Monday, March 5, 2007

Who says web video has to be short?

Ya gotta love the internet.

On Google Video, a minute :43 of Anna Nicole being sleazy is trailing in page views to conspiracy theories at an hour and 49 minutes.

Of course the anti-immigration folks have 14 minutes of numbers.

All three have over a million and half views.

And here I thought 90 seconds was the key to web video.....

That any of these three are in the "most popular" category is scary. Notably absent from any of the video popularity lists is anything resembling journalism.

Of course, they're way behind the five million views of another conspiracy video that's an hour and a half long. (This one disturbingly opens with a notice that the material in the video is stolen ("contains unlicensed footage.."))

But really, we're in a hurry after all: witness the six and half million views of a 13-second panda sneeze: I guess there's some virtue to brevity.



Of course, while we're on the subject of long videos, you can learn a lot about editing from watching eight minutes of crazy Russian climbers:

Pay attention to the transitions here -- how they get from one scene to another. No, not the stupid pixelation thing, I'm talking about the way they let the action go out of the frame. This one's got over 11 million views.

And finally, the sports video category is filled with long, half-hour plus videos.

So what's better? Long or short?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've never wanted to put a time limit on digital video.

It needs to be short enough. It needs to be long enough.

In an attention economy, the magic isn't in seconds; it's in retaining interest.

The big trick we need to learn is what that magic is.

In the meantime, I'm training for brevity as the common denominator ... you can rarely fail if you cut to keep it short.