Lauren Bateman says stop padding YouTube videos. Make each one only as long as it takes to answer the question, then end it. Stretching a beginner guitar guide from 5 minutes to 15 minutes kills retention and hurts your algorithm ranking.
So how long should your YouTube content be? And I'm talking about long form horizontal content. It should be as long as you need to to answer a question and no longer. Okay. So for example, someone asked me what is the best guitar for a beginner? I would go and tell them all the reasons I think this particular guitar is good or what to look for in a guitar. It might be three or four points. And then I would end the video. If that took five minutes, awesome. It took five minutes. If it took 10 minutes, that's perfect. But if it took 10 minutes and then I'm trying extended to 15 minutes, that's not a good practice. You're better off pointing people over to a new video so that you extend the watch time by them watching more of your content. Or you're better off just ending the video where it's supposed to and then making a call to action to get off of YouTube and go interact with you over on your website or through one of your products and services. Never extend a video to to be longer than it needs to or you're going to lose the audience, you're going to lose the retention, and YouTube's going to show your video to less people.
