A couple years ago I decided to start releasing my feature films on YouTube as an experiment.

At the time I had completed two features, both of which had already made the rounds on Apple, Amazon, and all the other usual suspects.

But as I quickly learned, the biggest benefit in making a low / no-budget feature film was never going to be the immediate revenue.

Outside of unicorns like Paranormal Activity, generally micro-budget films aren’t huge revenue generators. It’s easy to make your money back with them (because they are made for so little), but unlikely you’ll turn a massive profit.

The real benefit to making a micro-budget film – and it’s a huge one – is the ability to reach an audience, build a fanbase for your work, and ultimately leverage that to set up your next movie.

That realization got me thinking – what about YouTube?

It’s the single platform with the biggest worldwide audience, and there are no costs, fees, or gatekeepers to go through if you want to use it as a distribution outlet for your work.

When it came time to release my third feature film (Disappearing Boy), I decided to initially premiere it on YouTube as a test.

I already had two other movies on there, both of which had racked up hundreds of thousands of views without any promotion, other than an occasional mention here on the newsletter.

So to me, it made perfect sense to go all in on YouTube. Particularly for this movie which was made for only $6000.

Eventually, the film was also released through Amazon, Apple, Tubi, and other platforms. But to this day, it has by far the most views on YT.

Skip to present day.

My latest feature film Teacher’s Pet is about to be released via traditional distribution. It makes sense for this movie, based on the way it was financed, produced, and cast. It was a step beyond anything I’d done before, and required a different approach.

But as I near our release date (February 6th!), I couldn’t help but go and check on my YouTube channel to see how the other 3 movies were performing.

As I looked at the analytics, something really unexpected caught my attention…

The most viewed feature on my channel is a “Director’s Cut” of Psychosynthesis. A shorter, 42 minute version of the full feature that I had uploaded as an experiment.

My gut feeling was that a shorter length might perform better on YouTube, and that instinct turned out to be true.

At the time of this writing, the full length version has 227,000 views on YouTube. The shorter 42 minute cut has 417,000 views – almost double!

Initially, I thought maybe short form narrative just does better than long form on YT. But that isn’t necessarily true.

All of my features have tens or hundreds of thousands of views. Most of my shorts do not, with the exception of one that has 4 million.

Naturally I had to wonder – Is there such thing as a perfect length for a YouTube feature film?

Narrative material has always been bounded by certain guardrails, at least in terms of runtime. Theatrical features usually work best around 90 – 100 minutes. TV at 22 – 60 minutes. 

What if the optimal runtime for YouTube is somewhere in the middle?

Every film is going to perform differently on YT, so I’m not suggesting that simply making a mid-length film (or a shorter feature) guarantees any success on YouTube. This is still anecdotal.

But at least in my case, the 42 minute cut way outperformed the longer cut. Even with the same title, opening scenes, logline, etc.

So for any filmmakers thinking about making their first feature, I would take this into consideration – specifically if your goal is to self release on YouTube and build an audience around it.

The Academy considers any movie over 40 minutes to be a feature film. The same goes for many film festivals.

Therefore the lowest bar to entry as a feature filmmaker is a micro-budget film with a 40 minute runtime. 

And now (at least based on my experimentation), we can see that a shorter length may actually give your movie an advantage on YouTube, which is where your audience already lives.

Think about it. It takes half the work to create a 40 minute film as it does a 90 minute film, with the relative potential for 2x the upside.

So if you haven’t yet made your first feature, that’s a model worth trying.

There are never any guarantees of success. But it certainly helps stack the deck in your favor.