The longer your video, the less viewers make it to your final call to action. Around 2 minutes is a good balance of content and attention.

Unlike text, we can’t (yet?) scan video; we must decide whether to invest our time and attention to watch a video.

Length is key to this decision. However, we are not creating appointment TV, so if visitors don’t watch right now, the chances are they never will.

We need visitors to click the play button now and watch to the end, but how much of a typical online video are people actually ready to sit and watch?

Attention is fleeting

An analysis from TubeMogul (see diagram above) on 22+ million streams of 188k videos from 6 top video sites tells us.

Take these results to heart! The longer your video, the fewer will watch to the end. You might think your video is special; statistics are against you if you go long.

These statistics from TubeMogul make it clear why a punch line at the end is a very bad idea! Tell your whole story in 10-20 seconds; use the rest for more depth.

How long is too long?

I need a good reason to immediately watch a video longer than 2 minutes (or so). Applying the GTD 2 Minute Rule, I either ignore a longer video (life’s too short), or bookmark it to watch later (later, of course, often never comes).

The 2 Minute Rule from David Allen’s Getting Things Done action management method says if you can do a  task in less than 2 minutes, it’s best to get it done right away.

120 seconds might not sound much, but consider TV news reports are rarely more than 90 seconds. Add your titles and call to action; you soon use up your 120 second budget.

If in doubt, chop it up

Chop your video into segments if your content is (really) too long to edit into 120 seconds. Also, chop your video rather than trying to cover more than 3 points in a video.

Your visitors will appreciate you chunking your content. You also benefit from finer-grained metrics about how many people watch the different videos.

Shorter videos result in smaller files, saving you time uploading. They are also easier to download for offline viewing (which I suggest you offer your visitors).

I have made this video longer than usual…

As Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) would surely have agreed, shorter videos take more time to create than longer ones. The reason is simple: editing for length takes time.

Edit your videos down to 2 minutes (or so), however, and your visitors might reward you by actually watching what you have invested so much time to create.

Tags

GTD, Length, Metrics, Tip, TubeMogul

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