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Dave Kaminski is a professional copywriter, videographer and 10-year veteran of direct response marketing whose work in multimedia advertising has resulted in millions of dollars worth of sales. A former U.S. Marine, Dave specializes in teaching entrepreneurs how to effectively use web video in their marketing efforts.

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Keep Your Videos Short If You Want To Keep People Watching

September 4th, 2009 • Related • Filed Under

Although web video has grown at a dizzying pace, one statistic has always held steady; the shorter your video, the more people who will watch it from beginning to end.

And the ideal length for web videos, statistically, has always been around 2 minutes.  Go beyond that and viewership drops dramatically.  For example, Tubemogul reports that on video sharing sites, 53% of viewers are gone after the first 60 seconds of a video.  And beyond the one minute mark, viewership continues to drop just as dramatically.

Of course the content of a video plays a huge part in how long people stick around, but the safe rule to follow is the shorter the better.

It’s also a rule that people have a hard time following, which is why most web videos tend to stretch much, much longer than they actually need to be.

So as a good example on how to trim the fat from videos, let me introduce you to Doug Walker, AKA That Guy With The Glasses.  He runs a site where entire Hollywood movies are trimmed down to just 5 seconds.  Sure, a lot of it is done tongue-in-cheek (i.e. for humor), but many times they actually manage to tell the whole story of a 2 hour movie in about 5 seconds.

See the example of Million Dollar Baby below:

To see dozens and dozens of more movies, all trimmed down to about 5 seconds, visit Doug’s site at ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com.

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