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.<\/p>\n
And the ideal length for web videos, statistically, has always been around 2 minutes.\u00a0 Go beyond that and viewership drops dramatically.\u00a0 For example, Tubemogul<\/strong><\/em> reports that on video sharing sites, 53% of viewers are gone after the first 60 seconds of a video.\u00a0 And beyond the one minute mark, viewership continues to drop just as dramatically.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So as a good example on how to trim the fat from videos, let me introduce you to Doug Walker<\/strong>, AKA That Guy With The Glasses<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 He runs a site where entire Hollywood movies are trimmed down to just 5 seconds.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n See the example of Million Dollar Baby<\/strong><\/em> below:<\/p>\n