YouTube represents now one of the most popular pages on the internet, where there is more content to watch and learn from than hours that we have in a given day to watch it all.
Many people have left their jobs and have started making YouTube videos full time and they usually tend to rely heavily on Google Ads to pay their bills.
They and others use the fact that if you have videos that are longer than 10 minutes, you can add more ads to your video.
More ads, means that people spend more time on YouTube, but that also translates to earnings for the people who publish those videos.
However there is sometimes just a short clip from the video that interests you. Maybe, it is at the last part of the video, or in the middle. The uploader wanted to make you watch the video until the end to find out, which also translates to more ads being viewed.
You tend to use the forward arrow to skip until you get to the point of the clip that you are looking for.
What if there was a quicker way to do that?
Recently I learned a trick from productivity.so’s mailing list about quickly jumping to different portions of a YouTube video using keyboard shortcuts, which I really liked and decided to write this article.
Use the numbers keys to go to the respective percentage of the video
(Clicking 1 will send you to the timestamp of 10%, 2 to 20%, 3 to 30%, etc.)
This is a really helpful trick that is saving me a lot of time and I hope it will be the same for you too.
There are some videos that I usually just try to skim and have a quick preview of what it is about and do not intend to watch it entirely. Pressing 5 to go the half of the video and then simply deciding to go back or forward from that is really helpful.
This reminds me the famous searching algorithm for searching, Binary Search.
You do a split in the middle and then try to finish searching as you have already found what you were looking for, or move left or right that split.
Yes, I am aware that some videos are worth watching from the beginning until the end, but for a lot of them, they have those few interesting insights that you are may be looking for usually buried in the last portion of the video.
