Shhh!

We here at Gopherx.net have long known the dirty secret of online video – almost no one watches until the end.

It doesn’t matter how long or short your video is, or what type of hosting you use, most of your viewers click away before the video is finished streaming.

Now, I’m not a fan of bloggers who simply rewrite other blog’s content and call it their own, so I’ll let you check out the post on Visible Measures that inspired this one on your own. (But you’ll have to wait for the link at the bottom, cause I do want you to read my post first!) But essentially they discovered that 20% of viewers leave in the first 10 seconds. That’s an average figure across the whole online video sphere. (Is there a g33k term for it that I’m not aware of?)

Like I started out saying, that’s nothing new. We discovered this fact when we were analyzing our figures for our early series, especially Team Leader, which was launched just when these sorts of robust tools were first being developed.

The first response people throw out when confronted with numbers like this is “People have shorter attention spans today.” Usually with a roll of the eyes. What they’re really saying is that the it is the viewer’s fault

that they’re not sticking around past ten seconds, or even to the end. And I just that that’s mean. It’s not the viewer’s fault that they didn’t like your piece of video enough to watch it all. (At the risk of bragging, we’ve found that our videos tend to blow away to the average numbers for completion – as far as we can tell we some of the highest completion rates on the internet.)

The myth of lowering attention span I think comes from a comparison between old media and new media. When you go out to a movie, you have committed yourself and your time to about two hours of watching. Not so with online video. Often we get a link emailed or tweated to us and we have no idea how long it is, or even what it is really about. We open it, watch for a few seconds, and then glance at the time bar. “Four minutes? I better get back to that report. I’ll watch it later.” And that counts as someone watching the video and clicking away. Is it a problem with attention span? Or is it just the fact that entertainment on the internet is still very much about discovery. How often do you sit down with a plan to watch internet videos for the next hour? (Despite what media gurus would have you believe, people don’t plan their time that way – they pick series, not platforms. But that’s another discussion.)

Another element of viewer abandonment (and the myth of the short attention span) is that watching stuff on the internet still… kinda… sucks. Let’s be honest about it. My computer is fairly modern, but I still set the resolution way down on a video so it will play smoothly and buffer quickly. Fiction videos, like web series, have a bit of a raw deal. To get the kinds of scenes viewers expect to see – being used to film and TV – can choke up a stream. It is hard to compress a scene where there’s lots of action and motion. And so the picture stutters, and freezes and buffers and we huff and puff and get to a point where watching that video just isn’t worth the wait anymore. It’s not the videos fault. And it’s not the viewer’s fault. If the experience sucks, why should people put up with it? They can click to Fail Blog or Lolcatz where the pictures come up right away, we can feel good for a moment, and then get back to that report.

So, yes, people click away. And we’re not supposed to talk about it – it might scare off advertisers. But it happens. For one reason or another, some people just don’t want to watch your video. It’s not great, but instead of keeping it a secret, we should be upfront and deal with it.

And the answer is not making that first ten seconds super exciting and super high energy or have boobies or whatever (unless that is what your video is about). Let it introduce your story, let the people who will never like to watch that story leave, and the rest of us can get on with enjoying it.

For those who are interested in the numbers, check out the post from Visible Measures.