Who and how long?

Two recent sets of data have been released by the video tracking site TubeMogul. The first is the amount of time the average viewer watches an online video. Slightly more than 50% of online viewers don't even watch the first minute of an average video. About a third of the audience doesn't even watch the first 30 seconds. Slightly less than 10% stick around to watch more than 5 minutes of a video. As a maker of generally longer format videos, this is somewhat discouraging and a bit surprising. However, I contacted the study's author and they do have any data of whether channel subscribers (aka likely fans of a video maker's video) watch more attentively. The author and I suspect suspected they do but the statistical differences if any are unknown.

The second is the demographic breakdown of who comments on YouTube videos. Going by this data, 68% of all comments come from persons 24 years old or younger. And of this group, approximately 56-60% are male. This would go along way in explaining the hater community that exists on YouTube. Immature and unsupervised minds at work. This age group in reality is likely higher since a young person is more likely to give an older age if they are under the age of 18. I see a noteworthy amount of obviously inaccurate ages given on YouTube.

What are my take home ideas from these numbers? One, is to get to the good stuff earlier in videos. Don't even do title type credits. Instead go straight to compelling video and ideas right away. Two, would be to think about topics that have at least some appeal to a younger audience. Three, keep your videos shorter than 5 minutes. All three of these things I have not done with most of my videos. I'm not sure I will since I made videos that I'm interested in seeing and not trying to cater to the largest possible audience. However, I certainly could trim down my intro credit time and I give more thought to shorter video ideas.