How To Combat Viewer Abandonment in Online Video

With an ever-increasing amount of choice online, it is perhaps unsurprising that consumers of web videos tend to have pretty short attention spans. A recent study by Visible Measures has demonstrated just how problematic viewer abandonment can be for online video marketers. This article describes how best to combat it.

With an almost infinite amount of choice online and millions of websites just one short click away, it is perhaps unsurprising that consumers of web videos can have pretty short attention spans. An excellent, comprehensive study by Visible Measures has demonstrated just how problematic viewer abandonment can be for online video marketers.
Mat Cutler is the CMO at Visible Measures and wrote about the findings in a recent blog post, “Benchmarking Viewer Abandonment in Online Video”. Their study, which looked at short-form videos of less than 300 seconds (5 minutes) in duration, discovered that;
 - 20% of the audience will abandon viewing the video in the first 10 seconds
 - 33% will click away within the before the 30 second mark
and …
- 44% of the audience will have left by 60 seconds
This is clearly a serious problem for online video marketers, desperate to make every video “view” count and the very most of their marketing budgets. Here are three top tips to help combat web video viewer abandonment;
Get To The Point.
Make sure your videos engage right from the very outset, preferably in the first few seconds. And if the successful delivery of your message relies on viewers watching for more 30 seconds or so, either employ good story-telling techniques to create dramatic tension and intrigue, encouraging viewers to watch until the pay-off occurs, or get back to drawing board.
Be Interesting!
Web-users don’t want to be sold to - they want to entertained! Make sure that your online video offers them an experience beyond sales spiel, jargon and facts & figures. This can be left to text on your website and in printed prospectuses. If you don’t engage your viewers, somebody else will.
Some of most popular online videos ever actually have very little to do with the actual product or company they’re promoting. Instead - like many successful TV adverts - they are worth watching in their own right for pure entertainment value. The real beauty however, is that online film and videos, if they manage to strike a chord with an audience, can be very easily and quickly shared with other web-users. Television commercials can’t.
Short is Sweet.
Unless you have a VERY good reason for doing so, don’t waste money by producing long form films purely for online use. The vast majority of viewers won’t get anywhere near the end. If you’ve got a lot you want to say or show off, a video series of short 30-60 second video clips is almost always preferable to a 5, 10 or 20-minute video, no matter how well-produced or conceived.
If you’ve already commissioned or produced a longer film on DVD, don’t fret. Why not look into re-purposing the footage, by re-editing the material into shorter clips for use online? It could save you a lot of money, turning an expensive marketing campaign into a very cost-effective one.
Conclusion
It’s essential that video marketers bear these points in mind when devising any online video strategy, promotional film or web video marketing campaign.
Although implementing these tips will of course not guarantee that every viewer will watch your video right through to the end, they’ll certainly decrease average video viewer abandonment rates and help squeeze maximum value from your marketing spend.

Article Tags: Viewer Abandonment, Online Video

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