How long is a hook?
The window differs by platform, and on the fast ones it has closed before your logo has finished landing.
Somewhere near the start of most channels there is an intro. Five seconds of logo, a whoosh, maybe a strapline. It was made carefully, either by the owner in a template or by somebody who was paid for it, and it goes on the front of everything.
It is also, on a scrolling feed, the entire decision. The viewer has watched your branding and nothing else, and then they have gone.
This is the least popular sentence in creator education, so it is worth explaining the mechanism rather than just repeating it.
What is the viewer actually deciding?
Not whether to watch your video. That is the mistake underneath most intros.
On a feed, the viewer is deciding whether to stop scrolling. That is a smaller, faster and much less generous decision than choosing a video, and it is made on whatever is on screen at the moment their thumb passes. They are not weighing you up. They are looking for a reason to continue, and the absence of one is enough to keep moving.
On a platform where somebody has clicked a title, the decision is different again. They have already stopped. What they are now doing is checking whether the video is about to deliver the thing the title promised, which is a question you can answer badly for a while before they leave.
Two different decisions, two different windows.
How long is the window on a scrolling feed?
Take a second and a half as a working figure, and treat it as exactly that.
It is not a law and it is not published anywhere as a specification. It is the sort of number people who edit for these platforms work to, and the reason it is useful is not its precision. If the real figure turned out to be one second or three, nothing you would do about it changes. Either way the window is shorter than an animation, shorter than a greeting, and shorter than the sentence where you say who you are.
Which gives you a straightforward test for any opening. Play it, count to two, and stop. Whatever happened in that time is the whole of your case.
Is the window longer where somebody has chosen to click?
Considerably, and it is still not thirty seconds.
Somebody who has clicked a title and a thumbnail arrives holding a promise. The opening's job is to confirm that the promise is about to be kept and to make the shape of the video clear. That takes more than two seconds and it can be done comfortably in fifteen. What loses them at this stage is not slowness exactly. It is the suspicion that the thing they came for is a long way off.
So the same principle applies at a different scale. Start on the subject, not on yourself.
What does an intro animation cost?
The whole window, on the fast platforms, and the most valuable part of it everywhere else.
There is a version of this that sounds harsh and is just arithmetic. If the window is roughly the length of a doorbell, and the first thing in the video is a five second logo sting, then the viewer's entire experience of your work is a logo. It does not matter how good the logo is. It is answering a question nobody asked, at the only moment they were asking a different one.
The window gets spent on branding because branding feels like the professional thing to lead with, and because the alternative feels abrupt. It is abrupt. That is the point.
Where should the branding go instead?
Later, smaller, or nowhere at all.
The honest answer for most people reading this is nowhere at all, and that is worth saying plainly because it means not spending money. A channel with a consistent voice, a consistent set of colours and a face people recognise is already branded. A five second sting on the front adds nothing to that and costs you the opening of every video you will ever publish.
If you want it, there are three places it survives. A small static watermark in a corner, which costs no time at all. A short bumper placed after the opening statement, once the viewer has a reason to sit through it. An end card, where branding belongs and where nobody is deciding anything anyway.
What to start on instead
The thing they came for. Three shapes work, and all three can be filmed in a single take:
1. The result, shown before it is explained. The finished dish, the repaired joint, the before and after, on screen while you say what it is. 2. The question, asked in the viewer's own words rather than yours. Not the technical name for the problem, the way they would describe it to a friend. 3. The objection, said out loud before they say it. Naming the reason somebody would scroll past is a surprisingly reliable way of stopping them.
Go and look at the first two seconds of your last upload. Not the first ten. The first two, which is all most of the people who saw it ever watched. If those two seconds do not contain the subject of the video, you already know what to change, and the change costs nothing but a re-edit.
The next question is which of those three openings works for your audience, and the useful answer to that is not one you can reason your way to from a chair.
Keep reading
This is a service, and the method is written down.
Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
Start with a free audit
Tell us where your content is now. We will come back with what we would change and what result to expect.
A person reads the channel and writes the audit by hand: a considered read typically takes three working days. That is the usual shape, not a promised turnaround. We use these details only to reply to you: no lists, no lurking.
What you will get
A fit snapshot: where your channel stands, and whether we are a match.
Two to three opportunities: specific, prioritised, yours to keep.
A recommended next step, even if that step is not us.
The audit is free and commits you to nothing: nobody follows up with a call you did not ask for.