The Answer To Single Most Asked Web Video Question!
I do use services like YouTube, but only for promotional reason. When it comes to what I call "the business stuff", there are a series of analytical tools I employ so I know exactly who is watching what, for how long, if they come back, what parts they skip and so much more.
Because of what I do and have done in the past, I tend to get days worth of video consumption in a few hours form both normal websites and from mobile devices, so what I am about to tell you is based on year's worth of video consumption, from people in the UK, across all types of subject and that has been consumed in the last 3 months.
As a rule, and here's the most important factor from all our statistical evidence, the first 5 or 6 second is the most important, if you capture somebody in this timeframe then you can keep them engaged for anything up to 2 minutes without too much problem, so jump right in to what you are showing, don't waste time and attention with logos, animations and those type of things.
When you go past 2 minutes, all the way up until about 20 minutes, it's all about the balance between content and time, it's as simple as that, and there is no right or wrong video length.
I would love to tell you that the right length of video is, for example 22 seconds, but that's just not true, but what I can say is that if your first 5 seconds is wrong, then that's all people will consume which is going to massively limit your results.
Research organisation Forrester says that it's 50 times easier to get front-page Google rankings with video that with text, the reason is that they are meant to be more difficult to make than simple web and blog entries.