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.