Producer Tip: Short is King!

If you're a film director you really want to be able to "get your vision out" but there is always that producer standing behind you saying, "do it faster and cheaper". Well if your producing or directing for the internet there is one more demand on that list. Make it short! On the internet short is king.

One of the goals of the T-Cast Network is to get a real grasp on how to create and market fiction based internet video. And then bring that knowledge back to producers and the community at large. We use a number of services like Revver reports, Google Analytics and Feedburner tracking to make observations in our "Producer Tips" stories.

So...

Lesson Learned 1 - Short is King!

In our original series The Retired Porn Producer's Guide to... we have four episodes:

Blogging
- 2 minutes, completes views 11% , converts clicks 3% of the time

Office Meetings
- 2 minutes 20 seconds, completes views 13%, converts clicks 0.7% of the time

Water Cooler Chit-Chat
- 3 minutes, completes views 10% , converts clicks 0.4% of the time

Biking to Work
- 3 minutes, completes views 8% , converts clicks 0.2% of the time

and one promotional episode
A Complicated Man
- 1 minute, completes views 21%, converts clicks 2% of the time

Since posting the videos to Revver, the promo episode, which is the shortest, viewers complete the view 21% of the time, nearly doubling the average. But the Blogging episode, which is 2 minutes long and completes views slightly better than average, converts clicks far better than the promo episode.

But is shorter really better, if so what is the best length? We also have two random un-promoted clips to test the shorter is better theory.

Stop-Animation: Joggling
- 9 seconds, completes views 37%, and converts clicks 2%

My Alien's Not to Bright -
1 minute, completes views 16%, and converts clicks 3.1%

Here again we see that the shorter the video the better it completes views but that a moderately long one minute episode converts more clicks.

If you want to make your video more financially successful you need to keep the clip length under a minute, but make the clips substantial enough to draw users in and entice better advertisers.