Onutro — The outro: the closing 5-20 seconds of a YouTube | onutro.com
Fifteen to twenty seconds for a standard YouTube video, less for short clips, streams and podcasts — because the outro must fit the window the platform gives it.
The ceiling is set by the end screen. YouTube end screens can appear only in the final 20 seconds of a video, and the video must be at least 25 seconds long for the feature to exist at all. An outro longer than 20 seconds plays its extra time with nothing clickable on screen; an outro shorter than 5 seconds gives viewers no time to act on what they see.
Length should scale with runtime. On a 60-second video, the last 20 seconds is 33% of the whole piece — a third of the video spent signing off. Clips around a minute should close in about 10 seconds and let a single subscribe element carry the ask.
Longer videos can afford the full window. On a 3-minute video, a 10-second intro plus a 15-second outro uses 14% of the runtime, leaving 86% for the body. That is the trade most formats aim for: the close fills most of the end-screen window without crowding the content.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Streams and podcasts close faster because there is no end-screen window to fill. A stream sign-off of 5-10 seconds — a verbal goodbye and a short music tail — is enough, and a podcast can run 10-15 seconds, riding a 10-second music tail with a 3-second fade.
Frame rate changes the workload, not the length. A 15-second outro is 450 frames at 30 fps and 900 frames at 60 fps; the viewer sees the same 15 seconds either way. Choose the length first, in seconds, and let the frame count follow.
Once the length is set, the next job is filling it: the companion guide at /youtube-end-screen-setup walks through placing elements, and /outro-music-and-voiceover covers the soundtrack.
Further reading