Stay At Home Mom is a massive market segment with a lot of purchasing decision power. Long-form advertising targeted at SAHMs is nearly as old as the advertising industry itself. This is just the next iteration.

Video does particularly well with this segment (as opposed to text) because of the nature of parenting and housekeeping -- lots of time spent on your feet with busy hands and occasionally available eyes. The same reason radio/long-form podcasting is popular with truckers. Or text with office workers (relatively speaking). It's entertainment you can engage with during work hours between or during tasks.

Soap opera of the YouTube era, you might be on to something!

Plenty of people hate this shit and still watch it because they got tricked. I watched (skimmed) like 12 videos yesterday trying to find a hack to locate my empty AirPods case. There’s apparently no way to do it but each video had a more infuriatingly false title than the last.

It would never even occur to me to watch a video on finding my AirPods case. Either there is an article or forum post for it, or I need to post a question on a forum, but no way am I sifting through the garbage that is YouTube.

It just depends on the subject matter I think.

Plenty of my searches will lead me to a solid stackoverflow / reddit / quora / forum answer but another large percentage only seem to lead to the blog equivalent of the offending YouTube videos, hyper tuned to show a description that leads me to believe it's what I want but delivering nothing.

Same. It's probably a generational thing, with the split at maybe 20 or something where video became both searchable and trivial in terms of bandwidth.

But, to be fair, the Google-as-front-door internet has become totally useless for these types of tasks as well. Those wiki-style pages with huge walls of text offering nonsense advice are a plague.

Yes, I filter out all that garbage too, but because it is text, I can filter it out 100x faster than video.

If you don't mind explaining: how? I constantly find myself on those (very heavy) pages and haven't found a good way to avoid them except to restrict my search to certain domains (SO, Reddit, etc.)

I guess it is mostly heuristics learned over a couple decades. I use an ad blocker (Wipr), so if there are problems loading the page, that is a flag. If it looks like an SEO churned out page with lots of links and poor sentence structure, another flag.

A lot of times, you do end up on Reddit and SO, but there are some good forums available if you dig deep, especially for car/HVAC/home maintenance related stuff. Sometimes you have to join a forum and post a question.

I'm exactly the same as you, but my adolescent children all turn to TickTock or YT when searching for an answer.

They can't google for shit, unfortunately. My fault probably, but as I managed to learn all of this on my own, I expected them to do the same.

I am hoping I can teach mine to be sufficiently literate and good at reading to prefer scanning through text rather than watch video. I assume many others have thought the same, who knows if I will be successful.

to be fair I can't google for shit anymore either. Try to find an actual review or more information about an item and the first 90 results are SEO spam and places selling said item.

they really invited that sort of thing by tossing the dislike count

I'm curious what theoretical mechanism might there be for an airpods case to be findable?

AirPod cases have Bluetooth and report battery levels to the paired iPhone.

From there, one could imagine it working like any other Bluetooth tracker.

I'm not sure cases have Bluetooth - I think they use either of the inserted AirPods as a proxy to communicate its status to the phone (the power pins must have a minimal communication protocol to allow the case to talk to the pods).

Even with only that, they could have a “last place seen” feature.

He merely needs to apply Bayesian search theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_search_theory

1. Formulate as many reasonable hypotheses as possible about what may have happened to the object.

2. For each hypothesis, construct a probability density function for the location of the object.

...

I sometimes find myself watching similar content for a bit like a kind of engineering "reality" show. no real goal in mind and absolutely no intention of doing any of the things though. Knowing now that they put out videos suggesting people mess with live transformers... i think im over it.

Children and ESLs. I personally tune in to see just how far they'll go this time.

Little kids. My 7 year old loves five minute craft videos.