What's a Short Story?
How long is too long in the video world?
Well, in Vine, it's 6 seconds. How they decided it was six seconds I'll never know, but people took to it, me included, and you can press your video or still camera as often as you want, and voila, you'll still end up with a six second stop-motion animation to post on Vine.
Well, this evidently annoyed Instagram, the owner of the share-your-visual-world space until Vine, who launched a 15-second video app. Why 15? I guess because it's more than twice as much as Vine.
Now, according to a group of students at Columbia College in Chicago, who evidently are running out of things to study, the optimum length for a top YouTube channel is 3:25, which, contrary to all the best advice isn't really, really short.
No?
I thought a TV hour was about 40 minutes, and I'm pretty comfortable settling in for an episode of Game of Thrones or True Blood - heck, those are almost real hours.
But then, the students also determined that YouTube is not appointment television. That is to say, don't expect people to come back to see how it all comes out in the end. Yes, do post fresh content as often as you possibly can to your channel, but no, don't expect people to follow a story line.
Somehow, this is all failing to follow my instincts, which suggested that TV viewing was enjoying a renaissance of sorts due to the very fact that much of the best of it had such a compelling continuing storyline that you just couldn't miss the next episode - as opposed to the TV of the not-too-distant past, which was mostly self-contained little dramas or comedies. If you missed one Star Trek, good as it may have been, you could still watch the next one without wondering "How did Rutger Hauer get on this show?" (Let's see if you get that reference!) Now, people even tend to record an entire season and then watch them in a marathon few days lest they miss a nuance from one week to the next.
Still, if we're talking video for consumption on the Internet, and for purposes of quick and easy entertainment, the advice to keep it frequent and keep it short seems to make perfect sense, in a quick sort of way.
Well, in Vine, it's 6 seconds. How they decided it was six seconds I'll never know, but people took to it, me included, and you can press your video or still camera as often as you want, and voila, you'll still end up with a six second stop-motion animation to post on Vine.
Well, this evidently annoyed Instagram, the owner of the share-your-visual-world space until Vine, who launched a 15-second video app. Why 15? I guess because it's more than twice as much as Vine.
Now, according to a group of students at Columbia College in Chicago, who evidently are running out of things to study, the optimum length for a top YouTube channel is 3:25, which, contrary to all the best advice isn't really, really short.
No?
I thought a TV hour was about 40 minutes, and I'm pretty comfortable settling in for an episode of Game of Thrones or True Blood - heck, those are almost real hours.
But then, the students also determined that YouTube is not appointment television. That is to say, don't expect people to come back to see how it all comes out in the end. Yes, do post fresh content as often as you possibly can to your channel, but no, don't expect people to follow a story line.
Somehow, this is all failing to follow my instincts, which suggested that TV viewing was enjoying a renaissance of sorts due to the very fact that much of the best of it had such a compelling continuing storyline that you just couldn't miss the next episode - as opposed to the TV of the not-too-distant past, which was mostly self-contained little dramas or comedies. If you missed one Star Trek, good as it may have been, you could still watch the next one without wondering "How did Rutger Hauer get on this show?" (Let's see if you get that reference!) Now, people even tend to record an entire season and then watch them in a marathon few days lest they miss a nuance from one week to the next.
Still, if we're talking video for consumption on the Internet, and for purposes of quick and easy entertainment, the advice to keep it frequent and keep it short seems to make perfect sense, in a quick sort of way.
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