If you’ve spent any time on social in the last year, you may have asked yourself why the video you are watching is sharing the screen with seemingly unrelated footage of kinetic sand. Or maybe the mobile game Subway Surfers, or classic clips of Family Guy. 

This new phenomenon claimed to be the latest hack to channel growth, has been coined ‘Sludge Content’. The name is an allusion to the lack of audience value provided by the mostly unrelated second video. But while there are logical mechanisms and truths driving its current popularity, Sludge content’s credentials as a pathway to algorithmic success are often overstated. 

Regardless of whether the format is Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or TikTok, social video platforms are looking to promote content that keeps people interested. They make personalised approximations of this based on what viewers have engaged with and watched for the most amount of time, and then they give them more of that.

Sludge content has multiple, disparate points of focus, and in providing these it increases the amount of time it takes people to work out if it is a video they want to watch. With the unrelated Sludge element usually selected purely to keep you watching, you get a very slight, but crucial, increase in watch time. Enough to make a video marginally more likely to be promoted by the platform’s algorithm. 

Content that coldly plays to what the algorithm likes, rather than what people enjoy watching, is nothing new. Facebook’s version of this is the 15-minute video that sets up a premise early, before skirting on the edge of the big reveal for so long that Meta thinks it’s the latest Mr Beast production. Instagram equally has its flaws. Perennial rage baiters ‘5 Minute Crafts’ have created an entire business model around doing something so inane that you just have to mention it in the comments. 

One oft-cited but incorrect take on Sludge Content claims that it’s s sinister diversion tactic used to subconsciously place messaging in the minds of children. All research on ‘Second screening’ - the practice of watching two things at once - suggests that very little can be recalled from the secondary or background content that is being consumed. 

Once you start noticing Sludge in your feed, it becomes hard to ignore how many videos use the format. Where monetisation exists, there will always be an enterprising subset of creators who exploit algorithmic mechanisms to get seen by more people. The greatest content, however - that which genuinely builds audiences and viewer loyalty over the long term - will always be the content that adds value to people's lives. Content with its own merits, which doesn’t rely on tricks. Sludge content does not do this, which effectively limits the impact it can have. So although some version of Sludge will always be around, it seems unlikely it will ever become the norm. 

Chris Spearman

Chris is Head of Delivery for Fourth Floor Creative, ensuring all our campaigns are delivered by the right people at the right time with the right creators and collaborators and in the Fourth Floor way.