Video content is one of the best marketing options to choose from. Visual interactive content attracts much more eye-balls than images or simple text, and that means more views and engagement for your brand. When you think of videos you automatically think of YouTube, as YouTube is the largest video platform in the world.
Unfortunately, creating and uploading your video to YouTube is not enough, you need to know specifics and all of those tiny elements that make your video stand out from the crowd, be entertaining and attract as many views as possible.
YouTube video length is one of those important tiny things which can make or break your video’s performance. In this article I will explain should you aim to create shorter or longer videos & which ones tend to get more views and engagement.
Let’s get started!
All new YouTube channels are limited to 15 minutes of video length. However, once your YouTube channel is verified, you can upload videos longer than 15 minutes. But the question is – should you? Many are uncertain of the best video length to get the best results.
If we would look at the TOP 50 videos ranked on YouTube, we see that average video length of most popular videos is 3 minutes. Most YouTube video researches just look at these top videos and claim that the best video length is 3 minutes.
However, one important thing to notice here is that 95% percent of TOP 50 videos on YouTube are music videos! That’s why the average length of those videos are 3 minutes, as this is a standard length for music videos.
What I want to say here is this – average length of your YouTube video should depend on your video’s niche and topic. So, if you are uploading music videos then yes – you should aim for the average length of 3 minutes. However, if it is not a music video that you are uploading to YouTube, then keep reading further.
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Why the best video length depends on your video topic?
To simply answer this question – some topics can be covered in a few minutes, and some needs 10+ minutes to fully explain it.
Best videos have these things in common – high retention rate (time of video watched compared to total video time) and high engagement rate. It means that to create the best video, you don’t even need to concentrate on video length.
Concentrate on retention rate and engagement
You should be concentrating on keeping high retention rate by creating useful content and explaining the topic in detail. For example, if your topic can be fully covered in 1 minute, it means that the best video length for your video is just 1 minute. If you would extend the same video to 2 minutes with no real need of doing that, your retention rate will be worse and your video won’t rank high in search results. It means worse overall performance.
So, the golden rule here is to create videos of length that is needed to fully explain the topic you are presenting. As viewer should be engaged from start till the end of your video. If your video keeps audience entertained till the end of your video, it means that you did your job right and length of your video is optimal.
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Create detailed videos
However, it is important to notice that if you are covering wider topics, then it is beneficial to create longer videos. For example, fashion, make-up, Ted Talks, other experienced blogger videos tend to create longer (10+ minutes) videos. That means more space for video advertisements and consequently more earnings for creators. Also, longer videos tend to rank better than short videos, but only if viewer retention rate and engagement is kept at high level.
So, don’t extend your video without a purpose, as this won’t help you and even worsen the performance of your video. You always need to find that golden spot, and this golden spot changes with every new video you create.
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I hope that this article was helpful in finding out the best length for your YouTube videos. If you would like to add anything to this article, leave a comment below!
