I was thinking what the first blog post should be about and I feel that it should be to cover one of the questions that I have been asked the most by clients and collaborators alike: how many words per minute is a voiceover?

The answer is somewhere between 150 to 200 words per minute, depending on what type of video you are making, who your audience is, how important the individual details of what the voiceover contains are, and how much leeway you’re going to want for the timing of the video.

For instance, I would say that the most words you would want a 30 second explainer animated video to be would be 75, BUT it depends… if it’s a hard sell, intense video you could go as high as 100. For a 1 minute video, 160 words per minute is a good general rule to keep in mind, but again the more intense the video / the harder the sell the higher you can potentially go with the words per minute as high as (potentially) 200…. past that you’re just making a 1980’s Micro Machines commercial (am I the only one who remembers the fast talking Micro Machines commercials?)…

Hope that helps someone out there!