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    Hello_Madam_PresidentJordan Sargent
    4/22/16 2:08pm

    Ok, so those recipe videos autoplay on FB. Are they counting that in the views? Because that just means everyone who ever scrolls by it counts.

    Some of those recipes seem either disgusting or like, why did you do this? Not sure if it was a BF video, but once I saw one that was like, how to make a salad and it was assembling lettuce, tomatoes, red onion, croutons, and then pouring a “dressing of your choice” on it. WTF was the point of that?!

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      youcuntseemeHello_Madam_President
      4/22/16 2:20pm

      A “view,” according to Facebook, is three seconds. So yes, if you’re scrolling by, odds are they’re counting you as having “viewed” it. It’s probably single digits percent of people who actually watch the whole video. Maybe higher for the recipe ones.

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      CakewalkinDaddyHello_Madam_President
      4/22/16 6:21pm

      That sounds quite tasty and easy as well. I wonder if Jordan Sargent has ever eaten a salad. Probably not, there’s a first time for everything.

      I’m going to try and find that video and make a salad. I want to make sure I get it right. Great tip, thanks.

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    BrocephalusJordan Sargent
    4/22/16 2:36pm

    I was having this conversation with someone the other day and figured this post would attract the kind of people who know the answer:

    Why do companies market to millennials/young people when those are not the people with the money to actually buy their products? Is it the logic of hook them early so they are life long customers?

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      BurnerHerzogBrocephalus
      4/22/16 2:50pm

      I think traditionally they have more disposable income and more time to spend it, even if they make less in absolute terms. People with kids don’t go out as much, and those little fuckers are expensive. And even if you don’t have kids, by the time you’re in your late thirties, you probably have more responsibilities and less time and energy to keep up with whatever the hell the new thing is.

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      DinhilionBrocephalus
      4/22/16 3:06pm

      Two part answer. In short, yes. Younger people are more likely to try new things. As you get older, you tend to have more set preferencs. At least partially because you don’t have as much time for exploration. You have work, kids etc. Think about how much money the Rolling Stones have made because Boomers want to listen to the same music they loved as kids.

      The second piece is that younger people spend a higher percentage on disposable goods, which have the highest markups. You don’t see Koehler marketing to millennials. They are going out to eat more (especially this generation), they spend more on clothes, etc. Also, they tend to want to cycle products (see still exploring above), so there is more space in their money allotment for more products.

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    Freddie DeBoerJordan Sargent
    4/22/16 3:10pm

    So who will protect the written word? The answer, ultimately, is probably no one.

    I don’t mean to dismiss your concerns. But it’s essential to say: people have been declaring the death of print for hundreds of years. It’s in the historical record. People said the telegraph would mean the end of print (even though the information conveyed was “print”), and that the telephone would, and that radio would, and that television would, and that the internet (circa 1995) would. We’ve had the ability to produce mass-scale video for cheap for at least 10 years. And the bias in pieces like this is always going to be towards the sensationalistic and the apocalyptic. It’s the nature of internet publishing.

    I mean, look at print books: a few years ago it was totally fashionable to declare that you wouldn’t be able to buy them in a few years, that the age of the e-reader was here and that print books were dying. And yet the exact opposite trend has occurred since then. And why wouldn’t it? Print books have a vast number of advantages over ebooks, and people love them. A relatively small number of people read books. But that’s always been true, even in the supposed good old days. Same thing here: there’s no reason to believe that a hardcore fanbase won’t keep text-based publishing alive as a profitable and fairly large venture into the future. It already has. If vinyl heads could keep records alive and prompt a renaissance, text will endure too.

    Trust me: if you study the history of print and media, it’s really hard to take pieces like this one seriously. People have made this claim for hundreds of years.

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      AgingHipsterFreddie DeBoer
      4/22/16 3:22pm

      tldr

      Just kidding, just kidding. I was thinking exactly that as I was reading the original article.

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      R. damascenaFreddie DeBoer
      4/22/16 8:01pm

      You do media history? *raises hand tentatively*

      Soooooo…is it worth picking up a Michael McLuhan book at the library? It sounds like he was an interesting, if retro, kind of weird. But my main reason for wondering in the first place is that I liked Videodrome, and my actual education background is biology, so. Um. I’m a little hesitant.

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    BrtStlndJordan Sargent
    4/22/16 2:09pm

    You guys really like to write about Buzzfeed.

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      bbutle01BrtStlnd
      4/22/16 2:21pm

      it’s like when my kids are really jealous of other kids... they talk about them a lot.

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      NoOnesPostBrtStlnd
      4/22/16 4:12pm

      No shit, a media blog likes to write about an attention grabbing media venture?

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    FelixElixJordan Sargent
    4/22/16 2:15pm

    Is that website that steals all of Clickhole’s ideas all the time?

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      norbiznessJordan Sargent
      4/22/16 2:07pm

      It’s like Arthur Andersen [staid makers of asinine lists] and Andersen Consulting [maverick offensive video makers], or whatever the fuck it’s called now because of Enron

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        raincoasterJordan Sargent
        4/22/16 8:46pm

        Well...no.

        The internet started as text, because text was easier to do technically than video, audio, 3D modelling, etc, etc. So, the words flooded there, and writers blossomed there. But the internet is actually just a delivery technology, not an ivory tower or special interest group. The flood of video content to the web only mirrors the flood of video into homes after broadcast television was invented, the flood of audio into homes once radio came of age.

        The internet is just a delivery system for brain fodder, and it was only accidentally text-based in the beginning, which then drew in more writers, even created writers like Richard Lawson (now at VanityFair.com, yes, the web site) out of commenters. As the technology matured, it delivered progressively more technologically complex material to the public, and guess what? If you look at the number of people who watched tv in 1980 vs the number who read books, you’d see some familiar ratios.

        So, I don’t think this will be the death of writing on the web. It’s just a bunch of corporations thundering after the thing they think will make the most money, which is nothing new in the media world. They’ll overcorrect, then try to compensate, and there will be bankruptcies and so on, but people who like to read essays are not going to be converted into people who watch “Dudebro eats tea sandwiches for the first time” videos.

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          notaquarterbackJordan Sargent
          4/22/16 10:33pm

          I think it’s an age-based thing. People under a certain age are able to watch more stuff and they trend lately towards short-form video. It’s especially true for minorities where mainstream tv seems to have less useful for them, people are creating their own Nollywoods of content that serves their friends and becomes viral with the elite ones getting mainstream media deals.

          But at the end of day, I’d always prefer to read an article. The videos are nice, so long as it has something to do with a story that I can read, but the noise gets old at times. But I have friends in their 20s who are like all up on the latest Vine stars and at any show I go to, every kid is Snapchatting everything.

          It’ll be interesting to see how these models sustain when people have less time and get older. Facebook managed it by expanding its user base and enveloping parents, but when your friend groups are less cohesive through tie and atrophy, there is just less time and attention for a multitude of networks.

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            Portlandnative1984Jordan Sargent
            4/23/16 1:32am

            There is just too many damn ads. I am getting sick and tired of clicking on a 15 second video and first being hit with a 30 second ad. I would much rather pay for content then get assaulted by random ads I never ever click on.

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              OMG!PONIES!Jordan Sargent
              4/23/16 8:35am

              io9 is no longer a stand-alone blog but Sploid is like half of the posts on Gizmodo. Just sayin’

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