How long should a YouTube video be?

The honest answer: as long as the idea holds

A video should run as long as the idea stays interesting, then stop. There is no length YouTube rewards and no length it punishes, and nothing in the monetization rules sets a minimum or a maximum.

Look at what the advice pages say and the disagreement is obvious. Brafton says a YouTube video should ideally be 6 to 8 minutes. Social Video Plaza says “as long as you can make it, without getting boring,” and suggests aiming for at least 10 minutes. Jason Scott Montoya says the sweet spot is between 30 and 40 minutes. IdeaRocket lists 2 minutes as the ideal YouTube length.

Four pages, numbers from 2 to 40. None of them is lying. They are answering different questions: a company explainer that has to hold a buyer, a documentary channel that people put on in the evening, and a how-to video someone opened to solve one problem in ninety seconds.

Your length comes from your idea and your audience, not from an average.

Minutes watched, not minutes uploaded

The thing you are actually producing is attention, measured in minutes. Length is just one of the two numbers that make it.

Take 10,000 views. If the average person watches 2 minutes, that is 20,000 minutes, or about 333 hours. If the average person watches 6 minutes, the same 10,000 views produce 60,000 minutes, or 1,000 hours. Same audience, three times the result.

So a 20-minute video that loses most people at 90 seconds is worth less than a 4-minute video people finish. Length only helps when the extra minutes are watched.

Nobody has ever subscribed to a channel because a video was long.

That is also why “make it longer” is such tempting advice: it sounds like a lever you can pull on your own, without the harder work of making the middle of the video better.

YouTube video length for monetization

There is no required video length for monetization. What is required is subscribers and watch hours.

To earn ad revenue you need to be in the YouTube Partner Program at the level that pays ads: 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 qualified watch hours on long-form videos in the last 365 days, or 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. YouTube's first level opens earlier, at 500 subscribers, 3 qualified uploads in the last 90 days and 3,000 qualified watch hours, but it gives you memberships, Supers and Shopping, not ad revenue.

Qualified watch hours come from long-form videos you have set public. Hours watched on Shorts in the Shorts Feed do not count toward the 4,000.

4,000 watch hours is 240,000 minutes watched. That single number turns length into a plan:

If the average person watches 2 minutes of your videos, you need about 120,000 views.
At 4 minutes, about 60,000 views.
At 8 minutes, about 30,000 views.
At 15 minutes, about 16,000 views.

That looks like an argument for long videos, and it is, with one correction: average watch time does not scale with length. Doubling a video from 8 minutes to 16 rarely doubles the minutes people watch, because the share who stay falls. A 16-minute video that holds 35% gives you 5.6 minutes. An 8-minute video that holds 70% gives you the same 5.6 minutes, for half the production work.

You also have to clear the rest of the bar: YouTube's monetization policies, a supported region, no active Community Guidelines strikes, two-step verification and a linked AdSense account. We cover the whole list in YouTube monetization requirements.

One more thing to check for yourself rather than trust a blog post: people often pad videos to a specific length to carry more ad breaks. YouTube Studio shows which ad formats a given video is eligible for. Read it there before you build a format around a number you read somewhere.

What padding costs you

Stretching a video is not free. On July 15, 2025, YouTube renamed its repetitious content rule to inauthentic content, and the examples read like a list of padding techniques: image slideshows, templated storylines or scrolling text with minimal narrative, and content with minimal variation between videos.

The same page says reading out material you did not write is not monetized either. So a script bulked up with a block of copied background, read over a stock montage, is working against you twice: viewers leave, and the video drifts toward a policy line.

What YouTube does allow is a repeated intro and outro when the bulk of each video is different, and a series with recurring characters where each episode has its own storyline. A fixed format is fine. Filler is not.

Check your own numbers first

Stop reading averages and look at yours. Open the analytics for your last ten videos and write down two things for each: how long the video is, and how long the average person actually stayed.

Then look for the pattern. Three things usually show up.

A length where people stay much longer than elsewhere. That is your format.
A point in the first 60 seconds where a chunk of the audience leaves. That is an opening problem, not a length problem.
A long tail of videos where nobody reaches the end. The ending is doing no work, so move whatever was there forward.

When you want to know what those minutes are worth, YouTube reports RPM in Analytics: what you earned per 1,000 views after YouTube's share, across every revenue type. If you are not monetized yet and want a rough figure, the YouTube money calculator does the arithmetic and tells you how far you are from the threshold. Be clear-eyed about the result: YouTube's own help page says there are no guarantees about how much, or whether, a channel gets paid.

Who should not make longer videos

Longer is the wrong move for more people than the advice pages admit.

If your audience retention falls off a cliff in the first minute, adding minutes multiplies the problem. Fix the opening on a short video first, where you can make ten attempts in the time one long video takes.

If your subject genuinely resolves in three minutes, resolve it in three minutes. A tutorial that answers the question fast gets rewatched and linked to, and that is worth more than nine padded minutes.

And if making a 25-minute video means you post once every six weeks, the length is beating the schedule. Frequency compounds; one long video does not. A channel that posts nothing for six months or more can even lose monetization.

Pick a length you can repeat every week

Decide your length by capacity, then build the format to fit it.

Work out how many finished minutes you can actually produce in a month, including research, script, voice, pictures and the edit. If the honest answer is 40 minutes, that is four 10-minute videos or two 20-minute ones. Four is almost always the better bet, because you learn four times as fast and get four shots at the algorithm instead of two.

Then keep the length steady for ten videos before you change it. Changing length and topic and thumbnail style at the same time teaches you nothing.

This is where production capacity decides the format. AutomationChannels makes long-form videos between 3 and 20 minutes, priced in finished minutes (100 credits each, so a 10-minute video is 1,000 credits), which is a useful way to think about it even if you make everything yourself: a 20-minute video costs twice a 10-minute one, so it has to be worth twice as much. If you are still choosing a subject that can carry a repeatable length, faceless channel ideas that survive is the better place to start than any length chart.

Questions people ask

How long should my videos be as a new creator?

Short enough that you can publish often and still finish each one. New channels learn from volume, and a video you can research, write and edit in a few days beats a 30-minute project you abandon halfway.

Does video length affect how much YouTube pays?

Indirectly. YouTube pays partners 55% of net ad revenue from videos on the watch page, and your earnings follow the minutes people watch and the ads they see, so length matters only to the extent that the extra minutes are actually watched.

Do Shorts count toward the 4,000 watch hours?

No. Qualified watch hours come from public long-form videos, and hours watched on Shorts in the Shorts Feed do not count toward the 4,000. Shorts have their own route: 10 million qualified views in 90 days.

What is the maximum length of a YouTube video?

IdeaRocket's guide says the average account can upload videos up to 15 minutes, and verified accounts can go longer. Verify your account in YouTube Studio if you plan to publish anything above that.

Is a 10-minute video better than a 5-minute one?

Only if people watch more of it. A 5-minute video watched to the end delivers more minutes than a 10-minute video abandoned at 3, so compare average watch time in your own analytics rather than the length on the thumbnail.

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