Sixty to ninety seconds, for most single-concept product explainers. Across sixty-odd produced videos, the animated core of each finished piece ran 54 to 124 seconds, the typical video landed at 60–80, and the ones that ran long earned it with a worked example rather than a longer pitch.
You can also compute the number instead of picking it. A video's concept cuts into scenes, each scene carries one idea and a minimum duration its picture needs, and the runtime is the sum. When someone picks a duration first and fills it, viewers feel the padding.
The running example is an explainer for a CRM: leads arrive, move through pipeline stages, and one deal moves from first touch to closed.
The real numbers
Measured from our production records:
| Format | Measured length |
|---|---|
| Single-concept explainer (the core format) | 54–124s, typically 60–80s |
| On-camera founder intro | 25–30s ≈ 70–80 words |
| Full product course (11 modules) | ~11 minutes of animation total |
| Onboarding sequence | 10–15 minutes across 4–5 short videos |
Even a complete course over a serious product amounts to about eleven minutes of animation, roughly a minute per concept. And when more total time is needed, it ships as more short videos rather than one long one: a 12-minute explainer appears nowhere in the corpus, because no single concept we've produced needed that long to argue.
The words-per-second math
A production narration read measures about 1.9 words per second (the measurement lives in the voice over guide), and every scene's line is followed by roughly 0.7 seconds of breath. Those two numbers set the budget:
- A 9-second scene holds one short sentence of about 15–18 words.
- A 12-second scene holds two.
- A 60-second video holds roughly 100–110 words of narration in total.
- A typical 6–8 scene video at 8–12 seconds per scene comes out at 60–90 seconds, which is exactly where the measured corpus sits.
The same math audits any script you've been handed. A 500-word script is a five-minute video, so if the target is 90 seconds, the script is overwritten by a factor of three, and no amount of fast reading fixes it. The fix is cutting ideas, never cutting verbs.
Length follows scene count, never the reverse
Every video in the corpus comes out of the same planning chain: a learning outcome, one thesis sentence, a causal chain, beats (the chain cut into scenes, one idea each), visuals per beat, narration last. Duration never appears as an input; it emerges at the beat step.
Run the chain on the CRM video. The outcome: the viewer thinks "the pipeline keeps itself up to date, and I can see where every deal stands without asking anyone." The chain: leads come in from forms, each lands in a stage, activity moves the deal along without anyone updating a spreadsheet, one deal gets walked from first touch to closed, and the pipeline view answers where everything stands. Five links, each needing 8–12 seconds of picture, so the concept itself says 60–75 seconds, whatever the brief says.
Two production rules enforce the direction:
- Every scene has a visual minimum. A scene's final length is the larger of that minimum and its narration plus the breath pad, so words may extend a scene and can never compress it below what the picture needs.
- A scene that keeps outrunning its narration gets trimmed. When the picture wants far more time than the words fill, cut the scene down rather than padding the prose to fill it.
A video ends up exactly as long as its idea, measured in scenes. When a draft feels long, the cut list is scenes, and the test is the thesis sentence: everything on screen exists to make one idea feel obvious, and any scene that doesn't push it gets deleted no matter how good it looks. One idea per scene is what keeps length computable: each idea adds a scene, and each scene adds its 8–12 seconds.
When 60 seconds, when 2 minutes
The real decision is whether the video gets a worked example or only the concept.
- 60–90 seconds buys one concept. Six to eight scenes: a hook, the mechanism macro to micro, one run of the machine, a closer. Most products need exactly this.
- 2 to 2.5 minutes buys the concept plus a worked example. The extra minute pays for one thing: walking a single real case through the machine — in the CRM video, one actual deal from inbound email to closed-won. If the added minute isn't a worked example, it's padding.
- Past 2.5 minutes you have two videos. Split along concept ownership, so each video argues one thesis. Three tight videos get watched to the end where one 6-minute video gets abandoned at the 90-second mark.
Two measurements from our graded corpus back the ceiling. Viewers pay full attention to a machine's first run, less to the second, and almost none to the fifth — one graded build got stronger by cutting from seven runs down to three. And stretching shows: one measured bad build spent 44% of its runtime fully static (the static-time numbers are in the timing guide).
What the length decision costs
Runtime scales cost everywhere, but the expensive mistake usually runs the other way: paying for 2.5 minutes when the idea was 70 seconds. Before commissioning to a target length, write the thesis sentence and count the links in its causal chain. Pricing is on the cost guide, and how long production takes is a separate question from how long the video runs.
FAQ
How many words is a 60-second explainer script? About 100–110 words of spoken narration, at roughly 1.9 words per second with a short breath after each scene's line. If your draft is 250 words, you've written a 2-minute video.
Is a 3-minute explainer too long? For a single video arguing a single idea, yes, in our experience. Past about 2.5 minutes you're holding attention you no longer have. Split it: each piece owns one thesis, and the set becomes a sequence viewers can enter anywhere.
Should the ad cut and the homepage video be different lengths? Yes, because they're different scene counts rather than a re-trim. An ad cut is the hook and the single strongest run at 15–30 seconds, while the homepage video carries the full causal chain. Cutting a 90-second video down by playing it faster or dropping its middle breaks the chain that made it work.
Do silent scenes count against the word budget? They don't need words at all. A scene with no narration keeps its authored duration, and some of the strongest beats in the corpus are silent payoffs. Budget words per scene, and let the picture carry the scenes that can.
When you're ready, send us your product's URL. We cut twenty short videos of it, and you pick the one worth finishing.