Why I Stopped Making Long Videos (And What It Taught Me About Content)

Ever spent hours putting together a long, detailed piece of content, only to find a quick five minute version gets more attention?

That’s exactly what happened to me with my YouTube channel.

For the first few years I focused mostly on longer videos. Eight, nine, sometimes ten minutes long, working through a topic in proper depth, covering three or four points in one go.

They weren’t bad videos. But they took a lot of effort to plan, film and edit.

Last year, partly because life got busy (new kids, moving house, the usual chaos that eats into your time), I started doing shorter videos instead. Just answering one specific question, as directly and quickly as I could.

The difference was obvious almost straight away.

More views. More comments. More emails from people asking follow up questions or sharing feedback. A handful of those emails have even turned into genuine business opportunities for me.

I don’t have a huge following on that channel. I never have. But the engagement on the shorter format has been noticeably better than anything I got from the longer videos, even ones that probably had more “value” packed into them on paper.

So why does this happen?

I think it comes down to a few things:

• People are searching for an answer to one specific question, not signing up for a lecture. If someone wants to know the difference between a Smart Campaign and a Search campaign, they don’t want to sit through eight minutes of background first.
• Shorter content is easier to finish. A video someone actually watches to the end beats a longer one they click away from at the two minute mark, every time, in terms of how the algorithm (and the viewer) reads it.
• It’s far more repeatable. I can realistically produce several short, focused videos in the time it used to take me to plan and shoot one long one.

This isn’t really a YouTube specific lesson either. I see the same pattern in blog content, email newsletters, even social media posts.

Business owners often assume more detail and more length signals more value. Sometimes it does. But just as often, you’re better off answering one question really well than trying to cram five questions into a single, sprawling piece of content.

If you’re creating content for your own business, it might be worth testing this yourself. Take one of your longer articles or videos and see if you can break it down into smaller pieces that each answer a single, specific question. You may find your audience responds a lot better to bite sized, focused content than the marathon version.

Got a question you’d like me to cover in a future video? Leave it in the comments, or email me at info@samfrost.co.nz.