The Wadsworth Constant is an axiom which states that the first 30% of any online video is either uninformative or uninteresting and can therefore freely be skipped.

 

The Discovery of the Wadsworth Constant

The law was coined on the website Reddit. In the comment thread discussing a YouTube video, user Wadsworth complained:

For EVERY youtube video, I always open the video and then immediately punch the slider bar to about 30 percent.

For example, in this video, it should have just started at :40. Everything before :40 was a waste. This holds true for nearly every video in the universe.

"Perhaps this should be known as the Wadsworth Constant," Redebo, another user, suggested. The community agreed and the Wadsworth Constant is now commonly cited on Reddit, and gaining ground elsewhere on the Internet.

&wadsworth=1

A YouTube exployee, acknowledging the utility of the Constant, created a parameter that, when added to a YouTube URL, automatically begins loading the video's content 30% of the way through.

Other Media

The Wadsworth Content can be applied to other media as well, including music, text or even magazines that might begin with useless ads and indices. English newspapers readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might have routinely applied the Constant – back then, advertising material often comprised the entirety of the front page.

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