While the mainstream media struggles to keep our attention for more than seven seconds, millions are sitting down for hours at a time to watch the Australian Youtuber and pop-culture connoisseur Mike’s Mic recap 2010’s television dramas. This makes me wonder whether the key to the attention economy is making videos shorter, or just speeding them up.

Screenshot: Emma Francke Husebø / PRESSET. from *YouTube*.

Short-form origins

Vine. It’s success and it’s legacy is really the perfect example of social media’s draw to the short-form video. The app limited the duration of videos to six seconds, and since its demise we’ve seen many social media platforms be in constant discussions of how long videos they should allow, and what length make for the best performance. In recent years, TikTok began allowing videos to be up to 10 minutes, and has since (along Instagram and others) often also included a progress bar at the bottom of the screen, where TikTok even allows you to adjust your playback speed on individual videos. Changing playback speed has long been an option on YouTube, but is also popping up on streaming services. All of these options have one thing in common, enabling the diminishing of attention spans.

We often speak about living in an attention economy, and not in vain. Social media influencers and marketing strategists report that their videos perform best at under seven seconds, or that their videos reach large amounts of people, but that most of them stop watching after two seconds. This tendency seems to be dominating in the media landscape, however, people are also posting two-hour videos, garnering millions of views.

Speed is strength

The reasons for the success of such creators may seem somewhat obvious to some. With creators like Mike’s Mic, the element of nostalgia is powerful. I’d say most of his audience are Millenials or Gen Z, who were teens and tweens in the early 2010s. For me, reminiscing over Pretty Little Liars is also reminiscing over the show I was a little too young to watch at the time, and how mature I felt when I did it anyway. As the leading paragraph suggests, my focus will be on the counterintuitive ability of recap videos to keep younger audiences attention for over an hour.

First of all, some of these videos are upwards of two hours long. The two hours it takes for someone to explain a book, or a season of a show, to you, is still less than it would take you to read the book or watch the show yourself. Meaning that the tempo is an important quality here. This is where I think Mike’s Mic excels.

Mike’s Mic recap-series’ genesis

On the 20th of november 2021 Mike’s Mic, whose real name is Michael Messineo, posts the first of a three-part video series, recapping the teen-drama Pretty Little Liars, titled “An appropriately unhinged recap of “Pretty Little Liars” (Part 1)”. A month later he posted part two, in which he thanks the audience for the love on the previous video, stating that part one had surpassed a million views, to which he says “Are you kidding? That’s unheard of for me”. The videos have since reached between 4 and 9 million views each.

At the time of writing this article, the videos have 9,1 million, 7,4 million, and 4,4 million views respectively. Screenshot: Emma Francke Husebø / PRESSET. from YouTube.

In the intro of part one Messineo asks “why am I making this video?” and answers that it is because we, the audience, are ready for it. In January of the same year (2021) Jenny Nicholsson made a video of a similar length, detailing the show The Vampire Diaries, while Messineo was making his the video had 5 million views, it now has over 14 million. Messineo explains that seeing the response to Nicholsons video, made him realize that maybe people were ready for these kinds of long-format, deep dive videos. And the idea for his Pretty Little Liars series (henceforth referred to as the “PLL-series”) was born. In the years since Messineo have created similar recap series’ of shows such as Glee, Gossip Girl, and Lost, most of which have several million views each.

Inspired works

Collection of screenshots of my results when searching for similar videos. Photo: Emma Francke Husebø / PRESSET.

The PLL-series was well received, and brought many new viewers to Mike’s Mic. Messineo and Nicolsons videos were so popular, that they caused an influx of recap- and deep dive videos on YouTube. Now, I don’t mean to say that the popularisation of the YouTube Video Essay is entirely due to Mike’s Mic (though I would hear you out if you were to make the argument), but in the years since Messineos first video, countless people have copied or emulated his style, down to the titles (common interpretations include “a truly deranged recap of…”, “an unhinged deep dive into…”, “a desperate attempt to explain…” etc.) and the visuals. In his PLL-series Messineo mounted photos and strings on his wall, likening a detective board, a visual aid that has been used by many since.

Again, I cannot confidently claim that all these creators have taken inspiration for Messineo. I certainly can’t say that the detective board format comes from him, (it being a well-known and efficient device in exploratory video essays). However, I do believe his success has been unmatched. And that with the recent influx in videos in similar style, form, and length, to his, you kind of can’t talk about the trend without talking about Mike’s Mic. (At least, I don’t think you should.)

Long-format, but High-speed

In my opinion, a real strength of Messineo’s videos is the speed at which he speaks, as well as the sheer amount of pop-culture references and jokes he includes. I have showed these videos to some friends of mine, and several have needed to turn on subtitles to be able to keep up, or to take breaks for me to explain references, or just to go back in the video to have him repeat himself.

A personal favourite joke from *Gilmore Girls*. Screenshot: Emma Francke Husebø / PRESSET. from S2E12 *Richard in Stars Hollow,* Warner Bros.

A funny observation I’ve had from these instances, is that the two friends who needed the most assistance, also might be my two most “chronically offline” friends, at the very least on a completely different side of the internet than I am. So when Messineo says “Pam Fields went from hating the gays to being the president of the Frankie Grande appreciation club” or “Wayne Fields is in the army. Yes, he is a BTS stan”, I can understand that they might need a moment to digest the joke. A moment they aren’t given, as the video moves right on.

Perhaps this is both a strength and a weakness. Some might deem it a weakness, catering to a more niche audience, because it makes him less marketable, or less palatable for a mass-audience. I however, count this as a strength. Creating a stronger — albeit smaller — audience, I believe is a better option than having a large but shallow fanbase. Additionally, I’d argue that a key part in creating an invested audience is the idea that “the audience is only as only as smart as you allow them to be”.

Amy Sherman-Palladino (creator, writer, and executive producer of Gilmore Girls) said this about her show. Scott Patterson (Luke Danes) added that it is “an educated persons dream” to watch Gilmore Girls, just for the joy of trying to figure out their references. A good storytelling device is to make your reader feel clever. This will make them feel more personally invested in your writing, and if they believe they can decode one thing, they’ll be more inclined to try to understand the next. Sherman-Palladino explains that dumbing down your writing is essentially saying that the audience can’t handle it. We live in a world where everything is catered to making everything more comfortable and more-easily accessible — which is really just catering to our inherent laziness (obviously not counting for accessibility aids for disabled people). But I bring up Gilmore Girls because the things one might critique in Mike’s Mic’s videos, are the very things that have made Gilmore Girls so famous and so loved.

The intimacy of being in the know

Messineo referencing a joke he made earlier in the video (“Wayne Fields is in the army. Yes, he is a BTS stan”) now saying that his wife Pam Fields (main character Emily’s mother) moved to Texas to be with him. Screenshot: Emma Francke Husebø / PRESSET. from *YouTube.*

Mike’s Mic’s videos have a distinct style, largely resting on the tempo (of both his speech and editing) and the references he makes. I would argue that most people who enjoy his videos, enjoy them because of this. As I discussed earlier, the issue isn’t so much the duration of the videos (TikTok’s can often be over a minute, three, or even near ten), but the speed of them. What Messineo is doing is not only moving quick enough for you not to get bored, or stopping to dwell on plot points, but he’s also flooding his sentences with little jokes. Not big or complicated enough to take away from the discussion, but small and inconspicuous, to where they feel more like sharing a knowing look with a friend in the middle of a conversation, rather than the conversation stopping altogether.

In this, Messineo is building a relationship with his viewers. We see each other (we good). And he’s not stopping to over-explain a joke you may not have picked up on, he moves on to the next. Meaning that not only are you not getting bored, but you’re also not feeling embarrassed from not understanding something. Instead, he’s leaning into the “if you know, you know”, and if you don’t, that’s fine too. Because we’re going so fast that by the time you realise you’ve missed something or have zoned out, we’re already onto the next thing, drawing you right back in again.

In the end, I stand by my statement that Mike’s Mic is one of the few people who speaks fast and funnily enough to keep me entertained and engaged for two and a half hours.

Mike’s Mic is the only one who speaks fast enough to keep my attention for two hours