Same Hustle, Different Screens: Why 1920s Hollywood Output Echoes The Internet's Endless Demand For Videos
Hollywood's silent film era didn’t have algorithms, but the game was the same: stay constantly visible, or be forgotten.
Last week, I wrote a piece about Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931); the film had been selected at my film club as the February movie month of the month. It was the first silent movie we were discussing, so I chose to research beyond Chaplin by watching at least one film by his contemporaries, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd were the biggest silent film stars back in the day. Their modern day equivalents would probably be Robert Downey, Jr., Tom Cruise1, and Dwayne Johnson.2 As I looked through the history of Lloyd’s life, this bit caught my attention: in the 1920s, Lloyd3 used to release one or two feature films every year.
Intrigued, I dug through his filmography and discovered an eye-popping fact: Prior to making features, Lloyd made a LOT of short films within a year. His record would be 81 one-reel shorts in 1919. Each one-reel short was approximately twelve minutes. That means in 1919, Lloyd had about 972 minutes of screen appearances in a year— about 16 hours of film!
But in the 1930s, after the Great Depression plus the advent of sound and “talkies”, Lloyd’s film release rate slowed to about one feature film every two years4. However, this part in particular caught my attention: As Lloyd’s absence from the screen grew, his popularity declined, and with it, his fortunes.
Basically, when he stopped constantly putting out stuff into the cinemas, his career suffered.
I looked at Chaplin’s and Keaton’s film history to see how many films they’d also made throughout their career, and I found similar numbers. Between 1914 and 19215, Chaplin appeared in about 77 short films; compared to Chaplin and Lloyd, Keaton only made about 18 short films between 1917 and 19206 but unlike Chaplin and Lloyd, he’d continue to appear in more short films.
So it seems that this rate of output was not uncommon for film stars at the time. It also made sense because short films— and even features, for that matter— were still relatively simple affairs with uncomplicated stories that could be shot quickly for little money. But what did strike me is that this output rate in the 1910s-1920s feels very similar to the rate of videos being put out today by channels on platforms such as YouTube— only, the rate of output on the internet is much more frenzied and sped up to insane levels. If Lloyd’s annual absence on the screen led to his career decline, on the internet, an absence of a few days or even a week can mean an entire reversal of fortunes.
Which leads to lots of content creators and influencers burning out because the hamster wheel of the internet means that they need to be everywhere all the time; or else, viewers will simply swipe to the next one. And on the internet, there are plenty of alternatives, because now— thanks to smartphones and the ease of uploading videos to platforms— everybody wants to be a star!
Whereas Lloyd— as well as Keaton and Chaplin— could get away with one short film per month, or even one or two films annually, the algorithm on the internet demands you put out something EVERY DAY. Stay away for longer than that, you’ll end up as yesterday’s news. Especially if what you’re putting out is, to put it mildly, garbage7.
There are exceptions, though, and I think that connects to my earlier point about quality. I’m specifically thinking about something like the Acquired podcast.
Acquired, run by co-hosts, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, became famous for its deep dives into the backstories of well-known brands and companies— they’ve done episodes on Nike, Rolex, and Hermes, to name a few. These episodes can LONG— the Hermes episode, for instance, runs for 4 hours8. That’s because Gilbert and Rosenthal take a lot of time to do their research.
According to a Fast Company profile, Acquired is an anomaly:
By almost every measure of what drives success in podcasting, Acquired should not be a hit. Its release schedule is irregular, and its deep-dive episodes into a company appear approximately monthly, whereas a regular weekly cadence is considered best practice. Its episodes now routinely extend past even Joe Rogan length, to three to four hours; the conventional wisdom remains that podcast episodes shouldn’t extend past about 40 minutes.
Irregular schedules. Long episodes that defy conventional wisdom. How much time does it take for Gilbert and Rosenthal to put together an episode? When they launched in January 20209, they’d spend about “5 to 10 hours per episode”; two and a half years later, that number rose to a “cumulatively spent 100 hours”. In 2023, they’d spend about “60 hours a week for a month”10. For their herculean episode on Nike, Rosenthal drafted a 39-page script based on all the research, while Gilbert curated a list of insights that clocks nearly 4,000 words11.
And it’s paid off. In fact, their audience of listeners is so large that featuring ads to tap in some of the sweet ad revenue money would be worth it. “Our deal sizes are fortunately so large at this point that I don’t know that if we grew the number of listeners to the show by 10 times, our revenue would not commensurately go up 10x,” explains Rosenthal. It’s similar to the conundrum by YouTube’s biggest star MrBeast, who revealed in an interview that he started Feastables chocolate bars because even the largest brand marketers in the world would not be able to afford to pay a fair price on a video that will garner 400 million views12. Acquired doesn’t bother with YouTube or social media strategies because, put simply, the work they do cannot be done quickly. The podcast, according to conventional wisdom and how the internet machinery works, should have flamed out long ago— just like what happened to Lloyd. Instead, it keeps growing.
Okay, that went on a tangent. But the point I was trying to make is that the factory-like process of churning out silent short films on a monthly basis feels analogous13 to the current demands of social media platforms today. And, just as the majority of silent short films of Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd have been lost to history, nearly all of the stuff on the internet14 will be forgotten. Instead, we remember films like City Lights (Chaplin), The General (Keaton), and Safety Last! (Lloyd) because they took time to make and, as a result, were quality.
When the historians of the future look back on this time, it’ll be the stuff that took time to make, not that which is cranked out rapidly, that will be preserved. Because judging by how early Hollywood worked in the past, there’s a good chance that history will repeat itself.
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Long live the movies!
D.L. Holmes
What do Buster Keaton and Tom Cruise have in common? They both did a lot of their own stuntwork and risked their lives for our entertainment.
Not respectively— only the Keaton-Cruise comparison feels equivalent.
Although Chaplin and Keaton’s films have endured longer in cinema history, Lloyd was actually the highest-performing actor in his heyday.
Which is the cadence we see of film stars today, unless all their films happen to release in the same year— for instance, Robert Pattinson has four films confirmed for 2026: The Drama, The Odyssey, Dune: Part Three, and Here Comes The Flood.
In 1921, Chaplin directed and starred in the feature film, The Kid.
In 1920, Keaton appeared in his first feature film, The Saphead, that launched his career as a leading man.
Superfans who really care about a creator’s work, however, will stick around. Or at least, I’d like to think so.
To put it in perspective, that’s literally the same runtime as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Extended Edition!
They originally started by talking about company acquisitions— hence, the Acquired title— before broadening their scope, to extremely successful results.
Which explains why the gaps between the release dates of episodes take such a long time.
For the Nike episode, Gilbert had “a list of 117 links, plus a 42-page Pitchbook report on Nike—the original 1972 trademark filing for the “Swoosh”; a bunch of earnings reports and Nike’s most recent earnings call; and the LinkedIn posts of the retired Nike historian Scott Reames”. My head is just spinning trying to imagine how much work went into assembling the facts into a coherent story.
Personally, I’m not a fan of MrBeast, but I guess I’m not the demography for his videos.
Ironic, since it’s digital. That’s a nerdy pun for you wordsmiths out there.
I refuse to use the word ‘content’ and so, I shall use the phrase ‘stuff on the internet’.