I guess 3000 is the average, but it’s not a must have. Reviewers judge length by how many minutes it took them to finish reading an episode, not by how many lines it has (not that they know anyway).
A CC template takes up over 1500 lines, but it only takes up a few minutes of a story. An episode can have 5000 lines and still be 10-15 minutes long instead of over 20. My upcoming story is an example.
A good rule of thumb is 400 lines of dialogue- not the spotting, or advanced coding overlays and all that- just what the characters are saying. Then add in your spotting and other codes. You’ll find that you end at least 1000-1500 lines.
That will give you approximately 10-15 minute episodes everytime.
The deeper into coding/ branching/ choices/games etc your codes will get longer, more complex and you’ll have way more lines than 1000. So I stick with the 400 lines of dialogue rule. 
Edit to add: 400 sounds like a lot but think about how many scenes you’ll have in one episode- it’s really not that much when you think of how it breaks into each scene.
no less than 500 no more than 2000 each episode sound be about 10-15 minutes not including CC
14-19 minutes is an appropriate amount of time I think
Honestly it all depends on how many paths you have programmed in, how many branches, etc. If you have three different sexualities programmed, that’ll easily triple your code count but will not make the story longer.
Would 6-7 minutes (including 1-2mins of adverts) be too short?
I’m trying to write a story at the minute and want to make sure that there are enough episodes whilst not being too long or short
Personally I won’t read most stories with super long episodes because I don’t always have 1h+ to read so I go for the ones with 5-9 mins because that usually ends up being 30-40 mins in total
Ngl, yes, that sounds really short, I don’t know why you’d include ads in the read time because it isn’t part of your content and some people pay for the ads to be removed anyhow. I’m pretty sure 5 minutes read time or thereabouts is the minimum but remember, people pay an entire pass for one chapter and you get 4 for every 4 hours. 4 hours wait time for barely 20 minutes of content. Yeah the story would have to be very solid for me to not become increasingly annoyed by that enough to continue reading. Otherwise it’s not really worth it to me. Most people prefer between 10-15 minutes of content.
It is your story though so if the minimum is what you want to do, do it. Just be prepared for complaints and requests for longer episodes from readers.
Ok thank you, I am starting to make them slightly longer now, I included the ad time just because I tried to work out the total time it would take to use the 4 passes. Do you think people would mind if just the first few episodes were slightly shorter than the others or should I make them the same length?
Yeah, that should be fine honestly. Maybe give an authors note heads up at Chapter 1 that the first few are shorter than the rest will be.
Honestly, it really depends on the amount of advanced directing you do! When you start accounting for points and simple choices, a single line of dialogue can take up 10+ lines. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it sure adds up!
I would just time your story. People like an episode about 5-10 minutes long, at least from what I’ve heard – but that even seems too long for me.
My rule of thumb for writing story is to have two cliffhangers per story. Have one that is minor that will transition into a new scene, and the “major” one will end my story. That way I’m not ending at every plot twist and not continuing on for decades.
bump
For the story I’m writing it’s maybe 2,000 with out CC and the if I just count dialogue maybe 200 lines more or less. Most of the coding for me is directing tbh. I would say 1.5k-2k of code with out CC. Also counting I don’t have a point system so mine is a bit shorter.
Hope it helps!!!
Mine is usually 1500 on average w/o CC, and with lots of advanced directing 
I heard that 1k lines of pure dialogue is the best.
You can have 2 episode’s that are 20k lines of code and they wont be the same length