How Long Should Your Next Video Be?
Attention span has a pretty direct impact on content and video marketing. Someone looked at 650,000 sessions and found that only 20% of people actually read articles start to finish. (Yeesh — we’ll be keeping this post short to avoid losing 80% of you.)
Video length vs. Engagement
Because every video is a different length, we decided to explore length vs. engagement. Do people take length into consideration when they decide to watch or leave? We wanted to find out.
We expected engagement to decrease with video length. In other words, we would expect people to watch more of a 1-minute video than a 2-minute video. But we also imagined that increasing a video from 1 minute to 2 minutes — a difference of 1 minute, but 100% longer — would have a much bigger impact on engagement than the jump from 10 minutes to 11 minutes — a change of one minute, but just 10%.
How long should videos actually be?
2 minutes is the sweet spot. After that, the drop-off in engagement is significant. Here are a few important points from this data.
- Videos up to 2 minutes long get tons of engagement
- There is significant drop-off between 2 and 3 minutes
- 6 to 12 minutes is sweet spot