For a long time, you have probably been told that you should make short snappy videos due to people having a short attention span. Today we are looking at why that is wrong and how producing longer videos can boost your visibility on YouTube. Watch the video below or keep scrolling for the text version.
Shorter = Better?
So the general consensus for the past few years has been that shorter content is better. People have short attention spans, making your videos shorter means that they are more likely to watch the whole thing. Well if you have uploaded video recently, especially to Facebook, you have seen a message saying ‘Videos over 3 minutes perform better’. Why is this? For this post we are going to look at it from the perspective of YouTube.
Good Content Trumps Attention Spans
Before we get into the technical aspects of why longer videos are better for your channel I want to address the concern about people having short attention spans and not wanting to watch a 10-minute video. This is a comment I hear a lot from my clients and I have been answering it the same way for years. If you make engaging content that is actually solving your viewer’s problem, they will watch your video no matter how long it is.
That’s not to say that you can fill your video out with a load of waffle that doesn’t actually add anything, that will definitely drive viewers away. But your viewers are watching your video because they want an answer to their question.
Lets’s say your video is ‘5 Ways To Boost Your Facebook Post Reach Without Paying For It’, you could easily spend 3 minutes on each point, resulting in a 15-minute video. As long as each of the points is valid, the video is entertaining and your not deliberately not adding in extra time to make up the length, then people will keep watching.
A Brief History Of Watch Time
Now on to why longer videos can boost your YouTube channel. Have you heard of YouTUbe watch time? It’s quite a big subject so I will just give you the overview today. YouTube used to use views to measure how to structure it’s search results. The problem was that this system could be gamed by people uploading a video with a title and thumbnail that had nothing to do with the actual video. Once people had clicked the video, watched 10 seconds and clicked away (realising that wasn’t the content they were looking for), the view had already been counted and the video moved closer to the top of the search results.
A few years ago YouTube changed it’s algorithm to favour videos with high watch time. Watch time is literally the amount of time your video is watched. So the basic premise is, the longer videos you make, the more watch time you accrue and the higher up the search results your videos will appear.
A Bit Of Maths
It goes a bit further than this, let’s say you have 2 videos on the same topic. One is 2 minutes long and the other is 10 minutes. They are both appearing in the same area of search results. The maximum amount of watch time you can get on one view of the 2-minute video is 2 minutes whereas even if viewers only watch 50% of the 10-minute video, each view will still get 5 minutes of watch time. What this basically means is that the 2-minute video has to get 2.5x more views to the get the same watch time as the 10-minute video. And that’s being generous and saying that everybody will watch the whole of the 2-minute video. In time, the 10-minute video will appear higher and higher in search results over the 2-minute video.
That’s A Wrap
So to wrap up, you should be making longer video content. People’s attention spans are longer than you think and if you are making engaging content that answers your viewer’s questions, they will keep watching. By making longer videos it is easier to accrue more YouTube watch time and appear higher in YouTube search results.
What is the average length of your videos, let me know in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube Channel for weekly video marketing content.