How many words should a voice over have?

It depends.

A commercial voice over may need to fit those words into a minute, two minutes, maybe thirty seconds, or less. In that case, you need to be careful with your choice of words to make sure everything fits.

You can search online for "words per minute" and get estimates for how much time is needed to cover e.g. 150 words.

According to various search engine results, 150 words covers approximately 1 minute of speech.

Perfect, so for 1 minute of voice over I need to use 150 words!

Not so fast.

Even if this result is accurate (and we need to be careful to not take generated answers as gospel), this assumes the voice actor will be talking for the entire minute, which is rarely the case.

I will use a working example to demonstrate this: A few days ago I voiced a commercial for a brand in the food & beverage industry. The video had factors which affected the final word count.

• Visual cues: Certain visuals appear in the video which align with phrases in the text.

  • This means I needed to align the voice over with when that visual appeared. This lead to longer pauses which were filled with music and sound effects.

• Important pieces of text:

  • Similar to the previous point, I had three words which needed to be timed with when they appeared in the video. The result is the delivery was much slower than I would've naturally done without the video.

• Emphasis the client wanted to add.

  • The brand name is the obvious one, but there were key words the client wanted to highlight. This often means giving the words a bit more space and/or slowing them down.

Now, put all these factors together: visual cues, important pieces of text, emphasis, along with the fact that a voice over rarely starts exactly at the beginning and stops exactly at the end, and you that 150 word count shrinks to probably half that, or maybe even less.

This also means taking a hard look at the message you want to communicate and make conscious choices about what really needs to be there.

If there are too many words there is less time and space to slow down when impact or emphasis is required. You need key moments to grab your audience's attention and give your viewers something to remember.

Often times, less is more.