It is one of the most common questions clients ask before a project starts, and it is almost always the wrong question to lead with.
“How long should my video be?” sounds practical. It sounds like the kind of thing you can answer with a chart or a rule of thumb. Two minutes for websites. Sixty seconds for social. Thirty seconds for ads. And while those guidelines exist for good reasons, leading with length before talking about story is a little like asking how many pages a book should be before you know what it is about.
The length of a video should be determined by one thing: how long it takes to tell the story well. Not how long attention spans are. Not what some study said about scroll behavior. The story. That is the only honest answer, and everything else is a framework built around it.
What the Data Actually Says About Short Video
That said, the data on short-form video is real and worth understanding before you make decisions about length.
Wonder Boy produced a series of 15-second recruitment spots for RiverValley Behavioral Health, distributed through a targeted video campaign across the Owensboro and Western Kentucky market. The campaign ran from November 2024 through January 2025 and generated over 358,000 total impressions. Of those, more than 206,000 people watched the videos all the way through, representing a video completion rate of 57.5% across the full campaign.
On the targeted video side specifically, those 15-second spots hit completion rates between 62% and 82% depending on the month, with January 2025 reaching 81.88%. That is a remarkable number for any video ad. It means roughly four out of every five people who started watching finished watching.
Fifteen seconds. Four out of five people stayed through the end. That does not happen by accident. It happens because the story fit the format and the format fit the placement.
The lesson is not that all videos should be 15 seconds. The lesson is that when a story can be told in 15 seconds, 15 seconds is exactly the right length.
The Platform Shapes the Format
Where a video lives matters as much as what it contains when it comes to determining the right length.
Social media is a scrolling environment. Research consistently shows that if a video cannot hook someone in the first three to ten seconds, they move on. Wonder Boy aims to keep social media video at 60 seconds maximum and pushes clients toward that ceiling rather than past it. The goal is to capture attention, deliver the core message, and get out before the viewer has a reason to leave.
Website video operates differently. Someone who has navigated to your website has already shown interest. They are not scrolling past you in a feed. They chose to be there. That changes the math. Wonder Boy generally lands in the three to four minute range for homepage or about-page video, long enough to tell a real story, short enough to keep the page loading efficiently and the viewer engaged through the end.
There is also a practical reason to keep website video on the shorter side. A large video file embedded directly on a webpage can slow down load times, which affects both user experience and SEO. Linking out to a Vimeo or YouTube hosted version helps with file size but introduces a different problem: once a viewer clicks off your site to watch a video, the odds of them returning to contact you or request a quote drop significantly. Keeping people on your site is almost always the better strategy.
The Two-Version Strategy
One of the most effective approaches Wonder Boy recommends for clients with both a web presence and active social media channels is what might be called the two-version strategy: a long-form version for the website and a short-form version cut from the same footage for social.
The long-form version lives on the website and tells the full story. The short-form version, usually 30 to 60 seconds, takes the strongest moment from that story and leads with it. Both versions serve real purposes. Neither one is a compromise.
This approach works because it starts with the story rather than the platform. You build the full version first, find what is most compelling in it, and then cut that into something built for a scroll. The short version points people toward the long version. The long version converts the people who are already interested. They work together.
The Story Determines the Length
Here is how Wonder Boy approaches the length question with every client: how long does it take to tell this story properly?
If everything the video needs to accomplish can happen in 30 seconds, that is the right length. Rushing past the 30 second mark just to make a video feel more substantial adds nothing. If the story needs 90 seconds to breathe, those 90 seconds are earned and necessary. The goal is never to fill time and never to cut something short before it lands.
This sounds simple. In practice it requires knowing what the story actually is before production begins, which is why Wonder Boy puts significant time into pre-production on every project. The length question almost always answers itself once the story is clear.
When Longer Is the Right Call
There are genuine situations where a longer video is not just acceptable but necessary. The EM Ford 100th anniversary video is a clear example.
EM Ford has been serving customers in this region for a century. The people who built that company, the employees who stayed for decades, the culture that kept it alive through everything that changed around it: that story could not be told in three minutes. It could not be told in ten. The full documentary came in at around 40 minutes, and every minute of it was earned.
One hundred years of doing things the right way does not fit in a highlight reel. It fits in a film.
That 40-minute version was then cut into a five-minute version for the web, one to two minute versions for social media, and shorter clips for specific platforms and purposes. The long version made all of the shorter versions possible. Without the full story captured properly, there would have been nothing worth cutting down.
This is the right way to think about long-form video. It is not that a long video is better than a short one. It is that some stories require the space to be told completely, and when you have that kind of story, you film it properly first and then build every other format from that foundation.
The Question Worth Asking
Before any conversation about length, Wonder Boy asks clients a simpler question: what does this video need to do, and what is the story that gets it there?
A 15-second recruitment spot that gets 80% of viewers to watch to the end and drives qualified candidates to apply is a success. A 40-minute documentary that captures a century of business history and becomes an artifact a company is proud of for the next hundred years is a success. A three-minute homepage video that keeps a visitor on the site long enough to request a quote is a success.
Length is a variable. Story is the constant. Get the story right and the length takes care of itself.