BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
02 Dec 2008

From our friends at Tubemogul: While nearly 90% of viewers watch the first 10 seconds of a video, only 10% watch more than 5 minutes.  Worth noting that WatchMojo.com’s videos are 1 to 3 minutes… with most of them being in the 60-90 second range.  Tubemogul has over 30,000 users (we’re one of them) so while this study might not be 100% empirical, it is definitely representative of made-for-web video content:

SAI and MediaMemo jump to conclusions that I think are somewhat faulty because while some traditional media companies such as CBS and FOX use Tubemogul, a bunch do not (or do not use frequently).  Surely if you lump in viewing patterns of traditional media - which tends to be longer - then I think these numbers might get skewed a bit.

Then again, this begs the question: would online users, who clearly have short attention spans, sit through longer-form content?  My gut says no… and this is a programming reason why TV companies are slow to move their content online.  Of course, the bigger reason is an economic one which is captured by this table:

When traditional media companies do venture online, they find that they are replacing their offline dollars with online pennies, to quote NBC’s Jeff Zucker, who isn’t alone:

Discovery CEO David Zaslav expanded a bit on what he said last month about the value of full shows online for the cable net, in an interview with B&C: “I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the economics. If you take out a pen and you add it up, there’s not a lot of economics there [of putting full shows online]. The business model is not that strong…we get substantial value by distributing our content on dual-revenue-stream platforms, domestically and around the world. We’ve been able to take the best of our content and use pieces of it through HowStuffWorks.com or on our other sites..there’s no reason for us to take a fire hose and take a fantastically valuable library and make it available on the Web for free.”

In other words, the economic incentive isn’t even there, which explains why when it comes to traditional media and online media: those who can won’t and those who want can’t.