No plans for lunch? How 'bout YouTube's 47 minutes of surfing chicks?

The maximum allowable length of a video uploaded on YouTube is 10 minutes. And it's the rare online videophile who will watch anything longer than 6½ minutes anyway. Isn't it a double wonder then that videos like the one below still get uploaded?  It's a surfer-girl montage from Roxy, Quicksilver's lady line, and it goes on for the better part of an hour. Some legacy accounts — those created before YouTube switched to the 10-minute max last year — still allow you to upload nearly endless amounts of video. So this one's been grandfathered in.

I've been sitting here for five minutes trying to think of a scenario under which I, or anyone else, would watch this entire clip (could've watched like three videos in that time!) and have been unable to. Which is not to say it would never happen, just that my imagination has its limits.

Comments

[Stephen Cobb]

Chicks surfing -- what's not to love? Surfing very well actually. Even better, but I admit you have ot be hard core to watch the whole thing. Your post was the first I heard about the grandfathering of long videos. We just posted our movie trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9lh4dGMHjo) andI have been trying to find out how much of it people watch. For example, the trailer appears in several places and there is a "Views" count. Right now the total is over 500, which is exciting [we are a zero budget indie film so we are thrilled to be opening at the Laemmle Grand 4-Plex this month] but how many of those views were full length? It would be great to know how many people watch to the end. For a start, if you are editing a movie trailer do you provide all the essential info in the first 20 seconds? Or do you try to hold people to the kicker at the end? Our distributor, Indican Pictures, made what I think is an excellent trailer. But I am wondering if a regular movie trailer worsk with the YouTube attention span.

Anyway, keep the insights and inside news coming.