What Length Should My Video Be?

You won’t get to the end of this post, right? It’s not a video, meme, gif or tiktok so it will be curtains by the time you get to the second paragraph. Because people have really short attention spans – don’t they?

Maybe not.

The received piece of wisdom that people have shorter attention spans than a goldfish all comes from a 2015 report Microsoft Canada did studying brain patterns of a whopping 120 people doing various tasks. A clever fellow at the BBC has done a lot of digging to debunk the myth which of course you’re going to read about here.

Attention spans aren’t getting shorter, it’s just harder to stay focused in such a hyperlinked world. If your content is good enough people will stay engaged. Ask Wagner fans.

The best performing ad we made for a client recently was 37s, outperforming the 15s CTR by nearly 0.25%. By all means put the juicy stuff up front, get your punters interested, but if you engage and entertain there’s no need to strobe all your content in a nanosecond.

Of course all the social platforms do have their nuances in terms of ideal video length, particularly from a marketing perspective. In this respect, hubspot have done the heavy lifting and done some research on the ideal durations for platforms, which we’ll pinch here:

OK you can stop reading now. Go see Gotterdammerung maybe.

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