What Did I Do Differently?

[Winski357]

Over the past few months, I've posted a few boring videos to my channel. I've noticed that one of them is getting like 4x the views and comments of all the other ones put together. The thing is, its not much different than the rest of my videos. Actually it was the first one I posted. Is it to do with the fact that it's a bit shorter than the rest? 14 mins vs 20? Or the fact that I say about 2 sentences during it as opposed to none?

All my videos have pretty similar titles and tags and are in the same section.

Any input appreciated! I'm new to the whole posting on YouTube thing...

 

[Clint Love]

Could be the length. 20 minutes is a long time to listen to engine noise and someone rambling. Took me a little bit to figure it out. bakerXderek can get away with posting 25 minute vids and still get tons of views, but most of us can't. Under 4 minutes is optimum, unless the content is just that damn good that you need more time.

If you look at MTV or listen to the radio, you'll notice most songs come in about 3:30. With pop songs, you can overlap any video with any song almost and not only will they end at roughly the same time but the transitions in the videos occur at almost the same times! The music industry figured out that most people don't have 4:00 worth of attention span anymore so they produce the songs accordingly.

I have a degree in Commercial Music Management and it was one of the things I dicked around with for a Forum project.

 

[SwissMotard]

I have the same, it just means it was popular enough to be flagged by YouTube as a popular video and so it gets recommended to others more.

Check out your traffic sources for it and you'll see it will almost all be links from other videos or sidebar recommendations taking people there.

 

[Winski357]

Thanks for the responses!

Hmmm... That makes some sense. 4 minutes is a little bit short for me, my more recent videos started out with 4 hours of video and there's a lot of cool scenery that I don't wanna cut out. Usually 3 hours of video end up right at 15-20 mins.

Maybe I need to get more selective with my editing, and I surely need to get better with my editing. I guess I just use my videos more as a log of my adventures and I don't wanna cheat myself out of good footage that I care about.

Is it acceptable to do a long and short versions of my videos? That might be a good option for me.

 

[SwissMotard]

Not on the same channel. If I keep seeing duplicate videos clogging up my subscription feed I'll unsubscribe.

 

[Winski357]

Fair enough, that makes sense. I'll just shoot for making my future videos a bit shorter. Thanks!