This is where the exponential decay kicks in. There is significant drop-off between 2 and 3 minutes But don’t sweat over a few seconds here and there if you’re still going to come in under the 2-minute mark. Takeaway: Short and sweet is a safe strategy. If you’re making short videos, you don’t need to stress about the difference of a few seconds. This is surprising and actionable information for video marketers. Videos up to 2 minutes long get tons of engagementĮngagement is steady up to 2 minutes, meaning that a 90-second video will hold a viewer’s attention as much as a 30-second video. Here are a few important points from this data. After that, the drop-off in engagement is significant. So what did this data actually tell us?ĭrum roll please … How long should videos actually be?Ģ minutes is the sweet spot. Luckily, we have plenty of data to draw from - we looked at 564,710 videos, and more than 1.3 billion plays for this research, so we feel comfortable that the results are representative of wider video engagement trends. We predicted we’d see an exponential decay like the one below: In mathspeak, we expected that the relationship wasn’t linear. 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%.
In other words, we would expect people to watch more of a 1-minute video than a 2-minute video. We expected engagement to decrease with video length. Do people take length into consideration when they decide to watch or leave? We wanted to find out. engagementīecause every video is a different length, we decided to explore length vs. We confirmed our theory that humans have really short attention spans, but we found some other useful takeaways too. (Yeesh - we’ll be keeping this post short to avoid losing 80% of you.) We assumed there’s a similar drop-off in video engagement, so we dove into our customer data to find out how long videos should be, when you should go long, and if there are any situations where seconds matter. SumoMe looked at 650,000 sessions and found that only 20% of people actually read articles start to finish. And thanks to the great distraction known as the Internet, it’s getting harder than ever to focus on one thing at a time.Īttention span has a pretty direct impact on content and video marketing.