From Social Times on why your video isn’t getting traction:
Your Video Is Too LongHow long is your video? If it’s ten minutes long people may not be watching because they simply don’t have the time or patience. Ideally your video should be between two and three minutes long, or even less, unless it succeeds to engage viewers throughout and simply can’t exist without being longer.
[...]
Remember that the attention span of an online audience is short and if they get bored all they have to do is click to watch a different video. Be concise, to the point and engaging and you can increase your video’s success.
Let’s recap: your video isn’t getting traction because it’s not as short as Dramatic Chipmunk which is about 12 seconds long. Most of the episodes of IT.tv I did were in the range of 5-7 minutes. By web standards that’s a 6 day miniseries, apparently. That’s apparently what I was doing wrong; I was daring to explore something more than a quick hit off a bong. I’m not blaming Megan O’Neill, the author, for that, but I do think she contributes to the climate where people who make videos about things that matter can’t get an eyeball but people who do 2-minute makeup tutorials have millions of views.
The issue is that we’re very dismissive of content that isn’t served up in McNugget-sized bites for the masses. The idea that “longer videos don’t work on the web” has so permeated people’s thinking about web video that if they open a video and it’s longer than 20 seconds, they start to ignore it. While that may be true (to a degree), people didn’t get that idea on their own. The refrains of “boring” and “too long” didn’t automatically get assumed of a longer video until proven otherwise without a bit of help.
This mentality of “too long” isn’t helping web video, either. It’s nice that every teenager runs to see what’s new on YouTube the minute they get home, and it’s really nice that they plow through 20 videos in 3 minutes, but is tailoring content to that market really where you want to be taking your online image? Do you want to be the goofy guy who dances on camera in a clown mask, or would you rather talk about things that might elevate the medium a bit? It seems we have a tendency to tell people that the former is great for the web and the latter is unwelcome, and that’s where we’re failing miserably as a community.
Instead of promoting the idea that the people who are talking about big ideas and big concepts are “too long for the web” and “not engaging enough,” we should be sharing their ideas and their videos. It will elevate the quality of online video dramatically. After all, if you’re an apostle of TED, how interesting would it be if their talks were all the length and of similar content to some of the most popular YouTube videos? Would you care what those people had to say?
We’re missing an opportunity to turn the web video world into something more than prat falls and fart jokes (and don’t get me wrong, I love ‘em just as much as you do), and it may even be too late to turn the tide because we’ve poisoned people with the assumption that anything longer than :30 is long and boring.
It’s a shame.