- How long should my YouTube video be?
Nine minutes
50 seconds
if you're a Fortnite channel.
How long should my YouTube video be?
13 minutes
52 seconds
if you're a tech channel.
How long should my YouTube videos be?
Four minutes
30 seconds
if you're a channel,
making a video
about how long YouTube videos should be.
Can you see where I'm going with this?
(upbeat music)
All right then.
This is a lot easier to work
out than you might think.
Simply do a search for the topic,
or title,
you want to make a video about.
Take the video links from the top four videos,
or however many videos you want,
and then put those values into this time calculator,
which I'll leave a link to
just below that lovely like button.
Scroll down to the bottom of this screen and voila,
the average video length of the top ranking videos
for that search.
And you know what,
kind of gives me an idea does this.
Would you want us to add this to vidIQ?
Let us know in the comments because we build what you want.
And of course,
as you can see,
there are already plenty
of valuable keyword research tools that we have to
offer here at vidIQ
But let's get back to the question at hand.
As I say,
this is a very simplistic,
unscientific,
dare I say
hack way of finding the perfect video length
for a particular topic or video title.
Now,
having said that
you only have to do a few searches
on YouTube to realize just how revealing this
simple data is.
How to tie a tie.
Average video length,
three minutes,
10 seconds.
Why?
It's a 30 second task and people searching
for this simply want a solution that works
job done,
move on.
How to build a gaming PC,
26 minutes
39 seconds.
Why?
Viewers appreciate that
such a task is a lot more complicated than tying a tie,
and are much more willing to invest more time
in watching a longer video.
Sometimes,
for credibility's sake,
the video needs to be longer.
Imagine if you searched for how to build a gaming PC
and you find a video that was only five minutes long.
Do you really think you're going to get all the value
and information you need
from a video that short?
How to get a support a creator code,
one of those somewhat niche Fortnite questions,
oh,
six minutes 30.
Why?
This is an interesting one with two outliers.
First we have a super short video that comes direct
from the developers,
so maybe we need to ignore that one.
But how did this channel spin out such a topic
for nearly 12 minutes,
rank very highly,
and have less subscribers than all
of the other channels in this page.
This is a video I would want to watch to find out more.
So before you try to answer the question,
how long should my YouTube video be?
Answer this question first.
What is the intent
of my viewing audience?
Make the video as long
as it needs to be for them.
Now then,
an important thing you need to consider
about the answer I've just given you.
It is mainly a search based driven answer.
For things when it becomes a lot more personal,
emotional,
storytelling,
then the video lengths can become a little more tricky
to try and determine.
If you have a magnetic personality,
and you are an exceptional storyteller,
then you can be more flexible
and creative with the length of your videos.
But there are of course,
other ways that you can determine
the ideal length for your videos.
In the YouTube analytics,
click the see more button,
and then go to the subscription source tab at the top.
Here you can see the impact
of your subscribers,
and generally speaking,
how much longer they watch your content for.
If you see overall views from subscribers increasing,
or you're making community style content,
you can probably increase the length of your video.
If you want to go even more granular,
check out the traffic sources tab.
How people discover your content can really
influence how long they are willing to watch.
Look at the difference here between search and suggested,
but also look at the difference in click-through rate.
It seems clear that to get people to watch longer
we need to make our thumbnails more clickable
when they appear in the suggested column.
Now then,
personal opinion,
but from experience.
I don't think you can make YouTube videos
less than two minutes.
I myself can't remember ever making a video less
than two minutes long and have YouTube widely share it
and it turn into a successful video.
And if it is less than two minutes,
then you might want to consider squeezing it
into less than a minute
and turning it into a YouTube short.
where there are all sorts of weird
and wonderful possibilities.
And that ladies and gentlemen,
by my own calculations,
is the perfect length of time
this video should be.
And I didn't even mention audience retention once.
Bye!