What video length works best?

Completion is the thing length is a proxy for. Under about 20 seconds you rarely get to say anything worth sending to a friend; past about 35 seconds on vertical the drop-off starts costing you more than the extra content gains. That band is where most of our client Reels and TikToks land, not because a rule says so but because it is long enough for a setup and a payoff and short enough to be watched twice. Rewatches count, and a clip watched twice is a strong signal on every vertical feed.

On YouTube, 8 to 12 minutes is the practical band for a channel that is still building, for two reasons. Mid-roll ads only become available on videos of 8 minutes and longer, so a channel aiming at revenue leaves money on the table below that. And past about twelve minutes, a new channel with no track record is asking for a commitment its audience has not agreed to yet. Established channels break this happily — a wedding photographer in Islamabad running a 40-minute full-day shoot breakdown does fine, because the people watching are already booking.

Cut to content, not to a target. The worst videos we are ever sent are ones padded to reach eight minutes: a greeting, a channel introduction, a request to subscribe, and the actual answer at 3:40. Every one of those seconds is a place viewers leave. If the honest answer takes five minutes, publish five minutes and make the next one longer when you have more to say.

One practical detail for Pakistan: the first 60 seconds matters more than usual here because a lot of viewing happens on mobile data with a rough connection. If your opening minute is a slow logo animation, the viewer has paid for buffering and received nothing. Put the substance first and the branding at the end, where the people who stayed will actually see it.