Why are all webinars an hour long when business people are busier than ever?

Woodrow Wilson said he needed two weeks to prepare a 10-minute speech, one week to prepare a one-hour speech, but could begin without notice to deliver a two-hour speech. So does that mean presenters of 1 hour webinars value their time more than that of their audience?

BTW Here's a 30 minute webinar I will host next week on making retail sales reps more successful in the last 3 feet!
http://resources.marketsource.com/how-to-boost-product-value-at-no-cost-LI.html

Interestingly enough, participants in ON24 webcasts in 2010 spent an average of 38 minutes viewing webcast content.

To some degree it is more a question of perception and promotion. Despite of the fact that most webcasts are promoted to be for one hour, in reality the overwhelming of webcasts we do for clients are in the 30 minutes range + Q&A

I wonder the same myself :).

I think this is a translation from the physical events world we need to get rid of. Physical one hour speeches were boring enough, but audiences were trapped in the auditorium and could not multitask. In the virtual world, no webinar should last longer than 30-40 minutes, and real time INTERACTION with the virtual audience is a MUST.

Speakers should be prepared to ask questions all the time, answer what the audience wants to know, create polls, and use the help of multimedia content to make the webinar more engaging.

Agree with Miguel. The reality is that most 60 minute presentations can be condensed into far more entertaining and informative 10 minute videos. It is always worth investing more time and energy into each minute rather than spreading that value out over a long period of time.

My general rule of thumb is that no segment within one experience should be longer than 7 minutes. So even if you're producing a 30 minute webcast/webinar, you should switch up the format of the presentation every 5-7 minutes to re-engage attendees in a new way. That may be by offering a poll, interspersing Q&A, cutting to a pre-taped segment, bringing in another opinion on the subject, etc.

This is how TV news is produced... nothing is longer than a few minutes - and it works. You're constantly being hooked with promos of the next segment and it becomes very difficult to change the channel (because you have to figure out the verdict of the case, the new law that affects you, the circumstance of the drug dealer who lives near the school two towns over, how much snow we'll get tomorrow, etc, etc, etc)

When we're creating online presentations, we need to do so in a news-oriented format if we're worried about people sticking around. If you're presenting highly technical content for training purposes the circumstance is different, hence the numbers that Kathryn posted above. We've seen that to be the case with technology focused user conferences.

I'd like to see most webinars be 30 minutes (total), with a 60/40 split between presentation and Q&A. As Craig noted in his question, most webinars are 60 minutes (too long) and I estimate that the split is more like 80/20 (or even 90/10) in favor of the presentation.

Unless you're doing your PhD defense, anyone should be able to condense a presentation down to 15-20 minutes. Quick tip: take your slide deck and see if you can't eliminate every other slide.

When presenters are asked interesting questions, I tend to find the answers as useful (if not more useful) than the presentation material itself.

I've been watching some TED videos of late and noticed that the total duration (of each video) tends to be 20 minutes or less. When the video concludes, I find myself thinking that the duration was "just enough".