We’ve been discovering all sorts of cool things living in online videos lately. First there was initial attention (also known as initial abandonment), a phenomenon where about 30% of the audience stops watching online videos in the first 10% of playback. This was exciting stuff for us -- yes, we’re excited easily -- but this was only the beginning.
As we moved past initial attention and tracked the progress of viewers throughout the rest of the videos, we expected to see a gradual erosion of interaction as people lost interest. We expected the graph to be a steady downward slope.
But this isn’t what happened.
Instead, we found an unexpected spike of abandonment at the very end of most videos and have termed this concluding abandonment. Our preliminary analysis shows that, in general, more than 20% of the viewers who make it deep into any given video wind up abandoning the stream before it completes (i.e. reaches 100% play through). In other words, roughly 1 in 5 viewers click away right before the video ends.
And like initial attention, we see a wide divergence in concluding abandonment between different types of content. Music videos, sports highlights, and news clips each keep their audiences engaged throughout the video at variable rates. It turns out that the end is no different.
While concluding abandonment is an interesting and unexpected discovery, the more we talk it over with our customers and partners, the more it makes sense... videos tend to have a well-defined ending, viewers can see it coming, and once it's clear the clip is winding town, many viewers immediately move on.
Concluding abandonment reinforces the idea that Internet video is a lean-forward experience... throughout the entire video. Regardless of where viewers are, how much they’ve seen, they’re ready to hit the eject button the moment they lose interest. Even two seconds from the end! It turns out that concluding abandonment is just another consequence of this media consumption behavior. Cool.
As we’ve found, and as initial attention and concluding abandonment has shown us, it’s not enough to get people to merely start the video. This has significant implications for content licensing and ad impression counting models that are predicated on 100% play-through measures.
At Visible Measures, we’ve seen that linear play-through of a video -- watching a video from start to finish -- appears to be the exception, not the norm. This makes understanding where viewers drop off -- where ever they drop off -- essential for video publishers and video advertisers alike.
Matt