Content Length

How long should your content be?  This is an interesting question for me as it holds relevance in quite a few of the creative endeavours I pursue.  This blog is a good example, you can ask how long a post should be which you can measure in terms of word counts.  I've varied this quite a bit over the years preferring longer form posts now as opposed to the shorter posts I used to write. 

The obvious answer however that most people give is that you should keep it short and sweet and to the point, stating that anything longer will not be read and that people won't engage with your content if it is perceived to be elaborate.  GIFs, memes, and viral videos from Vine in days past and now Tik Tok as its spiritual successor are often cited as justification for this belief that shorter is better.  However this answer doesn't stand up when you use it as a backdrop to some of the decisions made by major content distributors online.  Google for instance altered the Youtube Partner agreement to place greater emphasis on Watch Time which is the duration of time a viewer spends watching a video, with longer videos therefore not only encouraged but in practical terms made a necessity if creators want to make money through the platform.

Likewise you can look to the likes of Twitter a social network whose Unique Selling Point in the beginning was its brevity and the necessity of shortening your content to fit in 140 characters, here too this was extended to 280 characters in order to increase the amount of content that a user can fit into a single tweet.  Twitter did not stop there, they went on to include the ability to tweet threads of tweets which effectively made it possible to post entire blog posts on twitter provided each paragraph was limited to 280 characters or tweeters added 1/x notations to the end of their tweets signalling their intent to the reader to add further content.

Beyond the internet this lengthening of content has occurred in other media forms over the years.  Sometimes that change has been because of evolving technology, for example Vinyl and Cassette based albums were quite short compared to CD recordings and later still digital releases went on to push this boundary.  Likewise there was a time when 1 hour and 30 minutes was a respectable duration for a feature film but this again has been pushed to greater extremes with movies - although movies longer than 3 hours were not unheard of, they were much rarer in decades passed.  At the time of writing, 7 of the top 10 longest cinematic releases were within the last 20 years, 4 of those were within the last 5 years as examples of this boundary being pushed.

Even in the literary world the emphasis placed on word counts grows over time, taking Harry Potter as an example the first book in the series was approximately 77,000 words in length with the series peaking at book five which was approximately 260,000 words in length.  The entire series combined is approximately 1.1 million words in length.  These numbers are not unprecedented, the likes of War And Peace was 560,000 words for a single book that was first published in 1869 so again it's not entirely fair to say that there is or ever was a consensus as to how long something should be.

The question of attention spans I think is not as relevant as we might think at first.  My reasoning for drawing this conclusion is the realisation that the impetus or the compulsion to continue to consume content is more pressing than the length of that content.  When you look at the likes of Netflix, whilst one could argue they push for longer content, this isn't the case when you look at the length of episodes of a series, they are not uniform, and with no need to factor in time for advertisements and a network schedule to adhere to Netflix gives creators a lot more flexibility to vary the length of their content.  I find it interesting that no overall consensus emerges and that there still exists diversity in the run times of content.

The fact that no universal answer seems to exist, even within specific industries and fields you can often find guidelines but these are not absolute.  Beyond content that is specifically created to fill a gap there seems to be no uniformity at all.  Perhaps it's fair to say then that the adage of quality over quantity still reigns supreme, that the length is irrelevant and that the appeal of the content is what matters, those who find it appealing will consume it no matter how long you make it.