How long should a YouTube video be? The ideal length by video type

There is no length bonus on YouTube. Its help centre puts it plainly: "we want both short and long videos to succeed", and it encourages creators to make each video the appropriate length for its content. What the discovery system does look at is watch time, measured two ways: absolute (how many minutes people watched) and relative (what share of the video they watched). According to YouTube's help centre, relative watch time matters more for short videos and absolute watch time for longer ones, and both average view duration and average percentage viewed inform ranking.

That is why padding backfires. Stretching a 5-minute idea to 10 minutes rarely doubles the minutes watched; the extra minutes tend to be where people leave, and the share viewed drops. A longer video pays off when it holds attention for longer, which usually means it has more to say, not more words to say it with.

The practical test is your own data. The audience retention chart in YouTube Studio shows the moment viewers leave: a sharp drop in the first seconds points at the intro, and a slow slide in the middle points at repetition. Write the next script for the chart, not for a target number.

Monetized videos that are 8 minutes or longer can carry mid-roll ads, which play during the video instead of only before or after it. YouTube's help centre explains that automatic mid-roll slots are selected by default, that its systems look for natural breakpoints, and that an ad slot is not guaranteed to serve an ad. Slots at a pause in the audio or a change of scene are more likely to serve one, because YouTube generally sees higher viewer retention at those points.

The trade-off is simple. An 8-minute video with mid-rolls can earn more per view than a 6-minute one, but only if people stay. A video stretched just to cross the line loses viewers in the filler, and fewer minutes watched means fewer recommendations. Cross 8 minutes when the topic genuinely has 8 minutes in it; otherwise, make the tighter video.

Length doesn't decide whether you can join the YouTube Partner Program; your audience does. YouTube's help centre lists two routes to ad revenue sharing: 1,000 subscribers plus 4,000 qualified public watch hours in the last 12 months, or 1,000 subscribers plus 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. Watch hours from Shorts in the Shorts feed don't count towards the 4,000.

For a product or service explainer, the kind that sits on a homepage or a landing page, 60 to 120 seconds is the common guidance. That is long enough for the problem, the product, how it works and a call to action, and short enough that people watch it through before deciding. At the pace of our American English AI voices, about 160 words a minute, it means 160 to 320 words of script.

An explainer on YouTube is a different case. Someone who searches "how does compound interest work" chose to learn, and a 6 to 12-minute explainer with worked examples is normal there. The rule is the same in both: one question per video, answered completely, with nothing that doesn't serve the answer.

Whiteboard and doodle explainers follow the same lengths. The hand draws each element as it is named, so a tight script also means a board that never sits still.

If you start from an idea, you choose the length before anything is written: 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 or 15 minutes. Our AI drafts a script for that length, within about 5%, and you edit it; from then on it's your script. If you paste your own script, the video lasts as long as your words take to read at the voice's pace, so the table above tells you roughly what to expect. Writing and splitting into scenes are free: minutes are spent when the drawings and the voice are generated, counted by the second of video.

Each video can run up to 15 minutes, with up to 60 scenes; a long video gets longer scenes, not more of them. By default our AI adds a 3 to 5-second closing scene that sums up the topic and says goodbye (you can switch it off), and the last frame holds for 1.5 seconds before fading out. For a Short, choose 9:16 when you create the project and the video renders at 1080×1920.