It`s probably no surprise that short videos are more engaging and effective than long videos. Heck, we’ve built a business on this knowledge, but the stats recently reported by Wistia, a hosting service for thousands of videos, are out of this world!
They first compared two videos by one of their clients. “The red line in the graph represents the engagement of their 30-second video. The blue line is the engagement graph for a 90-second video. It’s expected that these two videos would have different engagement graphs, but what’s odd is that the first 30 seconds of both videos are identical!”
The results? “Even though viewers were exposed to the same exact content, the drop-off rate of the 90-second video was much higher. By the end of the 30-second video there were about double the number of viewers than at the same point in the 90-second video.”
This means that just knowing the video is longer is discouraging enough to viewers to quit watching earlier on than they will if they know the video is short. It’s really a fear of commitment!
It’s also interesting how Wistia measured these results on a larger scale including many of their clients to see how many people watched videos of different lengths all the way through.
While viewing length continues to drop after 30 seconds, the big drop begins at two minutes plus. It seems that this is the point where many attention spans timeout and lose interest. If it’s important that your viewers make it to the end of your video for say, a call to action then this two-minute time line is one to aim for.
Depending on your goals for your video the length will vary, but the better you can simplify your message into a shorter, more engaging video – the better the response you’ll receive.
Check out the full article titled Does length matter? It does for Video!
