How long should text stay on screen in a launch video?
By Yannis Coulibaly · November 8, 2026 · Measured on 591 launch videos
The short answer
Not long. The median piece of text in a tech launch video stays on screen 1.3 seconds and holds 2 words; half stay between 0.75 and 2.35 seconds. Films change their text about 29 times a minute.
We read the on-screen text of 591 launch films four times a second and measured every piece that appears: when it enters, when it leaves, how many words it holds and how tall it is. 588 films have some text; 22,751 pieces in total. Text inside interface screenshots is mostly too small to be counted, so these figures describe titles, captions and kinetic type.
- 1.3 s
- median time on screen
- 2
- words, median
- 29
- pieces of text a minute
- 31%
- stay under a second
Most text is a word or two, held for about a second
| Time on screen | Seconds |
|---|---|
| A quarter of text, under | 0.75 |
| Median | 1.3 |
| A quarter of text, over | 2.35 |
Half of all text holds between one and three words. That is the signature of kinetic type: a sentence is broken into short beats that replace each other, instead of a line that sits while the viewer reads. Measured as words per second of screen time, the median is 1.3. Only 17% of pieces show more than three words per second; those are the ones worth checking in your own cut.
Big, and mostly still
The median line is 6.7% of the frame height, and half sit between 4.1% and 12.2%. Most text does not move while it is visible: it arrives with a cut or a fade, stays put, and leaves. The rest grows or slides.
- Still while visible76%
- Scales13%
- Slides11%
How much text per minute
The median film changes its text 29 times a minute; half sit between 19 and 43. The range is wide. Blinka's YC launch shows about 119 pieces of text a minute, while GitHub's Copilot in Xcode film has none we could measure.
How far to trust these numbers
Text is read by OCR four times a second, and only text at least 2.5% of the frame height is kept, so durations are accurate to about a quarter of a second and small labels are left out. A line revealed word by word can count as several pieces. The figures describe what launch films do, not how well viewers read them.
What this means for your video
Our reading: plan your copy in beats of one to three words, and hold each beat for about a second and a half. When a line must be longer, give it more time rather than smaller type: a viewer meeting your product for the first time reads slower than you do. The readability check in the MCP compares any line and duration with these films.
