Have you ever watched a YouTube video and thought, "The first 40 seconds of this was completely unnecessary?" With a simple bookmarklet, you can jump right to the 40% mark in the video so you can get to the good stuff.
The Wadsworth Constant, for those of you that don't know, is a joke slash genius discovery made on Reddit by a user named Wadsworth, who noted that the first 30 percent of every YouTube video is unnecessary, and you can usually just skip 30% of the way in to get to what you're looking for. While the Wadsworth Constant has become a fast-spreading internet meme, Redditor PublicRestrom notes that YouTube has actually added a feature to the site that incorporates the constant:
To apply the Wadsworth Constant to any Youtube video, put
&wadsworth=1
at the end of the URL.
Surprisingly, the trick works, and even more surprisingly, so does the Wadsworth Constant—at least in many cases. In an effort to streamline the process, we put together a bookmarklet that you can just click from any YouTube page to immediately skip to the 30% mark in the video. Just drag this link into your bookmarks bar and go nuts. The JavaScript, for those of you that are curious, is:
Give it a try for yourself, and let us know what you think in the comments.
And so an internet celebrity was born... | Reddit
You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
---
drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)