How Long Should Your On-Line Video Last?

Over the past year or so, I have been recommending that my clients add video to their web sites and blogs.  Thanks to sites like YouTube and other free video storage sites, consumers have become comfortable viewing videos on web sites and in some cases, potential clients expect video on web sites and blogs.

I work with lawyers and other professionals and very few of these service providers use audio or video.  Thus, for the time being at least, you can really stand out by adding video to your site.

My colleague Jay Douglas has been creating professional videos for clients for over ten years and he tells me that a web site video should not last more than 3 or 4 minutes.   Time Magazine columnist Bill Tancer notes that the average YouTube session lasts no more than 20 minutes.

When I videotape and produce videos for law firm clients, I generally limit the segments to one to three minutes.  If I have an hour’s worth of information to convey, , I’ll create 5 to 7 minute segments and stack them on the web page.  I have seen knowledgeable web developers post 90 minute videos – this makes no sense to me at all.

Columnist Tancer contends that web information consumers are not willing to spend a great deal of time viewing video on a computer or laptop screen.  This does make sense, given that most people consumer video on television, where content (the shows) are broken up by commercial breaks every 7 to 8 minutes and the quality of the video feed can be high definition beamed to a 55″ monitor.

So, the bottom line for me: put video on your web site, but keep the segments as short as possible in easily digested chunks.