Trends After years of growth, hotel marketing video length is shrinking…fast.

We’ve dabbled with this question before, but with a much larger sample of videos to pull from we wanted to revisit a simple question about how hotels and resorts use video in their marketing. Simply put, are videos getting longer or shorter? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at nearly 50,000 hotel and resort YouTube videos uploaded since 2007. We grouped the videos by the year each was uploaded, found the average length (in seconds) for each group, and plotted the results below.

After a steady upward trend between 2010 and 2013 that saw video length increase by 21%, 2016 (to date) marks the third year running with the trend heading in the opposite direction. So far this year video length has decreased by 22%.

What This Means
The reason for the change isn’t hard to guess. Vine launched in January of 2013 and Instagram followed suit allowing video uploads that summer. The common thread between the two? Strict limits on video length (6 seconds and 15 seconds).

Between attention spans, imposed restrictions, and the intersection of the two, we aren’t surprised to see hotel marketing videos get shorter and shorter. How short will they get? Only time will tell, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see this trend continue for the next few years at least.

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