How long should my video be?

As a cameraman I get asked a lot by clients how long should their video be. In general the shorter the better for videos as there are many factors to alter audience engagement and how long viewers will watch for.

It’s safe to assume that your viewers have short attention spans and plenty of distractions. The ideal length of a video depends on the content, the context, and the viewer.

Best practice tips for video length

• Favor short videos. If you can make your video shorter and make all the points, do so.
• Get the important stuff in early . Your audience will start to disappear over the length of your video. Wistia reported that for a video of 4-5 minutes, fewer than 60% of your viewers will still be with you–against 75% for a 1-2 minute video.
• Don’t hold your call to action to the end, especially for longer videos.
• Think about breaking up a longer video into a series of short videos. This works really well for Training videos in particular. Instead of making a single video that shows a long process, make a series of short videos that makes it easy to learn in digestible chunks.  A benefits to this is you’ll have an increased number of video assets and most likely an increased number of views for videos.
• Depending on the audience and the content, the length of the video length will not matter to some of the audience and they will sit back and experience the full video.