Hi, I’m Dave Kaminski of Web Video University with some more tips for Shama.tv viewers, and today we’re going to talk about some of the Do’s and Don’ts with web video, and I want to specifically cover three of them, and the first is video length.

You always want to try and keep your web videos around two minutes long. That’s because beyond the two minute mark, viewership tends to really drop and statistically, across the web, the average length of time a video is watched is slightly over two minutes, and on video-sharing sites it’s worse, where 90% of viewers have gone away before the first 60 seconds of a video is even played. So keep your videos short. It’s no accident that Shama’s videos on this site are all around two minutes, give or take.

The next thing you want to do with your videos is keep them moving. This will help keep viewers glued to your videos. For example, if you pay attention to television shows, you’ll notice that about every three seconds, what you see on the screen changes. It will be a different camera angle or a different scene, or they’ll show a different character. Again, this is done to hold the interest of your brain, at least subconsciously. Now throwing different things on the screen all the time can get pretty tough to pull off with web video. So instead just, every so often, throw some text or an image on the screen, a lot like I’m doing in these videos. It can really help to keep viewers interested.

And finally, if you’re doing live video like this one, well, whatever energy you project in normal life, well, you want to double it once you get in front of a camera. It’s one of those weird things where the camera won’t really pick up on your personality unless you over-emphasize it. For example, if you’ve ever seen a live performance being videotaped, you’ll notice the actors really seem to be exaggerating things, but through the camera lens, it comes out looking exactly right.

So that’s going to wrap up this tip on the important Do’s or Don’ts with web video, and in the next lesson I’m going to cover the three major ways that people are profiting from web video right now. I’ll talk to you then.