Get Right to the Point With Your Online Videos

BSD’s video department will be posting a series of tips and tricks for online video over the next several weeks. 

Tip #1: Get to the point.

How many videos have you watched that started with a long animated intro or title sequence?  I've seen a ton. Heck, I've made a ton, but the data doesn’t lie and it’s telling us to stop. 

One of the many advantages of using YouTube is its “Insight” feature, which collects and displays a variety of information about your video.  When you are logged into your YouTube account, every video will have this button. “Hot Spots” is Insight’s audience attention feature; it records what parts of the video people are actually watching and compares that with videos of similar length.  The graphs below represent the results for two different videos. 

As you can see, these videos begin with below average attention, they rise to above average, and then the attention level falls back down.

What do both of these videos have in common? They both begin with a long title sequence. A good chunk of viewers either skip right over the beginning or just stop viewing altogether. 

There is not much time to capture viewers. On average, after 30 seconds of video, 35% of the original audience is gone.  Why waste 10 or even 5 seconds of your video on a generic introduction?  The video needs to jump right into the content and answer two questions for a viewer as soon as possible: “What are we talking about?” and  “Why should people care?”  The faster you can answer those questions, the longer the viewer will watch the video and therefore, the more successful your video will be. 

Earlier this year, leading up to the general election in the UK, BSD created a video for our client Vote for a Change that gets right to the point. The video advocated for a hung Parliament, in order to bring about electoral reform. Watch the video here: