:) No apologies needed! We are all getting to know each other.
Oh, that kind of engagement, definitely. I was thinking more 'engagement' in the sense that it shows up in tech companies bottom lines and annual reports: Engagement™, as it were. (I shouldn't have used a normal word in a jargony sense without defining it; that's not good writing on my part. And forgive me if you already know all this!)
So real human engagement, definitely necessary! For different people, in different ways. But Engagement™ is a measure tech companies who sell our information use to measure time spent on their site. How many seconds or minutes do you spend on their site a day? How much is passive (scrolling, or letting YouTube suggest videos), how much is slightly active onsite (liking, reblogging, sharing), how much is creating content (posting videos, writing posts), and how much is active but taking you offsite (clicking links)? Since what they are selling is everything they can possibly learn about you by your use patterns, and also they are selling access to your eyeballs (via promoted posts and the like), they define successful engagement as "keeping you there as long as possible". And they've all learned that what keeps people on social media sites is outrageous content: either outrage (The Other Guys Are Doing This Awful Thing!!!!) or off the wall content (YouTube dangerous stunts, or Flat Earth conspiracies). So all their algorithms put forward that material to maximize keeping your eyeballs on their site.
It's why all the non-video sites like FB and Twitter are willing to spend the money to host native video, which is very expensive. Your eyeballs staying engaged with them, and not engaged with YouTube, is a net win.
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Oh, that kind of engagement, definitely. I was thinking more 'engagement' in the sense that it shows up in tech companies bottom lines and annual reports: Engagement™, as it were. (I shouldn't have used a normal word in a jargony sense without defining it; that's not good writing on my part. And forgive me if you already know all this!)
So real human engagement, definitely necessary! For different people, in different ways. But Engagement™ is a measure tech companies who sell our information use to measure time spent on their site. How many seconds or minutes do you spend on their site a day? How much is passive (scrolling, or letting YouTube suggest videos), how much is slightly active onsite (liking, reblogging, sharing), how much is creating content (posting videos, writing posts), and how much is active but taking you offsite (clicking links)? Since what they are selling is everything they can possibly learn about you by your use patterns, and also they are selling access to your eyeballs (via promoted posts and the like), they define successful engagement as "keeping you there as long as possible". And they've all learned that what keeps people on social media sites is outrageous content: either outrage (The Other Guys Are Doing This Awful Thing!!!!) or off the wall content (YouTube dangerous stunts, or Flat Earth conspiracies). So all their algorithms put forward that material to maximize keeping your eyeballs on their site.
It's why all the non-video sites like FB and Twitter are willing to spend the money to host native video, which is very expensive. Your eyeballs staying engaged with them, and not engaged with YouTube, is a net win.