Habits not hits
Back in July I blogged about the cunning plan hatched by the New York Times to wrap 30 seconds of news in a 5 minute video, thereby increasing their Nielsen ratings.
At the time I pointed out that this might not sit well with viewers who consider their time a valuable asset. Unfortunately the honchos at the NYT rate their own time so precious they have none available to consider this possibility.
Three months later and the VJ’s at the NYT are indeed spinning their 2 minute stories out to 3 or 4 times the runtime, and not surprisingly commenters are complaining.
The fault does not lie wholly with the journalists. A significant factor is that the NYT obviously does not have metrics that allow them to differentiate between the number of folks who click on a video and the number who watch it through. They are not alone, there simply are no readily available metrics to show content producers when viewers are turning off.
In an environment where tuning in counts as a hit and tuning out 5 seconds later is ignored – there are significant advantages to producing longer videos.
Unfortunately there is also a significant downside to this cavalier disregard for the viewers’ time. Sure you get to clock up a valuable 30 minute hit, but you also dissuade me from returning. Profitable distribution of media is about developing new habits not logging more hits.
This is true for YouTube. This is true for The New York Times. This is true for every corporate web designer, blogger and video producer who hopes to leverage the potential of the net.
It is also true for nytimes.com.
I don’t think it’s safe to assume that the NYTimes doesn’t have the metrics to count whether their videos are being watched all the way through.
At the Express-News we use Brightcove, which makes that information readily available.
Even with the metrics available, it’s not always easy to draw sound conclusions from the data. A long video about breaking news like a fire or something will be watched all the way through. A short video about a serious subject like a community that isn’t getting potable water from the city will not be watched all the way through. I don’t think that the most important thing is length … It’s content.
[...] Are the videos on the NYTimes site too long? Peter of Shooting by Numbers thinks so, and I have to agree that the thought has crossed my mind too. [...]
Angela – I agree a video cannot be too long – any more than a share price can be too high. It all comes back to return on investment/return on attention. Unfortunately Nielsen cannot measure quality of content but they (think they) can measure length of visit.
My contention that NYT does not have such info is based mostly on the Nielsen rating published in July by E&P claiming that the average nytimes.com visitor spends 30 minutes on the site. What else could explain that bizarre assertion?
That is interesting about Brightcove – they can tell you how much of the video is actually watched? As opposed to how much has been downloaded – which is a fairly meaningless stat.
They must be adding cue-points when they re-encode the video. Are the stats collated for you so that you can see when viewers click out of a particular vid?