt there’s enough time to cover much of anything at a decent level in that little an amount of time. So like, for a neat history vid on a topic I’d like to hear more about, if it’s 30 minutes or less then I’m less likely to give it a chance, unless it’s covering something super narrow where there wouldn’t be as much to talk about. But if you’re going to cover a major historical event, you better be at least a half hour. There are some exceptions to this, Indy Nidell(sp?) is a good example, but it’s my general rule.

Random friend, a minute. Random person on the Internet, 10 seconds.

Depends on where it links to (e.g. it’s a tiktok-link, vs. a video they directly uploaded into the chat), what the thumbnail looks like (if any), how much I like that person, and how interesting their previous links (if any) were. Also, if it’s something they recorded themselves.

If it’s only 5/10, I probably wouldn’t watch it. Maybe I’d do a few seconds to a minute. My friends pass around mid meme videos all the time and I barely watch any. If i’m not sober however, then probably like 5 mins.

I don’t open any email attachments of any kind unless they are critically important and the sender has spoken to me about them in advance.

Surfing videos, on YouTube for example, I might casually look at a video up to about 10 minutes long. I only look at longer ones if I sought out the specific video.