This Tubemogul study has been sitting in my head for over a month now and I think that it points to an interesting trend and behavior that we all exhibit.  To recap, the Tubemogul study says that almost half of an audience abandons a video after one minute.  Granted this didn't include long form Hulu content but short form content only.  However, this statistic is extremely frightening given the amount of time and money spent in video production.  If users are not watching beyond one minute and more than a third leave after 30 seconds, why bother to create anything longer than that?

Some quick math: 
According to Chad Hurley of YouTube, the average video length is 2.5 minutes long.  YouTube served 5.6 billion streams in November multiplied by 2.5 minutes on average = 14 billion minutes streamed.   Assume that any viewer remaining after one minute watches the entire video (which is false, but simplifies our calculation).  Therefore 54% of videos or about 3 billion videos are abandoned after one minute. With 2.6 billion videos viewed in entirety translates to 6.4 billion minutes +  3 billion first  minutes viewed = 9.4 b minutes viewed.  nothing to sneeze at but then you realize that almost 4.6 billion minutes were NOT watched in ONE month.  (Actually more minutes were not watched because we simplified our assumptions, but hopefully you get the picture.)

There's got to be a reason that video abandonment is rapidly dropping off.  The number one reason that everyone sites is that we all have ADD.  We can't focus on anything for longer than, in this case, one minute.  Let's juxtapose that with the latest headline from Hollywood:  2008 Record Year for Box Office.  OK, ok, we should take that with a grain of salt since the increase was 2% over 2007, the previous record, whereas ticket prices increased about 8%.  (In Manhattan, where I live (and haven't seen a movie in six months) ticket prices went from $11.00 on Fandango to a whopping $12.50! -> 14% increase!)  That being said, people are still buying movie tickets.  And people are still sitting through long films. 

The top movies this weekend:

1. Marley & Me - 120 minutes


2. Bedtime Stories - 95 minutes


3. Benjamin Buttons - 168 minutes


4. Valkyrie - 120 minutes


5. Yes Man - 104 minutes

By the time I'm done with Benjamin Buttons I'm nearly sporting a beard at a runtime rivaling 3 hours!   So, unless we are all sitting in the dark movie theater Twittering about what is happening during The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, we really don't have ADD.  ADD only occurs in front of our COMPUTERS (where the TubeMogul study was done).  Why?

Our penchant for windows.  Alt-Tab.  (or Apple-Tab).  Multi-tasking.  Instant Messenger clients.  These things have made us into the ADD creatures that we are in front of our computers.  When we watch online video, we treat the window that plays the video as another application window unlike our behavior when we watch Hulu: dim the lights, bust out the popcorn, move the computer back, and get ready for Family Guy (the most watched show on Hulu).  When we are using applications, our hands our busy.  We are typing, we are mousing over, we are googling, we are thinking.  When we watch video, we do NONE OF THE ABOVE.  And because we are creatures of habit, the only thing that we can do is click away.     

So no matter how interesting your video is, we were not made to view a passive video in front of our computers.  And if we are, we are probably Googling about the special effects team that made Brad Pitt look like he was an 80 year old midget as we are watching the Benjamin Buttons movie trailer. I've already done it for you here

How can we remedy this problem?  We need to utilize the medium.  We need to make online video not only interesting but interactive.  (Unfortunately, long drawn out character development should not be in the online video director's repertoire).   We must bring an element of interactivity that makes the online video experience more like reading a Wikipedia page than watching the latest episode of The Office (on Hulu, not on your television, because we all know that you are also multi - tasking while you are watching TV). 

Let's take a quick look at some of the KlickableTV data.  (In case you didn't know, we create an interactive online video experience.)  We've done small tests that compare "flat" content with Klickable content and here are our unaudited results:  Flat content gets on average 0.5 views.  So a 60 second video will get about 30 seconds watched.  A Klickable video on average gets 1.4 views.  A 60 second video will get 84 seconds watched.  Why?  Viewers go back and click on things that they might have missed.  Go ahead try it for yourself. 

Told you so.

Photo courtesy of Chim Chim