Get to the point, fast
When a prospective client asks me how long their video should be, they often assume three to four minutes is standard — enough time to explain a brand or showcase a product properly.
In reality, that’s usually too long. Length isn’t really the question. Attention is. Video content is everywhere, competing for the same few seconds of someone’s scroll, so the real goal is getting your message across before they move on.
So, What Length Actually Works?
Here’s what I recommend, based on 30+ years of producing video for businesses:
Social media clips: 15–60 seconds.
Short, punchy, and built to stop a scroll.
Website or landing page videos: 60–90 seconds. Enough to explain who you are and what you do, without asking for too much of a visitor’s time.
Brand or explainer films: 2–3 minutes
Tightly edited. Long enough to tell a proper story, short enough to hold attention throughout.
Event highlight films: 2–4 minutes.
Enough to capture the energy of the day without becoming a highlights reel of everything that happened.
Full event or conference coverage: no fixed limit.
Only if it’s genuinely worth watching in full, such as a keynote speech or panel discussion someone has actively chosen to watch.
If in doubt, shorter is almost always safer than longer.
Why Attention Spans Are the Real Constraint
Ten to fifteen years ago, three to four minutes was the norm for online video. That’s no longer the case. People’s willingness to sit through a long video has shrunk, and platforms have adapted around it — shorter formats now dominate almost everywhere content is consumed.
That means a three-to-four-minute video has to be exceptionally well crafted to hold an audience for its full length. Most don’t need to be that long in the first place.
The Superfluous Content Problem
One of the most common mistakes in video production is not editing out unnecessary content. A lot of video — YouTube especially — opens with a long, drawn-out intro explaining what the video is about, even though that’s usually already covered in the title or description. If someone’s watching, they already know why they clicked.
This is one of two things that trip up most video creators. The other is pace and timing. Platform algorithms don’t help matters — they’re designed to keep viewers on-platform as long as possible, which incentivises creators to pad content rather than trim it.
But for the viewer, that padding is exactly what makes a video feel frustrating: the information they were promised is buried somewhere in the middle of a video that took too long to get there.