How long should your presentation be that you're giving online? Now, the thing you hear again and again and again for people is, oh, everything's got to be short. It's got to be short, no one has any attention span. That's not exactly true. You can do an online presentation for 60 seconds. But if it's boring and uninteresting, and you're putting forth stuff that isn't useful to people, everyone will hit delete, after five seconds.
On the other hand, if you've got really good, interesting content, you could be speaking for 90 minutes and people are going to be demanding more. So the number one thing I think that should drive your presentation is, what is it that you've got to communicate? How important is it to you and to your audience? Certainly, if you're speaking to 50 colleagues in your company who report to you and they are in 30 different locations around the world, and you've got something that's really really important, I wouldn't put an artificial arbitrary Every five or 10 minute time limit on the presentation you're delivering through Skype or YouTube, or any other format. Focus on the content that really needs to be delivered. Certainly give people time to interact.
Now, if you are working, for example, with the Trade Association, and they have 90 minute webinars three times a week, and that's the format and that's what people have paid for, that's what they're used to. Well, then you need to be prepared to go 90 minutes, but even then realize it may only be 50 minutes of your talk time and the rest q&a, so you don't want to pack it so full, that you're not giving people time to talk. Now, when you're doing YouTube videos. What I have found works best is to focus on just one idea, one concept, but then talk for as long as you have interesting content. It might be 10 seconds, it might be three hours. If it's three hours, you could probably break it up.
But my point is don't arbitrarily make it shorter. Some of the videos I have on my YouTube channel that have the longest retention, and the most views are videos where I spoke for half an hour. However, I can tell you the average length of someone watching a recorded video on YouTube for me is one minute 31 seconds. Yours may be different. But the main principle here I want to stress is you're not a TV show. You're not trying to do things with a 62nd stock, stopwatch, focus on the ideas focus on what you have to really help your audience and the the length of the presentation will often take care of itself.