The short-form video trap: When reach comes at the cost of rigour

A COMMENTER on my first YouTube Short, dubbed “McKinsey Uses ChatGPT. So What Are You Actually Paying For?’, told me I had "no idea what I was talking about." He then proceeded to explain McKinsey's AI strategy to me with the confidence of someone who'd just discovered it.

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ANDILE Masuku's first week as a YouTuber taught him that direct engagement is seductive--but possibly corrosive to the deeper work.

(SZABO VIKTOR on Unsplash)

A bit of sleuthing reveals he might be a senior manager at a boutique enterprise tech consultancy specialising in Oracle solutions, with undergraduate and master's degrees in IT from a university Forbes ranks 114 in the US. In other words, someone who'd actually know his way around enterprise AI deployments.

The irony being that my 3-minute riff on AI disrupting consulting was based on months of research, multiple conversations with ecosystem players, and a 1,200-word piece I'd published days earlier examining exactly the dynamics he was lecturing me about.

But here's the thing: he wasn't entirely wrong to respond that way. The format demands oversimplification. Three minutes doesn't leave room for nuance, caveats, or the kind of layered analysis I've built my work around. What surprised me wasn't the critique but how quickly I felt the pull to keep making sub-3-minute videos anyway.

The first Short (put out on YouTube, Linkedin and X) got more direct engagement in 48 hours than I typically see from this column, which reaches over four million readers who I mostly never hear from. Views climbed. Comments rolled in. The algorithm smiled. And I felt the pressure immediately: keep it going, stay consistent, feed the machine.