Standard number of characters in title and description?

Question

Standard number of characters in title and description?

This might sound like a strange question but I want to get better at writing titles and show descriptions. I'd like as little of the title and description to be as truncated as possible.

Right now, most of my episodes only show about 17 characters in the title, but some shows have as many as 40 characters showing for their title before any of it is truncated.

Any ideas why there's a difference and what I can do to get as many characters / words showing as other shows?

My show is Let's Talk Tech and an example of one with longer titles is Stuff You Should Know.

Thanks.

Posted on Jun 6, 2016 4:57 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 6, 2016 8:14 AM in response to winniefromlinwood

In the iTunes Store there seems to be plenty of room for the main title. However the episode titles get truncated if you shrink the window width. The 'Description' column (populated by the 'itunes:subtitle' tag) doesn't allow much space and you should keep subtitles as short as possible. 'itunes:summary' tags can be quite long as the sub-window which opens to show them will scroll if necessary.

When subscribing in iTunes, the user can adjust the widths of the title and Description tags to suit himself, so there's no prediction on size. Again, the contents of the 'itunes"summary' tag can be quite long.

It's best to keep titles fairly brief - I've seen podcasts with a title which includes what is effectively a subtitle, and it looks a bit silly; people tend to write rather long 'itunes:subtitle' tags and this isn't a good idea as they will certainly get truncated.

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