Only Five Seconds? It Happens to A Lot of People

While on the video distribution site - http://www.TubeMogul.com - I noticed this very interesting post describing people and their attention span when watching videos online.

It all makes a lot of sense, I myself have been guilty of clicking away soon after a video starts - The following will explain a lot more.

"How Much of a Typical Video Online Is Actually Watched?

Most videos steadily lose viewers once "play" is clicked, with an average 10.39% of viewers clicking away after ten seconds and 53.56% leaving after one minute.

Monday 01st of December 2008 12:00:00 AM

In a previous study, we documented the fact that YouTube and most other video sites count a "view" regardless of how much of a video is actually watched. Given that fact, we often wondered: how much are people actually watching before they click away?

Our recent acquisition of TubeMogul InPlay, which tracks data far beyond the traditional metric of online video "views," including how much of a video is actually watched, allows us to answer that question.

Methodology

For a two-week period, we measured viewed-seconds for a sample of 188,055 videos, totaling 22,724,606 streams, on six top video sites (due to partnership limitations, we cannot disclose which sites). Limitations of this approach include the fact that we are only studying short-form content (full television episodes being streamed on sites like Hulu were not included), and that, because our code is not yet in their player, YouTube was not included (although many of the videos in the sample mirror identical videos on YouTube).

Results

The results are dramatic: most online video viewers watch mere seconds, rather than minutes, of a video.


Analysis/Conclusions
Online video viewers' short attention span seems especially relevant to advertisers looking to strategically trim ad budgets as the economy contracts. For starters, it is clear that post-roll ads are of limited effectiveness. A three minute video that has a post-roll ad in the final seconds, for example, will only be viewed by 16.62% of the initial audience, on average.

Another takeaway is that overlay ads should be displayed as early as possible in a video, preferably within the first few seconds. On YouTube, where most overlay ads appear at about 10 seconds in, 10.39% of a video's initial viewers are not likely seeing the ad.

Works Cited:

TubeMogul's patent-pending technology and our partners."