Subservience to the algorithm
Over the last couple of years I have been noticing two trends among internet videos, especially on YouTube: videos that could easily be three to four minutes long are stretched to over ten minutes in length, and thumbnails where people are making stupid faces. This comes from YouTube’s recommendation algorithm favouring thumbnails with people’s faces, and videos needing to be at least ten minutes long to be eligible for advertising revenue. At least those used to be the rules back then, they might have changed since, but the videos still follow the same pattern.