{"id":151,"date":"2008-11-28T13:13:44","date_gmt":"2008-11-28T17:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/?p=151"},"modified":"2008-11-28T13:13:44","modified_gmt":"2008-11-28T17:13:44","slug":"why-short-videos-work-best-on-the-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/28\/why-short-videos-work-best-on-the-web\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Short Videos Work Best On The Web"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you were to ask me to name one of the biggest mistakes I see people making over and over again with their web videos, <strong>my answer would be that their videos are too long<\/strong>.\u00a0 In fact, I teach my students what specific length their videos should be to guarantee the best rate of viewership.<\/p>\n<p>And while I often say that there are no rules when it comes to web video, about the closest thing to a rule would be video length.\u00a0 Where basically the rule would read, <strong>the shorter the better<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>You see, when it comes to online video, people are worse than channel flippers in the world of television.\u00a0 If a video doesn&#8217;t grab their attention immediately&#8230;and keep it&#8230;they&#8217;ll click away the second they get bored.<\/p>\n<p>Some statistics from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tubemogul.com\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>TubeMogul<\/strong><\/a> illustrate this point perfectly.\u00a0 If you&#8217;re not familiar with TubeMogul, they are a free video distribution service; you upload your video to them once and they distribute it to all of the video sharing sites for you.\u00a0 They have over 50,000 users and have deployed well over 1 million videos.<\/p>\n<p>But back to the statistics I mentioned.\u00a0 You see, Tubemogul tracks how long, on average, videos are watched before people click away.\u00a0 And the numbers paint a very clear picture.<\/p>\n<p>For example&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>10 seconds into any given clip, 10% of the viewers have already left.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>By 60 seconds in, over half have left.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>And by the 5 minute mark, less than 10% of the original viewers remain.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This chart from Tubemogul details it all:<\/p>\n<p><img style=\"vertical-align: middle;\" src=\"http:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/11\/tubemogul-stats.png\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The lesson here is obvious; keep your videos short and you&#8217;ll maintain a larger viewership.\u00a0 Still, it&#8217;s something a lot of video creators struggle with&#8230;there is so much they want to show and say, that suddenly their videos are stretching 7, 8, 9, 10 minutes or longer.<\/p>\n<p>My advice?\u00a0 <em><strong>Pithify<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 That means show them the baby&#8230;don&#8217;t tell them about the birth.\u00a0 Cut the fat, get to the point and hit the viewer with your benefits fast.\u00a0 In fact, you should hit them with your <strong>strongest benefits in the first 10-20 seconds of your video<\/strong>.\u00a0 Don&#8217;t wait; the viewer may not be around to see them otherwise.<\/p>\n<p><strong>And if you think you simply can&#8217;t pithify your videos, remember this<\/strong>.\u00a0 The entire American Civil War can be summed up in two sentences; The North and South fought.\u00a0 The North won.\u00a0 Now that&#8217;s pithifying something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you were to ask me to name one of the biggest mistakes I see people making over and over again with their web videos, my answer would be that their videos are too long.\u00a0 In fact, I teach my students what specific length their videos should be to guarantee the best rate of viewership. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[19],"tags":[109,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}