By Imy Brighty-Potts, Marketing and Content
In the 2010s, YouTube was the hottest place online, with new channels popping up left and right doing sketch comedy, character videos and long-form ‘trying’ or vlog-style content.
It was the birthplace of sketch icons like Dropout, became a breeding ground for new format creation and writing from BuzzFeed, and laid the table for formats like Hot Ones, Chicken Shop Date and Last Meals. Five-to-ten-minute videos were cropping up, rolling out across Facebook to audiences desperate to share content they identified with.
SNL was also at its height of popularity, with sketches travelling around university campuses faster than freshers’ flu. Relatable, tongue-in-cheek comedy was rife; it seemed it would never die. And then short-form content and its impact on our attention spans arrived.
Betches (US, not its LadBible-owned UK counterpart) releases Sisters, a scripted series highlighting familial bonds and the hilarity that ensues, based on their original sketch series. Concurrently, SNL is renewed for another season, so one can’t help but wonder if long-form laughs are back.
Sure, short, energetic comedy content still does numbers on social, but as permitted video length increases on platforms like TikTok, an appetite for longer content is returning. The ability to share a full set or clips of stand-up comedy, for example, makes social platforms the perfect outlet for comics grieving the loss of Live at the Apollo.
Sisters, the comedy series ‘that proves you never outgrow your family’, was developed by and stars homegrown Betches comedy stars Tess Tregellas and Madeline Mahoney. The long-form show’s debut season will be distributed across Betches’ Instagram, TikTok and YouTube accounts, as Betches evolves from a media platform into more of a production studio.
What makes this kind of content so engaging, particularly noting that everyone is reporting the benefits of branded micro-dramas? What can sketch-style content that lasts up to 15 minutes per episode do that shorter formats can’t?
Natural product placement in narrative arcs
Fitting a product into a one-minute short video and making it more than just backdrop isn’t easy, but longer episodes give products more scope to be part of the narrative. More time, more opportunity.
Greater story breadth
Equally, there can be more to the story and less left for the audience to fill in themselves. Sketch-style, scripted comedy gives greater opportunity to build familiarity with characters and cover more relatable elements of identity and experience, making the content more shareable too.
Longer on the platform
Longer stories equal more time spent on platforms. Be it social, YouTube or another media platform, the more time people spend there, the greater the ad opportunity.
Earned and organic
There is more opportunity for earned and organic coverage and social content when stories are longer and contain more faces and names.
You can fit more and longer jokes into a ten-minute video than a one-minute clip, and shows like SNL generate huge earned presence from them. It’s the same for shows like Trolley Problems or Escape the Kitchen on hit US scripted platform, Second Try TV. In sketch comedy, the loop is closed for audiences with jokes, callbacks and a final punchline, taking them on a journey of anticipation before enjoying the payoff when it comes. This provides a short but satisfying format that people will just keep coming back to.
