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The social media generation puts accessibility above almost all else, and nothing is more accessible than the world wide web. As a result, a new type of viewing experience has emerged--quick views over your breakfast cereal or during your lunch break. But video producers often fail to cater to this type of viewing experience, instead focusing on what has been successful over the past half-century.

the current online environment calls for video and content that is made specifically for online audiences. Meaning short-form video with a quality that matches the production level of offline content. Not spinoffs or originally discarded footage, but shows and content made specifically for online viewers

Online video doesn't have the luxury of longer-form shows that a viewer schedules time to watch. More likely, they stumbled upon your video by chance on their Twitter or Facebook feed. They haven't committed to watching their video, but their interest is piqued and they've pushed play. Don't waste that chance. The video must grab and engage them nearly instantaneously--if not, you'll lose potential longterm fans. Unengaging, ported-over content won't survive in our ADD environment.

the so-called "long-read" could be seen as a nutritious, well-balanced meal, while snackable content is the fast food of the content world.

So "snackable content" is short-form data — be it text, imagery or video — that consumers can quickly engage with, possibly on-the-go, possibly on a smaller screen, that will hopefully leave them hungry for more, similar content in the future.

In China, he said, online branded content is "the only thing that makes sense in advertising." 

DiIanni said Chinese audiences want stories and "want to engage with content and social media." But he cautioned that "brands need to be flexible and open to new ideas" in content. Too often in his experience, he said, brands do not see the opportunity in some roles offered in content. 

Sirena Liu, founder and president of Filmworks China, an agency that also specializes in assembling content for brands, doesn't think the branded content in its most recent form will necessarily last forever. "The trend of mini-movies will continue to be popular for a while, but probably not for too long," Liu told brandchannel.

A new study says the need to be entertained may be the biggest driver of activity on the social network

The desire to be entertained predicts the amount of time users spend on Facebook, according to an academic study published this month in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. The study also suggests that the reasons for using Facebook change over time: You sign up for interpersonal communications, but you end up staying for the boredom-busting factors.

Researchers have long known that five broad categories drive online activity: information seeking, interpersonal communication, self-expression, passing time and entertainment.

Here’s the problem with interactivity: There’s no evidence people actually want it in their stories. No one watches Mad Men or reads Gone Girl yearning for control of the story as it unfolds. Interaction is precisely what most of us don’t want during story time. The more we interact with a story, the more we have to maintain the alertness of the mind operating in the real world. We can’t achieve the dreamy trance that constitutes so much of the joy of story--and the power. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Finnegan’s Wake, for all its splendor as a kind of impressionistic word painting, repels readers because of its interactivity. Most critics think that Joyce was trying to get away from what he called “wideawake language” to re-create the chaos of dreaming life. Paradoxically, however, the sheer difficulty of Finnegan’s Wake forces readers to maintain a “wideawake” frame of mind as they attempt to puzzle their way through. They can’t slip into the waking dream of story time.

Story resists reinvention. As the example of Finnegan’s Wake shows, storytelling is not something that can be endlessly rejiggered and reengineered. Story is like a circle. A circle is a circle. The minute you start fussing with the line you create a non-circle. Similarly, story only works inside narrow bounds of possibility. Imagine narrative transportation as this powerful brain capacity that is protected by a lock. The lock can only be opened with a specific combination. For as long as there have been humans, the ways of undoing the lock have been passed down through generations of storytellers. Going back to the earliest forms of oral folktales and moving forward through stage plays, to printed novels, and modern YouTube shorts, the fundamentals of successful storytelling have not changed at all.

When it comes to the fundamentals of story, there is not now--and never will be--anything new under the sun.