How long should a children's rhyme video be?

This is the question that arrives right after the first video goes up. Everybody has seen the ten-minute and one-hour compilations at the top of the results and concluded that length is the trick. It is not the trick, but it is not nothing either, and the two get confused.

Start from the one number nobody argues about: a nursery rhyme, sung at a tempo a child can follow, with a chorus and four to eight verses, lasts between ninety seconds and three minutes. That is not a limitation of the format. That is the format.

Why the short version usually wins

A two-minute rhyme that holds attention the whole way through is watched almost to the end. A ten-minute version of the same song, with the chorus looped five times and a slow zoom over a still, is abandoned somewhere in minute three.

Those two videos look very different to whatever decides what gets shown next. One is a thing people finish. The other is a thing people leave. Total minutes watched can even favour the long one and it still loses, because the pattern of leaving is the part that gets read.

• •A short video is finished, and finishing is the strongest signal you can send
• •A short video is cheaper to make, so you publish more often
• •A short video survives being watched twice in a row, which is how toddlers watch
• •A padded video teaches a parent that your channel wastes their child's time

Publishing three good two-minute rhymes in the time one padded ten-minute video would take is the better trade almost every week.

What actually decides the length

Not the algorithm, and not a target you picked before writing. Four things, in this order.

1. 01

   The number of verses

   A counting song to ten has ten. An animal-sounds song has as many as you have animals. Each verse plus its chorus return is roughly fifteen to twenty seconds sung slowly enough for a two-year-old.

2. 02

   The tempo

   Children's songs are sung slower than you think when you read them. The same lyric at a singable tempo runs about a third longer than your reading of it, which is why estimating from the page always comes out short.

3. 03

   The repeats

   A chorus needs to come back at least three times before a child can join in. Three is the floor. Six is padding.

4. 04

   The ends

   Four to six seconds of establishing shot at the front and a held final frame at the back. Not a fifteen-second branded intro, which is where a parent taps away.

intro                    5s
verse x 8   (18s each)  144s
chorus returns already counted inside the verses
final held frame          6s
                        ----
                        155s   = 2m 35s

Do this arithmetic before the storyboard, not after. It tells you how many scenes to draw — roughly one scene every seven to nine seconds — and it stops you discovering at the render that you wrote four minutes of song for twelve pictures.

So what about the ten-minute videos?

They are real, they do work, and they are not one song. They are compilations: five to eight separate rhymes played back to back, usually ones that already exist on the channel.

That is the honest route to length. You do not stretch one song. You publish six songs over six weeks, then publish the collection as a seventh video. The long video costs you an afternoon of editing instead of an afternoon of padding, and every song inside it has already been watched to the end on its own.

• •Order the songs so the liveliest one is first and the calmest is last
• •Leave a beat of silence between songs rather than a hard cut
• •Say the running time in the description, because that is what the parent is choosing on
• •Never build a compilation from fewer than four distinct songs

The one length to avoid

Under sixty seconds, for a sung rhyme meant to be watched on a television or a tablet. There is not room for a chorus to return three times, so the child never gets to the moment of joining in, and that moment is the entire point of the form.

Short vertical clips are a different job with different rules. If you are making one, take the strongest fifteen seconds of an existing rhyme rather than writing a miniature song.

The short version

Write the song the length the song wants to be — ninety seconds to three minutes for nearly every rhyme. Count verses and tempo to get the number before you draw anything. If you want ten minutes, earn it with six finished songs and a collection.

Every Blue Flower kit is built to that arithmetic: the verse count, the sung running time and the scene count are worked out together, so the storyboard you get has the right number of pictures for the song you get.