Trends Q: Has the average length of resort marketing videos changed over time?

Nearly all the moving pieces of online video marketing have changed over the last decade. Download speeds have skyrocketed, once high-end tech is now pocket-sized, attention spans are waning, and more. But has the average length of resort videos changed in response? If so, is it getting longer or shorter?

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at nearly 30,000 YouTube videos uploaded by 250 resorts across the United States since 2006. We then found the average lengths (in seconds) of resort YouTube videos and plotted them on the chart below.

Setting aside 2006 when resorts only uploaded a few dozen videos total, length slowly decreased from 2007 (129.0 seconds) until 2010 (111.5 seconds) when length began to rise. Through mid-March 2015, average video length is nearly identical to 2007 (128.7 seconds).

What This Means
This really surprised us. Despite correlations between view counts, ratings and video length and despite all the factors we mentioned at the beginning that have changed so drastically over the last decade, video length has only changed about 15% overall and appears to be nearly identical to where we were 8 years ago.

One indication as to why may be found in the fact that YouTube uploads dropped by more than 8% last year. In other words, while it may take slightly longer to watch any one piece video, there are also fewer videos to watch. At least on YouTube.

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